With the pre and post election crisis in Zimbabwe there is, quite rightly, a focus on the present and future - a Zimbabwe without Mugabe and Zanu-PF. However Zimbabwe’s history is often lost in the present environment of fear, violence and economic catastrophe in the country. In this extensive article “In the Shadow of the Empire” Noah Tucket looks back on “120 years” of Zimbabwe and in particular Britain’s colonial rampage of what was originally Matabeleland and Mashonaland in the late 1800s and questions the motives behind Western (British and American) policy towards the country…..

The British point of view was set out succinctly by the UK’s former Foreign Secretary, Lord Peter Carrington:

For 15 years [following independence in 1980] Zimbabwe didn’t do too badly […] It was all right and then things went wrong so Mr. Mugabe played the race card, and then that didn’t work because all the [land] redistribution went to all the friends and the people who didn’t do anything about it. And then subsequently he’s become more and more authoritarian and you’ve seen Zimbabwe, the strongest economy in Africa, go down the drain. And it’s a disgraceful state of affairs.

Lord Carrington’s comment was made in a BBC ‘Breakfast with Frost’ programme in 2005. The other participant in the interview was Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to the UK, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, who intervened:

Well let us not forget, you know, Lord Carrington referred to the race card. The question of race has never been very far in Zimbabwean politics. We all know that during the 90 years of colonial rule the land was forcibly taken from the black majority.

The black majority was brutalised, we never heard of any human rights […] And indeed the question of land being owned by white people in Zimbabwe was not introduced by President Mugabe. It was introduced by the British colonial administration. Therefore, any land reform programme in Zimbabwe had to acquire land from white people, that’s how the race sector comes in, in order to distribute to the black majority.

The noble lord responded by dismissing the colonial past, as if it had no effect on shaping the present:

This is absolutely irrelevant to what is happening in Zimbabwe at the present time. The white farmers and all the rest of it, that’s all history. What has happened since, there’s been an authoritarian government, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe, you’ve seen what’s happened to the currency, you’ve seen what’s happened to the food, they’re starving. Continued……

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Zimbabwe
Britain