Volume 7 1980 Issue 18

Number 18 Contents May-August 1980 Editorial Working Group Editorial: The Prospects for Chris Allen Zimbabwe 1 Carolyn Baylies Dianne Bolton Lionel Cliffe Supply, Control & Organisation Robin Cohen of African Labour in Rhodesia Erica Flegg Luke Malaba 7 Duncan Innes Peter Lawrence Barry Munslow The People's Mood: The Voice Penelope Roberts of a Guerilla Poet Morris Szeftel Mbulelo Mzamane 29 Gavin Williams Editorial Staff Nationalist Politics in Zimbabwe: Doris Burgess The 1980 Elections & Beyond Judith Mohan Lionel Cliffe, Joshua Mpofu & Overseas Editors Barry Munslow 44 Cairo: Shahida El Baz Copenhagen: Roger Leys Kampala: Mahmood Mamdani The Prospects for Socialist Maputo: Ruth First Transition in Zimbabwe Stockholm: Bhagavan 'Peter Yates' 68 Toronto: Jonathan Barker, John Saul Washington: Meredeth Turshen Zaria: Bjorn Beckman Briefings Contributing Editors Zimbabwe after Independence 89 Basil Davidson Sam Geza Southern Africa's Strategies for Thomas Hodgkin Disengaging from South Africa Charles Kallu-Kalumiya Mustafa Khogali Angola — 1980 Colin Leys Robert Van Lierop Archie Mafeje The Constellations of Southern Prexy Nesbitt African states: A New Claude Meillassoux Strategic Offensive by Ken Post South Africa Subscriptions (3 issues) UK & Africa Debates 106 Individual £4.00 Institutions £8.00 The Settler Mode of Production: Elsewhere The Rhodesian Case Individuals £4.50 Institutions £10.00 Imperialism & Settler Capital: Students £3.00 (payable in sterling only) Friends or Foes Airmail extra Europe £2.50 Walter Rodney: A Biography Zone A £3.00 Zone B £4.00 and Bibliography 132 Zone C £4.50 Single copies Current Africana 138 Individuals £1.50/$4.00 Institutions £3.00/$8.00 Map: Land Apportionment in Zimbabwe 28 Note: Please add $2 for each non- sterling cheque Zimbabwe Distribution: Issues of the Giro no. 64 960 4008 Review are now available at the Mambo Press Bookshop in Salisbury or through Copyright ©Review of African Political the office in Gwelo. Economy, February 1981 ISSN: 0305 6244 1 Editorial: The Prospects for Zimbabwe The Basic Issue: LABOUR not Land The first step in assessing what the future holds for a Zimbabwe now in- dependent, in working out what is to be done, is to be clear about the basic character of the system it is sought to change. White rule is ended but what of the system over which the whites ruled? How much of it remains? How easy will it be to change? What are the possible alternatives to it? This Special Issue on Zimbabwe does not aim to give definitive answers to these questions — although they are at least raised. What makes prediction especially obscure is a lack of clarity about the nature of the settler system. In part, this is due to a lack of information: no one knows how much white farm land was abandoned or how many displaced people there are; no trade statistics have been issued since UDI, and during sanctions large businesses were coy about the facts of owner- ship; it is also a matter of pure guesswork how much land in the former African 'reserves' is by now individually owned. But even when the facts are in, there would remain serious limitations and differences in conceptualiza- tion. For instance, among our contributors, Yates' discussion of future development strategy is prefaced by an observation that 'the settler minority were the protege and local representatives of British colonialism ..." This assertion may not substantially affect his analysis of future prospects but clearly it is a different starting point from the one that Carolyn Baylies develops in her brief Debate about the relationship between metropolitan and settler capitals. If that issue about the nature of, and interactions between, capitals is one that defines the basic character of the Rhodesian social formation, it ought in turn to be related to a second basic issue: the nature of the relationship between capital(s) and labour. It has become a commonplace to say that the basic issue in Rhodesia has always been one of land: it has been the root of conflicts between black and white throughout the colonial period, and is the core problem whose solution will shape the path of future development. Our contention, however, is that the key to understanding lies in people not things, in the whole complex of relations of production rather than just pro- perty relations. In short labour, and the conditions of its reproduction. As a reflection of this emphasis, our first article views the colonial system from the perspective of the control and organization of labour. In it Luke 2 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY Malaba documents how the maintenance of the labour supply to settler mines, farms and industries was always a central concern of the colonial state, and how that state sought systematically to generate and maintain a supply at ultra-cheap wages and to that end to control African labour at every