Time will also tell if any policy reversal would lure back a significant number of those former farmers or not. As one such farmer pointed out in one of the Telegraph’s stories, Mugabe’s assurances of security of tenure may not be worth the paper they are written on.

But I wish to focus on the attitudes reflected in the Telegraph stories themselves, rather than what Mugabe is thought to be thinking of doing or what the reaction to that might be.

Mugabe has been a stinging rhetorical nemesis of the British in recent years, so perhaps it is natural that a British paper would react in a triumphal tone to speculation about what would be a major climb down by Mugabe. Quite apart from that, even the most rabid Mugabe supporter can no longer deny that his violent disruption of a sophisticated commercial agricultural system developed over decades has been disastrous for Zimbabwe. If there was ever any doubt, it has become glaringly apparent that the white farmers had a valuable, unique skills base.

In addition to the economic benefits that accrued to the country from that skills base, it gave the white farmers as a group an arrogance that was partly their undoing at the hands of the politically cornered, clever, and willing-to-be-a-demagogue Mugabe. The mix of their economic power and social attitudes carried over from the Rhodesian era made their scape-goating by Mugabe for his loss of political support in the face of declining national economic performance a relatively easy affair.

The cry of land reform struck a responsive chord amongst black Zimbabweans for obvious racial, historical, economic and other reasons. It is a fact of history that the issue of a pattern of land distribution that was so cynically and crudely tailored to the whites’ benefit was one reason a bitter guerilla war was fought to bring about an independent Zimbabwe. In addition to these reasons, many blacks also did not mind Mugabe bringing down a powerful racial and economic block who lauded their power over the blacks in many subtle and not so subtle ways.

While the white farmers can be forgiven for never having imagined that they would face the wrath of Mugabe in the way they did, it was also foolish of them to not see how their psychic isolation from the blacks demographically and literally all around them made them vulnerable to demagoguery. The Commercial Farmers Union had been happy to go to bed with Mugabe’s government for many years. The two lived in a fairly happy state of co-existence as long as the white farmers felt unthreatened by any major changes in the long-untenable pattern of land distribution that served them so well, and as long as the white farmers’ skills benefited the economy and Mugabe’s government in various ways.
This unspoken pact was broken by a combination of economic problems that put political pressures on Mugabe, and in his eyes the white farmers unforgivable, public support of the then new and upstart opposition MDC party that came onto the scene with such a bang in the 2000 general elections. When Mugabe unleashed his fury on the white farmers, they found that they did not have significant linkages with any part of the majority population. Even their support of the MDC was in a deprecating, cheque-book waving way that only emphasized a certain patronizing smugness. And indeed up to then their economic power had made it possible for them to set the tone and determine the nature of their relationship with the black majority. That meant keeping blacks at a psychological and social distance, and being able to pick and choose when, in what manner and how far to temporarily come down from that aloofness.

I have heard many whites furiously retort how they paid their workers better than their neighbours, built farm schools for the workers’ children and so forth. None of this addresses the point I am trying to make, which is essentially about respect. Respect towards your countrymen and good neighbourliness towards them that goes much deeper than dispensing largesse from a lofty perch. The attitudes associated with being an isolated, privileged community may have been a group habit inherited from the Rhodesian days, but in the evolving group power re-arrangement of independent Zimbabwe, that did not serve the whites well.

I keep using the word “group” because there are individual whites who have long perceived the necessity and inevitability of these changes and have consciously worked to change how they see themselves in the wider society and their interactions with it.
My point is that for whites as a group in Zimbabwe, and quite likely in the rest of southern Africa, their long term interests and survival is determined by shifting group identity from “whites in Africa” to white Africans. Some will not be able to make this psychological shift for many reasons, but their prospects are poor.

Part of the reasons for that difficulty is that by and large whites in southern Africa as a group have had very little experience in NOT being in charge of everything. There are all kinds of attitudes and behaviours to do with being a member of a small racial minority that economic and political power protected them from having to learn. But as power relations shift, bringing with them a changed conciousness and more confident, less servile and reverential attitude towards them amongst the blacks, the group attitudes amongst the whites that might have had no consequences to them 10 or 20 years ago do now.

Blacks in any western country instinctively know the ways they must adapt to the white majority culture for them to get ahead. Those who choose not to make that adaptation in terms of language and many parts of the majority culture have to pay the price of being marginalized even more than the rest of their communities. Whites in Zimbabwe on the other hand felt no such pressure to adapt themselves to the majority milieu at all. They, and the blacks, were accustomed to the Africans doing all the adapting to their ways.
This was always going to be a temporary state of affairs. Without Mugabe’s political gambit to scapegoat the whites for his failures it might have taken decades for these group dynamics to evolve to reflect the demographics and their attendant social, political and cultural realities. But all these issues were suddenly brought to the fore in a way that cannot be undone even if the old despot kicks the bucket today.

Whites who want to hang on to the view of themselves as a special group above the natives in southern Africa will likely never feel comfortable and secure. Apart from legal guarantees to farmland or citizenship, there needs to be a critical mass of whites who do and are seen to be identifying themselves as Africans. There is no longer a group benefit to holding on to the self-image of an elite group which just happens to be in Africa, enjoying still generally privileged status but also vaguely disdainful of the Africans and only comfortable dealing with them in situations where they are in control, making as few cultural, linguistic and social accommodations as possible. That difficult-for-many but necessary shift is what will best secure their place in Africa. Far more than money, duration of lineage on the continent, title to land, citizenship papers, the reigning political dispensation at any given time, or farming expertise.

Chido Makunike
I am a Zimbabwean in Senegal.