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Africa: What's Behind the Zimbabwe Land Crisis?
by Melvin Rhodes
On the same news bulletins have been occasional reports of thousands of squatters taking over prosperous commercial farms in the African nation of Zimbabwe, crying out for land taken from their ancestors more than a century ago.
These news dispatches are connected. We need to understand how.
African history lesson
Twenty-five years ago I lived in Zimbabwe in a farming community in Matabeleland. Zimbabwe was then known as Rhodesia. The white commercial farmers in the area were mostly the descendants of British and South African settlers who had arrived in the colony in the 1890s and early 1900s, just as the Matabele themselves had moved into the area earlier in the 19th century. The white settlers had worked hard to develop their farms. They were the backbone of Rhodesia's economy, exporting their first-class agricultural products to other nations. They spearheaded the development of Rhodesia, whose citizens-black and white alike-then enjoyed the highest standard of living on the continent.
But it was not to last. The winds of change that swept through Africa in the 1960s took away the security of the descendants of these early settlers. They had lived under the Rhodesian flag within the security of the British Empire for so long they were taken aback when London decided to dismantle its empire and return control of their African colonies to the indigenous peoples.
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