Mugabe and The White African is a documentary film produced by filmmakers Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson. The film documents the case of Mike Campbell, a 74-Year-old white Zimbabwean who filed a law suit against Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in order to halt the confiscation of his farm during the controversial Land Reform project that began in the late 1990′s.
According to Rotten Tomatoes, Mugabe and the White African is one of the best reviewed films of 2010. That fact, and the film itself caused me to attempt to examine my own personal prejudices as pertains to Zimbabwe’s present economic and political situation. As a Black, Shona Zimbabwean, I have always found it disturbing that the loudest voice on Zimbabwean politics is that of the White African. I don’t share the President’s view that race determines legitimacy of citizenship or nationality, but I also am fully aware of the reality and historical context within which interactions between White and Black Zimbabweans occur. While they are a tiny minority–their population in Zimbabwe has never exceeded 1%–white people enjoyed an inordinate amount of power and influence throughout Zimbabwe’s history. First during Colonialism, then during the Ian Smith-helmed White Supremacist regime, white settlers were allowed access to economic opportunities that were denied to Zimbabwe’s indigenous population, thus allowing them to gain control of more than 90% of arable land. In an agriculture-based economy, this meant that the divide between the quality of life between Black and white Zimbabweans became immense.
The economic divide, also lead to a cultural divide as interactions between white and Black being minimal outside of employment. In my personal experience, I’m always shocked at my treatment by white people when I go home. It’s not that they speak down to you, or insult you with racial slurs, more that the White Zimbabwean has the unique and distressing ability to look through you with a vacant stare that seems to say that your existence as a Black person is completely subjective. Even in a nation as self-segregated as the United States, white people can often be found engaged in cultural activities outside of their race, or enamored and immersed in other cultures. White Zimbabweans self-segregate more than any racial minority that I have ever encountered, and it is a widely known fact that many of them still refer to themselves as “Rhodesians,” a bitter and lingering protest against the struggle that was supposed to bring equality to Black Zimbabweans.
I say “supposed” to because the agreements that came at the end of the War for Independence were designed to be reconcilliatory as opposed to revolutionary, and the lack of drastic change meant that there was no real change to the prevailing economic order. Thus, the Independence movement left us with a generation of young war veterans, many of whom joined the war effort as teenagers, who felt that they had seen the lives of their comrades sacrificed in vain. This bitterness festered as Black Zimbabweans realised that while they now had control of Zimbabwe’s political system, and now enjoyed social freedoms, their economic reality had remained the same.
I say all this as a preface to my review of the film in question because I believe at least a basic understanding of the context in which the conflict between the Campells and the Zimbabwean government occurs is vital to see the ugliness of this documentary, because unfortunately, most news articles on Zimbabwe’s current situation seem gloss over this reality, instead referring to the days before land reform as a time of unprecedented wealth and prosperity, with the current climate in Zimbabwe resembling a modern hell on earth. Mugabe and The White African falls into this category, as it tells the story of the “brave” and “unflappable” white farmer fighting for his right to live in peace.
To sum up my feelings on the film, I was disturbed. More than anything I was disturbed by the lack of Black voices in a struggle that was supposedly being waged for the benefit of the Campbells’ Black workforce. The farm workers are present throughout the film, but they are used more like props than subjects—-most of them stand mute on screen throughout emotional scenes, while their situation is described by their employers. When they do speak, it is in a broken stuttering English that begs the question why they weren’t interviewed in Shona or Ndebele, which leads to the assumption that neither the filmmakers nor their employers speak a word of either, despite their many decades in Zimbabwe. The only Black person who does speak his mind in full is the son of a ZANU-PF Minister who challenges the Campbell’s right to their land since it was appointed to him by the government. As has been the case since it was implemented, Land Reform policies have seen rich whites replaced by well-connected Blacks, and the film does have some merit in that it exposes this fact with documentation. Unfortunately, the one-sidedness of the film’s depiction of events continued to distress me as the same Lawyer that points out the nepotism at the heart of the Land Reform policy compares it to the ethnic cleansing that occurred in the Balkans during the 1990′s. Political hyperbole is present in any debate, however when only one side is given a voice, these exaggerations can sound like facts to the uninformed.
The voicelessness of Black Zimbabweans on these issues internationally is best exemplified by what is supposed to be one of the film’s most heart-wrenching scenes. The Campbells visit the home of another white family that has recently been ransacked by a militia of war veterans, and the viewer is given a tour of the family’s damaged belongings as a cadre of voiceless black workers sort through the wreckage of their employer’s home. During the scene, a white woman describes how the house was built in 1901 and that the family had been living their for almost a century at the time of the raid. 1901 stands out to me as it happens to be the year that my Great-Grandfather died in a British jail, after being captured as he attempted to defend his ancestral home from oncoming white settlers armed with superior weaponry and illegal land titles. With that in mind, I find it difficult to sympathise with the loss of what in the US would amount to a plantation house, built on land illegally purchased, or not purchased at all, and developed at the expense of Zimbabwe’s indigenous people. In the same scene the homeowner points to one of her workers, the man stands mute and glass eyed as she describes how his father worked for her grandfather, and that he had worked for her family his entire life. My stomach turned, as she cried at the idea that the generation-long relationship of master and servant might be coming to an end. The paternalism of the scene actually sickened me as the worker, who was not even named, stood like a wooden golem, while the white woman that his family had served for generations, and undisturbed would have continued to serve, spoke for him.
The lack of context throughout the film will make sitting through it an infuriating experience for any non-white Zimbabwean. No one but the most amoral ZANU-PF cronie would ever attempt to argue that Land Reform was carried out in a fair manner that benefited the common man, but in going to such great lengths to whitewash our history, Bailey and Thompson do us a deep and damaging disservice. When asked from whom they purchased the land, the Campbells duck and dodge around the question, attempting to assert that a purchase in and of itself denotes property rights. But if that land was purchased from another landed white farmer who gained it via the subjugation of the African majority, is that purchase really considered fair? The film never gives the audience the ability to ask these questions for themselves, never once touching upon the brutal, ignominious campaigns that disenfranchised the Black majority and led to the present situation. By presenting us a Zimbabwe without a history and devoid of Black human-beings, the documentary disingenuously attempts to juxtapose the elder Campbell and Robert Mugabe as figureheads in a battle of good against evil. As a Zimbabwean, it’s hard for me to see much good in either side of the dichotomy presented here. On the one hand, you have the landed white farmer, who refers to himself as an African, but never as a Zimbabwean, fighting for his right to live in a farm estate that employs 500 modern day serfs who do not earn enough to allow their children any sort of upward social or economic mobility. And on the other you have the architect of a failed revolution, failed in the sense that it fell short in providing equality for the people that fueled it, instead content to replace the white farmers as the undeserving fat cats of the country.
During a sequence of ending captions, it is noted that SADC’s ruling to uphold the Campbell’s property rights is the first time an African citizen’s rights have been held up in an International Court. To me that is the saddest reality of this film.