On a recent Saturday in a suburban restaurant here, retirees around a table tuck into their cappuccinos and banter with their server, who jokingly calls these regulars the “young boys.”
Despite the joyful scene, these nine friends are at the center of a raging debate in Zimbabwe, one that could decide not just their individual futures, but the entire country’s.
Twenty-five years ago, they were among approximately 4,500 white farmers violently chased from their commercial farms as part of a government program to redistribute land to Zimbabwe’s Black majority. For years, they have demanded the Zimbabwean government compensate them for what they lost. Western countries and international lenders have also made those payments a key condition for helping Zimbabwe dig itself out of its billowing $21 billion debt.
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Twenty-five years after the infamous seizures of its white-owned farms, Zimbabwe is still reckoning with their complicated legacy.
Now it’s happening. In April, the farmers at the café received the first installments in a 10-year schedule to repay them for some of their losses.
“It’s been long and difficult, but we are happy with the agreement,” says Harry Orphanides, who is in his 70s and part of the team of farmers that negotiated with the government.
This reckoning is happening as the U.S. government begins accepting white farmers from neighboring South Africa as refugees, claiming without evidence that they are facing similar threats to their land.
For many Zimbabweans, though, the question of compensating white farmers goes beyond appeasing the international community. It is part of a bigger reckoning about land and justice that stretches back to when the British arrived in the country more than a century ago.
Fast-track reform
Under British colonial rule, much of Zimbabwe’s territory was carved up and handed out to white settlers. By the time the country became independent in 1980, after a 15-year guerrilla war, nearly half its farmland was owned by some 4,000 white people, who made up about one-twentieth of 1% of the population of 7 million.
“The land question was always national grievance No. 1, the reason we took up arms to fight the colonialists,” explains Dzingai Mutumbuka, who was part of the independence negotiations and later served as Zimbabwe’s first education minister.
To tip the scales, Zimbabwe’s government pledged to buy up as many white-owned farms as possible for redistribution, and the British agreed to help fund the effort. However, progress was slow, and in the late 1990s, the British government withdrew its support.
Impatient with the pace of change, the Zimbabwean government in 2000 asked citizens to vote on a new constitution that would give it the power to seize white-owned land without compensation.
Zimbabweans rejected the proposed constitution, but soon after, groups led by veterans of the war for independence began to forcibly occupy white farms. Then-President Robert Mugabe encouraged the seizures, preventing police from arresting the invaders and flouting court orders.
In the following years, more than 5,000 farms were seized, often violently. Marshall Roper still has a scar on his face from where he was slashed by a machete during the invasion of his tobacco farm in 2000. Initially, he says, he tried to stay on his land and fight, but after two years, he gave up and moved to Australia. “It was too much pressure, and the police refused to intervene,” he told The Christian Science Monitor by phone from his home in Queensland.
The aftershocks of expropriation
In the aftermath of this “fast-track” land reform, many white farmers did what Mr. Roper did – they left. The loss of the commercial farms, a cornerstone of Zimbabwe’s economy, came at a moment when the country was already struggling to balance its books.
As Zimbabwe’s debt piled up, it stopped repaying its loans and international financial institutions stopped giving new ones.
After Mr. Mugabe was deposed in 2017, his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa saw the writing on the wall. Zimbabwe needed international assistance. And its debtors made clear that in return, the country had to address the lingering question of the expropriated land, among other issues.
So the government started negotiating. In 2020, it came to a deal with a white farmers union to pay $3.5 billion to around 4,500 farmers. Payments were repeatedly delayed, and a majority of the farmers are now demanding the deal be renegotiated. But in April of this year, the first installments were paid.
Meanwhile, a small group of European farmers is receiving compensation separately under investment agreements between the famers’ countries and Zimbabwe.
An undecided legacy
But that doesn’t mean the land issue is settled.
Many here question the violent methods used to evict white farmers, and how much expropriated land ended up in the hands of the political elite. Still, they say redistribution was necessary to reverse the injustices of colonization. “Land redistribution is an ongoing revolution,” says Chipo Moyo, a Harare accountant.
While the land reform program caused an economic crisis in the short term, its long-term legacies are more complex. Take, for instance, the country’s main cash crop, tobacco. In 2000, about 8,500 farmers harvested 520 million pounds. By contrast, in the 2023 season, there were more than 135,000 growers – most of them small-scale – producing nearly 660 million pounds.
Edson Makina is a farmer in his early 60s near the capital, Harare, and one of those growers. Mr. Makina was allocated his 961 acre-farm in 2000; today, it is a major commercial success, producing tobacco, corn, wheat, and beef. He credits this success in part to the government for the support it gave him in his early days on the land, including subsidized fuel and fertilizer, low-interest loans, and expert farming guidance.
Many white farmers have also found a way forward. Some stayed after the evictions of the early 2000s, moving to Zimbabwe’s cities. In some cases, they transitioned into other businesses, but a few hundred still own farms in Zimbabwe. With government encouragement, others have formed partnerships with Black landowners to jointly run commercial farms.
Back in the café where Mr. Orphanides and his friends have gathered, as they do every Saturday, there is optimism about the payments farmers are beginning to receive from the government.
Former farmer Robin Wyrley-Birch is upbeat. The 10-year repayment period is long, especially on top of 2 1/2 decades of waiting already, he says. But “At least we are finally getting compensated.”
