Robert Mugabe’s rhetoric of justice, and how it was used to take farmland.

As a result of Zimbabwe’s colonial past much of the arable land was owned by a small white minority. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the Zimbabwean parliament passed several laws aimed at reforming land distribution in the country. This policy evolved from voluntary sales by white owners, to forced acquisition by the government. The latter policy resulted in a few violent incidents such as one where a group of veterans from the Bush War seized a farm and forced the people living on it to flee. Mugabe’s regime did not compensate them for the loss. The land that was taken, however, was never redistributed amongst the people, instead it was given to Mugabe’s friends, family, and other allies. With the incidents increasing in number it did not take long for the international community, predominantly those who are considered to be part of the Global North, to denounce this policy, with then prime-minister Tony Blair’s cabinet implementing sanctions in order to condemn the actions undertaken by the Zimbabwean government. Mugabe would seek to overturn these sanctions, and would try to defend his policy time and again in UN assemblies. Though most research regarding Zimbabwe under Mugabe looks into the consequences of this land reform and the many failures of the state, they all take a somewhat deterministic approach. Mugabe’s given reasons are rarely if ever explored in a manner that gives proper credence to the very real complaints he levied at the international community. This paper seeks to understand, and analyse the justifications given by Mugabe in order to help create a grander understanding of the African point of view, and add an additional layer to the discussion of African history that does not solely rely on a eurocentric point of view. This is done through an exploration of the colonial past of Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s verbal sparring with the United Kingdom during the early twenty-first century, and the socialist themes present in his rhetoric. The combination of these factors will lead to a deeper understanding of Mugabe’s justification and by extension a deeper understanding of the subaltern perspective.