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Whites in Demand 26th March 2004 Zimbabwe's white farmers - evicted from their farms in their home country - are, like the lost tribe of Israel, wandering around the continent, looking for places to put down their roots again. And they are starting to do so. About 150 families have now settled in Mozambique, about 100 in Zambia and a handful in Tanzania. The few in Zambia have been widely credited with turning the country from a net food importer into a net food exporter within a couple of years. In Mozambique, President Joaquim Chissano recently visited the ex-Zimbabwean farmers in Chimoio, near Beira, and thanked them for re-establishing the country's dairy industry. This week the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), which represents Zimbabwean farmers, sent a delegation to meet Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who offered to let them farm in his country. Alan Jack, who led the CFU delegation, said in an interview that the farmers had been overwhelmed by the response. "Where else do you get to meet the president, the vice-president and the minister of finance all at once?" he asked. Jack said he told Obasanjo: "We are Zimbabweans but we cannot farm there now. We are also Africans and we want to stay here." He said the Nigerians candidly admitted to him that their farm industry was ruined, that they were importing 98% of their food and that they desperately needed help. Obasanjo told them: "We don't want to take what is good for Zimbabwe away, but we don't want what is good for Africa taken away. Wherever you stay in Africa, the knowledge you have remains in Africa for the benefit of Africans." South Africa's Democratic Alliance has praised Obasanjo for his "wise and farsighted approach" and for realising that the "irreplaceable local skill and experience" of commercial farmers was "crucial to obtaining overall food security in Africa". It noted that the success of the New Partnership for Africa's Development depended upon reviving the continent's immense - but largely fallow or unproductive - farmlands. It is intriguing to see how the same person - a white Zimbabwean farmer - can be viewed so differently by two African leaders. To Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe he is a coloniser, a parasite feeding off black Zimbabweans and denying them land. To Obasanjo he is an investor, possessing rare skill and capital, willing and able to come to his country like a pioneer and help it feed itself. By welcoming them so warmly and praising the contribution they can make to Africa, Obasanjo must surely have intended to send a message to Mugabe that he is wrong about the farmers, that he is squandering a valuable resource. But many other Africans - probably quite a few in this country - will no doubt feel considerable unease about what they would see as a recolonising of Africa. This handful of whites, however, can surely not dominate any country, nor seize land from locals as the colonists did. Severed from any government force, they are merely investors, no more colonisers than an industrialist who builds a factory in an African country. Especially as the Zimbabwean farmers insisted that they should not displace any local farmers from their land and the Nigerians fully agreed to that. Jack admitted, though, that his delegation had raised one particular concern with the Nigerians: that having moved to the country and revived the farmland, they would then excite the envy of the locals who would covet the productive farms they then saw, and come to take them away as the Zimbabweans had done. In other words, that when they had served their purpose, it might be convenient to re-label them as colonists. "They assured us they were a democratic country with a constitution and that would never happen," he said. "We know, though, that there are no absolute guarantees. Each farmer must make his own choice." But between certain deprivation in the present and possible deprivation in the future, there is no real choice. By
Peter Fabricius - The Star |