turn. Moreover, he shows how the seizure of African land and the in- stitutionalized division of land by race, and the confinement of Africans to increasingly overcrowded reserves, were crucial, but as mechanisms of ensuring the availability of African labour on particular terms. Put bluntly, the main effect, whether intended or not, of the Europeans taking half of all land for themselves, was not so much to acquire it for their own use (they only ever cultivated 3%) but to deny that land and the possibility of peasant commercial production to Africans, thus ensuring a labour force. The essential outcome of the network of land and labour control measures which Malaba surveys was not to lead to the complete proletarianization of all Africans, but to halt that process short of complete dispossession of the peasantry. While apartheid style regulations limited the flow, especially of families, into the towns, some land was left in reserves to tie as many people as possible to some small plot. The significance for this system, or certainly for dominant settler interests, of measures to halt the drift towards landlessness among African peasants is exemplified by the fact that when Smith's Rhodesia Front party took power in the early 1960s they reversed the Native Land Husbandry Act of the previous 'liberal' administrations of Garfield Todd and Edgar Whitehead, under which individual titles were being given to land in the 'reserves', which in turn meant the loss of rights of access by others. Once again land was to be 'communal' which meant under the control of government- appointed chiefs and, in theory, everyone was eligible to be allocated a plot. Such switches in policy help to reveal what settler rather than metropolitan interests saw as crucial components of the system that they were seeking to defend, but are worth recalling when we look to the future for two addi- tional reasons. First, it is instructive to explore how some of the prescriptions for 'reform' now being touted by western aid experts, which Munslow reviews in Debates, seem to be simply resurrecting the policies of the 1950s: individual title to land and 'improvements' in the Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs) with the surplus population being absorbed, some on holdings carv- ed out from a proportion of the white land, the rest (some day) in paid employment. In place of a class which is both semi-proletarianized workers and im- poverished peasantry, they aim to stabilise a reduced and commodity- producing peasantry on the one hand and a landless reserve army of labour on the other. In one article,* which brings out explicitly the extent to which these formulae for resolving the 'land issue' are in fact manipulative prescriptions for social engineering, the former Salisbury university geographer, Kay, even puts numbers to this exercise of restructuring the classes. Kay is doubly revealing. His attempt to think in terms of numbers also shows that 'reformist' strategies can in no way solve the problems of poverty in Zimbabwe. As was discovered even in the 1950s, a capitalist path of development for the peasantry in the TTLs will generate such a flood of landless that they cannot possibly be gainfully asorbed elsewhere whilever land redistribution is only partial, as it will be whilever full compensation EDITORIAL 3 has to be paid, as it would have to be to meet the overall conditions of capitalist development. A second insight follows from viewing current development proposals in the light of earlier 'reformist' measures. In seeking to formulate an alternative to the present system of a semi-proletarianized labour force generated from a sub-subsistence peasantry, and one which is not a reversion to the more 'normal' capitalist social formation of Todd or Kay, the handling of the 'land question' in the TTLs is just as vital as, and must be dovetailed with, the plans for redistribution of the vast former European lands. The need to insure against any premature expulsion of people from TTLs before they can be absorbed in jobs or on redistributed land, and somehow to preserve in any alternative farming system in the TTLs the principle of common access to the means of production, would seem to be greater in a context, which Yates spells out, that for the moment precludes massive resettlement on the scale ultimately required. The Formulation of Strategy and the Need for Analysis We started from an assertion that the specification of strategies for the future development of Zimbabwe that could constitute an alternative to the existing system must come to an accurate assessment of the nature of that system it is sought to transcend. The foregoing analysis suggests one specific conclusion about such calculations: the need to see the essentials of the settler colonial system as one that revolved around attempts to institutionalize the reproduction of ultra-cheap semi-proletarianized labour.

Load more