‘Mugabe and the White African’: An exercise in dangerous help
While Blessing-Miles Tendi’s review of ‘Mugabe and the White African’ fails to acknowledge that not all of Zimbabwe’s white farmers disputed the need for land reform, writes Allison Lobb, he accurately sums up the key ‘white’ problem stalling progress: ‘Becoming “African” is not about economic integration alone – something many white Zimbabweans never grasped. It is also about social, residential and political integration, and about learning local languages.’
As a white Zimbabwean I was interested to read Blessing-Miles Tendi’s article on the Mugabe and the White African.
Whilst the film was perhaps one extreme, I felt his review was in someway propagating the other extreme!!
His comment ‘In the documentary the Freeth and Campbell families are distinctly white Europeans in Africa who claim to be white Africans based on their right to own land. Never are they captured speaking in any of the local languages.’ Indeed applies to the film but for 98% of the 40000 white farmers who have since lost their land this could not be further from the truth – they all spoke the local languages and their workers were treated fantastically well, clothed and fed etc.
And reality is that the film was attempting to highlight the biggest problem with land distribution – namely that the land was not given to the people who needed it, but to politicians who were the least entitled to it. I don’t think any of the white farmers at the time disputed that they needed to give up some of their land to the less well off. The problem was that the land went to politicians not to the ordinary black ‘poor’ person who had nothing – it should have been given to the farm workers themselves for example to let them start their own businesses.
The other point he fails to pick up on though is the reality that whilst the Freeths were ‘White Europeans’, there are a significant number white Zimbabweans (myself included) who ARE white Zimbabwean (and indeed I classify myself as white Zimbabwean not white African.) For these people there are no other options – we are nearly 6 generations through colonialism and for these people Zimbabwe is home and they have no entitlement to live anywhere else. And the inability of ZANU-PF to accept this fact has been one of the crucial factors in stalling progress in the country.
That said Blessing-Miles does sum up the key ‘white’ problem stalling progress:
‘Becoming ‘African’ is not about economic integration alone – something many white Zimbabweans never grasped. It is also about social, residential and political integration, and about learning local languages.
This is indeed a very accurate statement and indeed is very offensive that there are still people in Zimbabwe who have not adapted to the times and still feel a sense of entitlement to their prestigious lifestyles.