Roots of Africa's 'land problem'

What would you say is the connection between the recent death of the former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe (and the subsequent assessment of his legacy); the recent explosion of xenophobic violence in South Africa; and the ongoing evictions of the small-scale farmers who had made a life on the slopes of the Mau hills here in Kenya?

In my view, whether you talk of South Africans attacking foreigners from other parts of Africa; or Mugabe’s legacy; or the Mau evictions; you are basically talking about events which share the same roots.

This is the extreme difficulty (and routine failures) in trying to modify an economic structure designed for the benefit of the few, in order to serve the needs of the majority.

First, a little background:

The three countries – Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa – all have a very similar history. This is that at some point over the past few centuries, they were invaded by Europeans who had a heavy technological advantage when it came to weapons that could carry out serious massacres.

To give the examples I know best, here in Kenya it was really just two local communities who put up a spirited fight against the foreign invaders. First the Nandi Resistance (1890 to 1906) and then the Mau Mau Uprising in Central Kenya (1952 to 1960).

In retrospect, nothing could be more obvious than that neither the Nandi of the Rift Valley nor the Kikuyu and Meru of Central Kenya had much chance against the technologically advanced British. But as Chinua Achebe pointed out in his Anthills of the Savannah there is glory in being able to say, “It is true our ancestors were defeated. But at least they put up a fight.”

Now an odd thing then happened during the colonial era. For along with conquest, the invaders brought with them many things which our ancestors had not possessed before.

I speak here of modern medicine, modern education, modern transport, and – perhaps most important of all – modern agriculture.

Nowadays, a city like Nairobi is littered with so-called “innovation hubs”. But imagine what our forefathers must have felt, as they looked in awe at the level of innovation that colonialism brought, once the country had been “pacified”.

There were miraculous drugs which could treat all kinds of fevers, or other illnesses. There was advanced communication which came with the Roman alphabet and the printed word.

There were roads and railways which made it possible to transport goods from the interior in days rather than months.

And above all, once the indigenous communities had been forcibly dispossessed of large tracts of land, there was the miraculous transformation of empty savanna grasslands into orderly fields of wheat, pyrethrum and maize; and gently sloping mountainsides were transformed into gorgeous tea and coffee plantations.

In short, any indigenous Kenyan back in the colonial-era, looking at this rapid transformation of the endless plains and forested mountains that had existed for centuries before, could not fail to be impressed at the “white settlers” ability to generate real wealth from land which had previously only supported subsistence agriculture.

Along with this came the creation of modern cities with indoor plumbing, urban planning, and various amenities that would soon be coveted by all those who lived under colonial rule, including the various Asian communities which settled in Africa in the 20th century.

Thereafter it is hardly surprising that the central ambition within the indigenous tribes – even though not plainly articulated as such – became one of seeking to gain the same advantages that the white settlers so conspicuously enjoyed; to imitate them; to prosper as they had done; to share in the fruits of what we nowadays call “development”.

However, back then, ‘development’ was naively understood to be something which would automatically follow, once we got our land back, and also had the benefit of democratic self-rule.

This was a fatally flawed assessment of the realities of modern economics. And that is where, to quote Achebe yet again, “the rain started beating us.

I will go into the dynamics of this “rain beating us” next week.