ZIMBABWE LAND REFORM BACK GROUND The white farming population, originating from Europe and South Africa first arrived in Southern Rhodesia in the 1890s.[2] In 1918, in In re Southern Rhodesia[3] the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London ruled that the land of Southern Rhodesia was owned by the Crown and not by the British South Africa Company. Legal situation in Southern Rhodesia After self-government was granted in 1923, the Southern Rhodesia House of Assembly created a framework for the allocation of land. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided the colonys land into three areas characterised by tribes: zones where white, Shona or Ndebele could own property; and zones which were held in trust for indigenous peoples on a collective basis (called tribal trust lands per 1965 statute and communal areas per 1981 statute);[citation needed]. One effect of the apportionment was that some families were moved from land they had held for generations. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 formed the basis for subsequent laws and continued in effect until independence. Land apportionment and acquisition by white farmers Land apportionment in Rhodesia in 1965. The lack of individual title to land in areas designated as respecting tribal occupation in trust lands only ended up creating a divide amongst people and contentious issues arose about the subject of ownership of land. Traditional Africans understood community ownership of the land as occupied by tribes and chieftainships as being paramount[citation needed]. Development of the land in tribal areas by government spending on soil improvement, grading, irrigation, drainage and road building using a system of individual taxation was deemed unacceptable[citation needed]. African families who lived under communal or chieftainship systems of occupation were not in the tax system and were unable to get access to financing, equipment and techniques necessary to farm plots large enough as designated for sale in Native Purchase areas[citation needed]. Commercial farming families were European by descent, understood title deeds to land and bought and developed large areas of land into commercial farming businesses along western ideas and mostly owned land in the Whites Only central plateau regions of Zimbabwe. These farmers took the Whites Only European Areas to farm commercially on the more fertile upland regions where the rainfall was higher. These areas were optimal for large scale, mechanised farming with high export potential. Africans had been deported to the low rainfall areas. The colonial and UDI government policies favoured whites. Commercial farming enterprise benefited from training support, organised grants, loan guarantee schemes and funding for agricultural research all of which enabled the commercial farming sector and the economy and secondary agricultural industries to flourish. Rural road building programs serviced European farming areas. To his credit, the government of Garfield Todd in the 1950s made attempts to address the problems associated with the different ways of understanding land ownership by introducing farming ideas within traditional chieftain lands and tried to encourage farming projects and an understanding of the system of land tenure in the tribal lands, none of which could remedy the government decreed overcrowding, which resulted from cramming up to 99% of the population onto 25% of the country, in the low rainfall land - however, to put this in perspective, the population density (people per km2) was still far lower than most European states. In 1979 Zimbabwean whites made up 5% of the population, and counting only 4500 farmers, owned 70% of the most fertile land.[4]
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 05:32:07 +0000