Today in Zimbabwe almost all privately owned game farms have been poached to bits by African communities that now live and farm on those properties. White Zimbabweans, to say the least, misjudged the land issue. In the late nineties when it became clear that they had misjudged the land issue, organized agriculture agreed to get members to part with land that was not being utilized. Problem was, many members disagreed privately with the strategy, and one of the ruses they tried as a way of hanging onto this land was to stock it with game. Similarly, when the fast track land reform program kicked off in 2001, with daily invasions of farms by para-military groups calling themselves war-veterans, many farmers turned their hands and lands to wildlife management, because conservancies, for a time, remained immune to land reform. In the end, in the opinion of some, these tactics made things worse, for the whites who employed them and for Zimbabwe’s wildlife.
American anthropologist David Mcdermott Hughes’ latest book, Whiteness in Zimbabwe – Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging, covers some of this ground, anatomizing the love affair white Zimbabweans have conducted with animals and certain landscapes. As a white person born and partly raised in Zimbabwe I found his book deeply interesting, challenging, and at times completely insane. I called him up and interviewed him via skype and came away feeling the same way-challenged, educated, and more than a little outraged by his views.
Farmer’s Weekly published part of the interview but left aside certain sections that would have caused their readers to choke on their koeksisters. Here’s the full monty below. Assume the crash position.
Sean Christie (SC): Zimbabwe is renowned the world over for its national parks, which have been maintained even though the country has largely collapsed. Yet, to quote a reviewer of one of your books, you see environmentalism as ‘an ideology and practice inflicted by powerful outsiders on poor people who are increasingly exposed, as a result, to the risk of losing their land.’ What do you propose as an alternative to the current model?
David Hughes (DH): The colonial understanding of parks was that these spaces should be free of agricultural production. Ridding an area of production was considered the highest level of conservation. However, this approach wasn’t consistently applied even during the colonial period and, of course, Lake Kariba, which is an industrial site, is the greatest exception to the prohibition of production in parks.
I find it remarkable that post-colonial conservationists tolerate and even embrace Kariba, which was brought into being at unprecedented ecological cost. There’s something wonderful in this, because it demonstrates that conservationists have the breadth of spirit to accept industrial production in ‘wilderness’ areas.
I say let’s broaden that generosity still further to include cattle and crops, which are much less damaging to mopani woodland than flooding it with water! What I’m really calling for is an inhabited park, a more European-style working landscape, and I’m calling for consistency, because the Lake Kariba exception is so enormous it should lead to a restructuring of Zimbabwe’s whole environmental policy.
SC: The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority has said poaching at a certain conservancy is largely driven by ‘a perception that wildlife resources, which are a public asset, have been the preserve of a few with the majority receiving little or no meaningful benefits.’ Do you agree?
DH: Yes, I did sense at some point that occupiers/invaders were killing wildlife and cutting trees in a way that was spiteful, because they recognised they had ‘suffered’ for that wildlife and those trees, as whites justified their exclusion on the grounds of conservation.
There are alternatives. For example, in my 2006 book, From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier, I suggest that the best way of saving African elephants where they’re hunted would be to domesticate them and make them work for people.
Some 20 years ago domestication was considered impossible and the solution was to make elephants work for local African communities through eco-tourism. As I found working with Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources, the few places where this worked, local communities actually earned revenue from sports hunting rather than eco-tourism, and even that happened only in a minority of cases because that money passed through so many hands, with local government taking a hefty cut.
But if a landscape is being fenced off for the sake of a species, and you want to get rights to that land, then there’s an incentive to go in there and kill the members of that species – to destroy the basis for conservation in order to access that land. This is why the value structure of large-scale landholders who practice conservation may ultimately kill conservation.
If you justify social injustice on the basis of some non-human thing, then people seeking justice will destroy that thing.
SC: It’s been claimed that some white farmers in Zimbabwe stocked their land with game as conservancies were originally immune to the land reform programme, but in the end this just made the situation messier, resulting in the slaughter of many animals. To what extent is this true? And if true, what lessons can SA’s white conservationist farmers learn, given that in this country private game ranches occupy 18% of the landmass, several percent more than the former apartheid Bantustans combined?
