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The
measure of just demands? A response to Mamdani
Amanda
Hammar, Concerned Africa Scholars
March 16, 2009
http://concernedafricascholars.org/the-measure-of-just-demands-a-response-to-mamdani/
Judging by the
passionate and wide-ranging responses to Mahmood Mamdani-s
'Lessons
of Zimbabwe- (London Review of Books, 4 December 2008),
he has struck a deep chord amongst scholars of and from Zimbabwe
- as well as others concerned more broadly with questions
of African politics - both with the particular issues he has
raised and those left starkly absent from his analysis. The present
ACAS Bulletin is doing us all a valuable service by usefully bringing
together the different responses evoked by Mamdani-s original
piece and his subsequent response to his critics (London Review
of Books, 1 January 2009). Although in disagreement with much of
what he has written in these two pieces, I nonetheless express my
appreciation for his efforts to stimulate serious public debate
about Zimbabwe beyond partisan rhetoric (even if he himself has
not entirely avoided such rhetoric). This is certainly welcome.
Much has already
been written by eminent scholars as part of this debate, with whom
I concur (among others, Patrick Bond and Ben Cousins). Having already
added my name to a wider critical chorus (the letter to the LRB
by 'Scarnecchia et
al-, 1 January 2009), I will limit myself here to a few
additional points where I feel Mamdani-s analysis would have
benefited from more considered reflection, and engagement with a
wider selection of sources. These points relate to his somewhat
idealized reading of the land occupations and position of war veterans
in this process; his underplaying of the Zanu (PF) party-state project;
and his unexpectedly narrow definition of 'the people-.
One of the key
premises of Mamdani-s analysis of the apparently 'democratic-
nature of Zimbabwe-s post-2000 land revolution is that it
was largely driven by an authentic 'land occupation movement-,
a thesis developed largely by Moyo and Yeros (2005) and which Mamdani
accepts uncritically. One cannot deny the significant role played
by war veterans in initiating the land invasions and occupations
both in the late 1990s and from 2000 onwards, alongside a range
of other interested, mainly local actors (Sadomba 2008, Marongwe
2003). However, to account for the extent of the nationwide operation
that perhaps started with more spontaneous occupations but then
led fairly quickly into the 'official- fast-track land
reform process, (primarily) in terms of "the success of the
veterans- mobilisation", seems a rather exaggerated
claim. Not only is there little evidence to substantiate the claim
of a pre-existing, organized 'land occupation movement-
prior to 2000 as Moyo and Yeros and now Mamdani claim.[1] In addition,
despite contributions from varied independent sources (Sadomba 2008),
it would have been materially, let alone politically, highly unfeasible
for under-resourced veterans to sustain such national-scale mobilization
independently of extensive party and state backing on multiple levels.
Logistical, financial and other forms of support, as well as protection
from legal prosecution for property-related or violent crimes, provided
the basis on which many of the occupations were organized and sustained
for as long as they were (Kriger 2006).
To represent
the regime as somehow passively following the lead of the war veterans,
or conveniently jumping on their bandwagon as a matter of elite
cooptation of an established agrarian land movement, is to over-estimate
the capacities, resources and scale of the veterans- 'organisation-,
and to significantly under-estimate the overlapping (and persistent)
projects of sovereignty and hegemony of the Zanu (PF) party-state.
As post-independence history has amply demonstrated, there has been
no organization or group to date in Zimbabwe that the ruling regime
has been unable or unwilling to crush if so desired. As such, it
seems strange for Mamdani to so resolutely downplay the party-state
capacity and inclination to keep control of the country-s
key political and economic assets, least of all land. It seems equally
misplaced for Mamdani to dismiss as 'conspiracy theories-
the attention given by some scholars to the explicit and largely
violent practices of state-making that have accompanied if not superseded
the land revolution, not to mention the largely undisguised elite
accumulation linked to party loyalty. Naming this as such is not
a question of conspiracy but of politics.
