Women and the Literature of Settlement and Plunder: Toward an Understanding of the Zimbabwean Land Crisis

For nearly a decade the world has been intermittently gripped by the deepening political, economic, and humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. The government-sanctioned confiscation of approximately forty-five-hundred white farms commenced in 2000 and continued for a two-year period. Few human rights violations have produced more vitriol in Britain than the sight of white families expelled from their homes, often through violence and occasionally through the murder of the patriarch. The response in this country is quite different: sure, it is shocking, but in Canada the expulsion of white farmers in a former British colony may be a poignant reminder of our own colonial history. Although white Zimbabweans form only a small portion of the regime's victims, it is largely their experience which mediates international understanding of the crisis. The status of "home" and the ways in which it is inter-implicated in race, gender, and class is really what is at stake here. What is the meaning of "home" when an estimated one-quarter of the population has fled Zimbabwe, a country ravaged by 1,000, 000 percent inflation, worrying food and fuel shortages, and daily human rights violations? What is the meaning of "home" in a country where a "Marxist" president occupies a twenty-five-bedroom mansion and endorses the burning of the huts or shanties of opposition party supporters? What is the meaning of "home" for two million urban slum dwellers whose modest homes and businesses were destroyed in the Orwellian-termed "Operation Murambatsvina" (Operation Restore Order)? Home has deep ideological and historical meaning in Zimbabwe.

Just as the original plunder of land for white homes in the 1890s was constituted in gendered terms, so too is the current regime's re-appropriation of land and destruction of homes. From the beginning, the establishment of white homes was connected to the arrival of white women, and black women were taught by these same women to maintain their own homes to white European standards (Kirkwood 159). Even though his original "Pioneer Column," which set out from the Cape in 1890, was comprised of men, Cecil Rhodes envisioned white women on that landscape. In a footnote in his "Last Will and Testament," readers are told that Rhodes "circl[ed] his hands about the horizon [and] said, 'Homes, more homes; that is what I work for'" (Stead 5). Margaret Strobel explains that the arrival of white women in the colonies "intensified the appropriation of indigenous land" in order to facilitate this desire for homes (2). The hut tax and a forced labour policy meant that black men left their family kraals in order to pursue work on white farms and in newly developed mines. Their authority over their wives and children diminished substantially. Given this history, black men set out to "reclaim their manhood and masculinity" when they invaded white farms (McFadden 4). Black women were sometimes active participants in this process, but they were more often victims. Farm workers and their families were forced to leave, and many women were beaten and raped. Other rural people were invited to settle on reclaimed farms, but these former commercial farms were (and are) overcrowded and under-resourced. As well, Mugabe's targeted attacks on, first, urban and, more recently, rural supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have profoundly affected black women's (and a few white women's) ability to maintain a home. In both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, home is a highly contested and gendered ideological arena.

In this paper I examine four white women writers' negotiations of the problematic of land, gender, race, and home over a hundred-year period. My aim is to trace the formation and reformation of white women's claims to belong, to be at home, in Rhodesia and in Zimbabwe. While it is understood that white women played a pivotal role in the settlement of Britain's colonies, I want to push this understanding further and point to the ways in which their writing reveals the complications of white women's claims to home space in...