DH: To talk about Zimbabwe first – all through the 1990s there were debates among policy makers, including the Commercial Farmer’s Union (CFU), about what constituted under-utilised land. The CFU agreed to relinquish under-utilised land, but maintained there was very little of it, and commercial farmers put wild species there, so they could then say, ‘We’re utilising all the land because we’ve got kudu here.’
At the same time, though, farmers love wildlife, and many I interviewed were very nostalgic about the highveld they grew up in, which had a lot more wildlife on it, and they desired a more multi-species landscape which reminded them of the ‘old Africa’.
For farmer-conservationists the environment is personal and, after the land invasions, some are on record equating the cutting down of trees by their new neighbours to rape. Even if the paramilitaries had allowed them to stay, these individuals could not have abided their new neighbours. Rather than helping these farmers to fit into the new dynamics of the highveld, conservation drove them from it.
So the proliferation of conservancies was driven by economic self interest and a cultural romance, and I think it did hold back land reform for some years – long enough to make it very ugly and bloody.
As for South Africa, I would say that commercial farmers have slowed down land reform long enough to make it potentially really ugly and bloody, and in places like the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands and lowlands it’s pretty ugly and bloody already. The onus in my view should be on speeding up land reform in imaginative ways to avoid more of the same.
SC: In the second half of Whiteness in Zimbabwe you focus on white commercial farmers, and argue that by building expensive dams on their properties (particularly in the 1990s) they farmers sought to protect their properties from confiscation and that the dams ‘answered whites’ longing for a well-watered landscape.’ The strategy didn’t work, though. Why?
DH: White commercial farmers in Southern Africa have a difficult time thinking about how they belong in a country under majority rule, and one of the things Zimbabwe’s commercial farmers began to say to me after the land invasions was that they had been too rich and too visible.
‘What we should have done after independence,’ some said, ‘is integrate all of our clubs. We should have invited every black business manager and farm manager we could find to join, lowered our rates, changed the structure of the club entirely so that it could be bi-racial, or we should have simply done away with these institutions altogether, as well as relinquishing land.’
But for years, rather than doing this, farmers sought succour from their minority status in the environment, in impounding rivers, ploughing according to certain rules and in all-white enclaves rather than through an engagement with black society. And so they remained blind to the gathering danger of African politics. When they came round it was too late.
SC: White farmers in SA face similar questions. However, you describe how some white Zimbabwe farmers who have managed to stay on the land have adjusted their attitudes towards their new neighbours, as well as their approaches to agriculture, and you see a lesson in this for all non-European white communities. What is that lesson?
DH: I followed with great interest the debate stoked in the pages of the Mail&Guardian after philosopher Samantha Vice wrote in to say that white people should cultivate humility and silence, given their morally compromised position in the country. I say something like that in my book, but I put it in terms of self-interest for large landowners.
If you’re in a minority and tremendously wealthy and visible because of the car you drive and the house you live in, as well as a difference in skin pigment, then there’s a vulnerability there, and what interests me is the moment when people in these situations cease to feel vulnerable.
This is happening in the USA, because we have a small number of billionaires who own half the wealth, and they flaunt it, which served to provoke the Occupy Wall Street movement and which may result in higher taxes for those billionaires. If they hadn’t flaunted their wealth, but had rather enjoyed it with greater taste and understatement, they might have avoided this sort of thing.
So there’s a difference between feeling humble and acting humble, and I guess I’m saying that any white commercial farmer in Africa would be in a better position to preserve their privileges by acting humble.
Many of the remaining white Zimbabwe farmers I interviewed claimed they had come to hate blacks more, not less, as a result of working more closely with them, that is, sharing their resources and expertise, to ensure they could remain on their land.
In my view this is not necessarily a bad thing – hating the farmer next door is one way of acknowledging their presence, at least. A deal across the fence – even an unfair one – locks whites and blacks into co-ordinated cultivation.
In place of Vice’s term ‘humility’ I argue that whites in Zimbabwe should learn to ‘belong awkwardly’. If they do they might one day counsel others, Americans not least, to learn to do the same.
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