The dispute between the government and white farmers in Zimbabwe is a red herring that has nothing to do with righting historic wrongs as the government asserts, says Timothy Burke, associate professor of history at Swarthmore College and an expert on African history. Instead, he says it is government propaganda meant to distract from the broader crisis engulfing the country.
President Robert Mugabe ordered white farmers last month to stop farming their land and to vacate their farms by August 8. Many farmers have vowed to defy the edict rather than leave their crops to rot. The order is the latest in the government's efforts to seize white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks, which it says is needed to redress the imbalances of the colonial era.
"This is not a story about payback for racial oppression," Burke says. "Mugabe thinks he might have a chance for sympathy from the international community if he makes himself a crusader. He would be happy if people thought the story was only about the farmers. But no matter your politics, don't buy it. It's a deliberate diversion from the truth."
The real story, according to Burke, is the government's utter failure to rule effectively once it came into power after independence in 1979. "The ruling party is waging war against its own people," he says. "The country is in a death spiral, and the white farmers have been swept up in that."
According to Burke, Mugabe garnered early support for his presidency by claiming he would return land to the landless. Instead, Burke says he took land and gave it to "government ministers and party bigwigs" who allow it to lay fallow. "The land he gave to them is a vanity possession," Burke says. "There is no land reform program -- no vision, no policy, no idea at all on how to make it work."
Burke says American and British audiences are especially likely to think of the farming story as a heroic attempt on Mugabe's part to right historic wrongs. "White liberals and African nationalists think they can understand this story by relating it to race relations in their own country, or by finding comparisons with the struggle in South Africa. But they have fallen for the disinformation without knowing the Zimbabwean government acquired land that it isn't doing anything with, and has no plans to. In some ways, Zimbabwe has more in common with the dire situations in Nigeria, the Congo, and the Ivory Coast. People sympathetic to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa should not fall for the notion this is a parallel struggle."
A cultural historian, Burke is an authority on African history with a special interest in modern imperialism and the nations of Zimbabwe and South Africa. His book, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Duke University Press, 1996), is a study of changes in African material culture and economic behavior caused by the spread of manufactured goods and rising consumerism.
Located near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective liberal arts college with an enrollment of 1,450. Swarthmore is consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.
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