Furthermore,
to look at the land occupations in isolation from the broader political
landscape of post-2000 Zimbabwe, and most critically the evolution
of a viable political opposition and its threat to Zanu (PF) hegemony
and state control, represents a key blind-spot in Mamdani-s
analysis. Certainly one needs to look at the land redistribution
project in terms of 'historically just demands-. But
one also needs to examine this project in its broader contemporary
setting of wide-scale party-state attacks on any form of opposition,
and the mass displacement of both rural and urban Zimbabweans. If
one opens up the picture in this way, surely one cannot suggest
comfortably, as Mamdani does, that "it is striking how little
turmoil accompanied this massive social change" of radical
land reform.
It remains hard
to fathom why there is such an insistence by Mamdani, Moyo and others,
on ignoring or down-playing the extensive evidence of the party-state
project itself, and the profound contradictions between what the
regime has claimed to be doing, and what it has actually done. And
why do 'historically just demands- (defined uncritically
within the paradigm of a singular and static Land Question) automatically
outweigh or supersede currently just demands not for only land,
but for the basic conditions of life: health, food, shelter, safe
water, safety, and the right to exercise one-s democratic
right to vote or even voice objection to one-s suffering?
Surely these are all valid.
Drawing attention
to the limitations of the war veterans- thesis and to the
need for more analytical emphasis simultaneously on the party-state
project is not to argue against the need for a radical land redistribution
process (albeit one that doesn-t undermine national and local
economies, or one that violates basic human rights). Nor is it to
deny the depth of grievances or the genuine activism of many war
veterans and other land hungry or economically disadvantaged citizens
in Zimbabwe. It is rather to ensure a less idealized and more honest
account of both the meaning and realities of the so-called radical
land revolution that Mugabe has so successfully and cynically peddled
as heroically anti-imperialist.
Finally, it
is hard to understand why, with so much evidence on the brutal intimidation
of the electorate both directly by force and indirectly through
structural violence, Mamdani would claim so glibly that "almost
half the Zimbabwean electorate" is in support of Mugabe and
Zanu (PF). Certainly some are. Certainly there have been selective
benefits and uneven successes related to the land reform process
and other forms of redistribution of assets. But this has been overtly
linked to party loyalty, and counters the too-easy assertion made
by Mamdani of this being 'a social and economic - if
not political - democratic revolution-. Democratic for
whom? In relation to this, there is a sense, to paraphrase George
Orwell, that 'some people are more equal than others-,
or rather in the case of present-day Zimbabwe, some get to be validated
as 'the people-, while others are regarded as mere surplus.
And so when Mamdani says "The people of Zimbabwe are likely
to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era",
one has to wonder which 'people- this refers to, and
what will others, who have been violently excluded from the benefits
of this revolution or worse, remember of this time.
Indeed, Moyo
himself in earlier work noted the absence of "a nation-wide
political movement and/or peasant rebellion, over demands for land"
(Moyo 1999, 5). This is not to suggest that there wasn-t an
active war veterans movement especially during the 1990s, but this
cannot be assumed automatically to be the same as a peasant or land
occupation movement.
References
- Kriger, Norma,
2006. Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe. Symbolic and Violent
Politics 1980-1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Marongwe,
Nelson, 2003. 'Farm Occupations and Occupiers in the New
Politics of Land in Zimbabwe-. In Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopoulos
and Stig Jensen (eds), 2003, Zimbabwe-s Unfinished Business:
Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis. Harare:
Weaver Press, pp. 155-90.
- Moyo, Sam,
1999. Land and Democracy in Zimbabwe. Harare: SAPES Books.
- Moyo, Sam,
and Paris Yeros, 2005. 'Land Occupations and Land Reform
in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic Revolution-.
In Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (eds), Reclaiming the Land. The Resurgence
of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. London:
Zed Books, Cape Town: David Philip, pp. 163-205.
- Sadomba,
Wilbert Zvakanyorwa, 2008. War Veterans in Zimbabwe-s Land
Occupations: Complexities of a Liberation Movement in an African
Post-colonial Settler Society. PhD Thesis, Wageningen University,
The Netherlands.
*Amanda
Hammar is a Program Coordinator at the Nordic Africa Institute in
Uppsala, Sweden.
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