Comments Elsewhere

LoneSnark,

I’m not defending Mugabe’s policies. I’m saying that the white planters — who are overwhelmingly either robbers, the heirs of robbers, or people who knowingly bought land from robbers — aren’t in any moral position to complain about it.

LoneSnark: “Because the statute of limitations on grand theft has expired. Or, if you prefer, because the quick-deed duration of five years has expired without contestation.”

What statute of limitations? What duration? Are these elements of positive law that the otherwise rightful owners of Zimbabwean land agreed to abide by, or are they numbers that you’ve made up for them? If the previous rightful owners can be identified then they have as good a right now as they did then unless they’ve agreed to quitclaim their interest in it. If they cannot, then that only makes the farmland unowned land available for homesteading. It does not make it the respectable personal fief of the robber.

LoneSnark: “Either-way, to make a system of land management work you have to have a way of proclaiming ownership.”

Here’s one: the land to the people who till it.

Feudal land-claims granted by the Rhodesian government do not confer any legitimate ownership, so the land either rightly belongs to the people who owned it before it was stolen (if they can be identified) or to the people who have homesteaded it by cultivating it with their labor. On large plantations with many farmworkers, that means that the greater part of the land rightly belongs to the farmworkers, not to the planter. The planter has at the most a claim to the share of the land that he personally occupies or has cultivated.