THE LONG TRAGEDY

Things in Africa are seldom what they seem. When the distinguished Afrikaans soldier, author and politician, Deneys Reitz wrote No Outspan in 1943, telling of his political career and adventures in South Africa between the wars, much of the book was about the ‘racial question’. Confusingly, this referred to the still-fraught interactions between the English- and Afrikaans-speakers in that country. If his book had mentioned the future of white-black relationships – and it is a measure of how remote the possibility of black rule seemed at the time that it did not – the issue would have been described as the ‘native question’.
In 1923 the then Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department began publishing an annual review. Its origins give it a convenient acronym, NADA, and right from the start it was something of a platform for frustrated philosophers on the ‘native question’. In that first issue, out of twenty-one articles no less than five argued for the introduction of private land tenure for Africans.

A particularly contentious matter was the Clause 43 problem. Rhodesia had been granted ‘Responsible Government’ in that first year of NADAs appearance, under a constitution that included the principle of equal rights in land purchase. That was all right when the country was run as a business. However, from now on the ‘native question’ would be under the responsibility of British politicians who had constituencies who were clearly ignorant of Africa and who might influence their representatives into adopting dangerously liberal views. Something had to be done about Clause 43.

What was done was the Land Apportionment Act. 83 ‘Native reserves’ had been created by the BSA Company in 1920, covering about 21.5 million acres, or about 22% of the country. At the time they were inhabited by (the precision is impressive) 675,499 people. However, while the reserves were under communal black occupation, clause 43 now allowed Africans as well as Europeans to own land anywhere outside these. So in 1930 the Land Apportionment Act was promulgated which split the country racially in land-holding terms. To the native reserves was added 8 million acres of what became known as ‘purchase lands’ where Africans could buy and sell land in relatively large areas. However, the door for widespread private property ownership throughout the country, with its immense wealth-generating potential, was shut.

Twenty five years later the rock was meeting the hard place. A combination of fifty years of peace and the limited spread of improved sanitation and medicine upon a culture organised for intensive procreation meant that the population in the middle of the century was roughly five times that at its beginning. In 1902 with a population of 500,000 it was estimated that the average carrying capacity of the country on a slash-and-burn basis was about 20 persons per square mile. Now, in the mid-fifties, with a population of 2.5 million, such subsistence activity would require 125,000 square miles of a country whose total surface area was only about 150,000 square miles. More, whereas the cattle count in 1902 was about 55,000, it reached 2 million in the 1940s. The hoe economy of the beginning of the century had been largely replaced by ploughs and draught power; fifty years later there were 150,000 ploughs in use, described by one crusty contributor to NADA as ‘the most devastating implement that could be put into the hands of a primitive people’.

Yet remarkably, again according to NADA, the damage to the environment that overpopulation was causing was accompanied by a massive increase in food output from what were to be known as the Tribal Trust Lands and the African Purchase Areas:
Product % of Country Output in 1951

Small grains (sorghum, rapoko, millet) 97

Gound nuts 95

Beef 58

Wheat 57

Maize 52

Ground peas and beans 80

Cotton 54
In 1957, when there were 193,000 Europeans and 2,350,000 Africans, the effect of the Land Apportionment Act was to give the following distribution of land availability:

:Square Miles % of Country

European Areas 81,230 53.5

African Reserves 52,966 34.9

African Purchase Areas 12,580 8.3

Forest Area 4,984 3.3

Totals 151,849 100.0

The last NADA was published in April 1979 when the Muzorewa government was imminent. The editorial suggested how unprepared it was for a world turned upside down:


By the time this edition is published the black majority rule Government will be in power. Hopefully the war will be diminishing… I am sure of two important factors which are firstly, that chieftainship is indestructible and is wholly necessary and secondly, that an administration which understands the Rhodesian black man is indispensable. …The mundane day to day recovery and maintenance of the wide range of minor infrastructure which is so essential to tribal life will once again, as it should, be left to the District Commissioner and his staff at ‘grass roots’ level.

Now we, all of us, black and white, are reaping the whirlwind of the long tragedy of the land.