Robert Mugabe Quotes
We will proceed with current land reform with or without sanctions, ... Let that position be known here and abroad and let the commercial farmers tell that to their constituency or constituencies overseas.
Mugabe, Robert. National Address. Harare, 2002.
In every society where there had been past unjust ownership of land, all efforts of land reform were faced with the problem of having to dispossess the current “owners” who themselves had not been guilty of the crimes of their ancestors in unjustly obtaining the land originally. In America land reform was unworkable in most cases and the solution was usually a large monetary payment as compensation for the land.
If the land to be redistributed is divided amongst the majority population, each parcel would be too small to make any difference in any recipient’s life. For efficient agriculture there must be large land holdings. The colonial, stolen land history is valid for most former colonies, however, in Southern Africa, the situation was more complicated. When the whites landed at Capetown in the South, they moved North “stealing” land as they went. However, in Central Africa, Shaka and his Zulus were also a colonial power, and they moved South “stealing” land from the indigenous Blacks as they went. Eventually, the two Colonial Powers—the whites and the Black Zulus—clashed and the Zulu Wars ensued. So all of the land in Zimbabwe and South Aftica was stolen from the Blacks—except about half was stolen by Blacks. After the Zulu Wars, the victorious whites ended up “stealing” land from the Black Zulus that had been stolen by them from other Blacks. Also although the English were the official colonial power, the Dutch “Afrikaners” were a powerful subculture which was dominant on many parts of South Africa and especially at the frontier and they did most of the land stealing. The ethnic English were the businessmen and the city dwellers who actually ruled that Blacks were citizens with rights and slowedmdown some of the land stealing. There is no more complicated ethnic history in the world.
Peter van der Kun. The Roman society had developed huge inequalities in the wealth of its citizens. Land was the measure of wealth as the value was produced by the farming of it. In an agrarian reform, the holdings of any one citizen was limited to 500 acres. In effect the Romans created a maximum of wealth. To the owners of the large tracts of land, this was a redistribution of wealth.
Robert Gabriel Mugabe was a Zimbabwean revolutionary and politician who served as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 1987 and then as President from 1987 to 2017. He served as Leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) from 1975 to 1980 and led its successor political party, the ZANU – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF), from 1980 to 2017. Ideologically an African nationalist, during the 1970s and 1980s he identified as a Marxist–Leninist, and as a socialist after the 1990s.
