Honour, Patriotic Loyalty and Treachery in Zimbabwe's Land Reform Debate

Abstract

This chapter explores how the two ideals of love for one’s country and the notion of honour were appropriated by both Robert Mugabe and the veterans of the “War of Liberation” in justifying the accelerated land reform 2000–2008. Using Roman history as a basis for explaining the notion of honour, we critically problematise the zone within which the dichotomy of being a sellout or a patriot stretches and shrinks, by drawing attention to the contradictions in the understanding of patriotism in Zimbabwe during the period under review. Veterans of the liberation were encouraged to return to “combat mode” through the deployment of the Chimurenga ideology and the promise of concrete rewards. Reclaiming lost ancestral lands had been touted as one of the leading causes of the armed liberation struggle in the first instance. The memory of dispossession, ill-treatment and marginalisation at the hands of the settler minority had been kept alive in myths and songs. We examine the boundaries of the sellout/patriot dichotomy during the 2000s, and the implications thereof, and also Mugabe’s apparent change of attitude with respect to land reform, and how Mugabe has been viewed in the context of land reform. We ask whether land reform was truly driven by the two notions of love of one’s country and the sacrality of the land, or was rather a case of political imperatives masquerading as such concerns?