From “bush” to “farm”: Emplacement and displacement in contemporary white Zimbabwean narratives

Abstract

In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the “bush” and the “farm” can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations with place under different historical and political circumstances. In Cry of the Fish Eagle, which preceded Zimbabwe’s land reform process of the 2000s, “bush” is a privileged category by virtue of its supra-national allowance of a claim to white belonging in “Africa” at large. In The Last Resort, on the other hand, the “bush” is a derelict wilderness rescued by the ingenuity of white subjects, who create “farms” of splendid regenerative capacity in an effort to purchase belonging in the Zimbabwean nation-state.

Keywords

belonging emplacement farm landscape nation places spaces white narratives Zimbabwean literature

Introduction

Emplacement, a process through which an alien or neutral space can be transformed into a personalized social place (Hammond, 2000: 9), routinely involves forging relations with particular sites through stories, or what one might call narrative configurations. In this manner, various notions of place in its guise as home are constructed. In Zimbabwean writing by whites, characters are often shown to inhabit initially unfamiliar space, principally the “bush” or the “farm”, to which they have little or no relation. Then, in the course of time, the strange begins to appear familiar and comfortable. The bush, which initially appears hostile to white habitation, becomes more accommodating. Whites, however, are forced to negotiate their forms of emplacement within a changing social environment. Sociopolitical change, for example, the process of land reform such as occurred in the early 2000s in Zimbabwe, and earlier conflicts around land appropriation, crucially influences writers’ constructions of emplacement.

As will readily be acknowledged, most stories are situated in specific places. Philip Ethington (2007: 483) suggests that “all action and experience takes place, in the sense that it requires place as a prerequisite, and makes place, in the sense of inscription”. These places lend stories, more importantly, the events and characters comprising the story, a particularity which contributes to the story’s signification. Landscape is a feature of most white Zimbabwean narratives, more so because discourses on place have dominated the social, economic, and political thinking about citizenship and belonging in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. White narratives have consistently grappled with the question of place and emplacement, to the extent that the reader is almost always certain to encounter literary and symbolic configurations of landscape. In particular, we focus in this article on how the bush and the farm emerge as white Zimbabwean writers’ preferred, though paradoxically imagined, terrains of belonging.

One could reasonably argue that in autobiography or memoir, writers situate their multiple senses of identity within specific environments as part of a dialogue between self and place. The mere act of writing involves a conscious choice of which places to include or exclude within a broader context of belonging. In the context of Zimbabwean writing, Hughes (2006: 2) contends that “by writing and in writing, extra-European whites have forged senses of belonging more enduring and resilient than empire”. A useful distinction between space and place is given by Schmidt (2011: 22), who suggests that “place occurs when spaces have acquired particular meanings through the interactions of people with/in that space”. Place is thus seen as space humanized. Regardless, places are not cut off from the entirety of land and landscape: “[E]ach place embodies the whole at a particular nexus within it” (Uusihakala, 2008: 19).

We focus on two narratives: Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009). We consider the ways in which the two distinct locales of the “bush” and the “farm” enable an understanding of place as provisional, unstable, and ambivalent. In both texts, as in all Zimbabwean narratives, place is a central organizing concept that is dialogically entangled with individual identities. Our choice of Cry of the Fish Eagle is informed partly by the need to locate a study of places of belonging outside the overriding context of the land reform process in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s. The novel can loosely be categorized as a historical fiction, a genre that finds favour with some of Zimbabwe’s white writers, especially those who are not especially keen on autobiographical narrative forms. Unlike Rogers’ The Last Resort, a memoir dealing with land reform in the 2000s and its bearing on real people, Cry of the Fish Eagle depicts fictional characters who are cast within historical time, events, and places. This characteristic lends the novel relative authenticity. Our focus on The Last Resort, by contrast, allows an examination of literary configurations of the farm and the bush as places of belonging, as “genuine” lived experience, and how such places are predicated on perceptions about precisely the land reform exercise. Read together, the two works provide a suggestive sense of white Zimbabwean literary constructions of space, place, and belonging emerging from two distinct narrative modes. In addition, Cry of the Fish Eagle may be said to anticipate the land reforms of the 2000s, whereas The Last Resort depicts this period after the event, in narrative hindsight. Separated by 16 years, these two works enable a critical view of multiply nuanced, changing conceptions of white Zimbabwean takes on place and belonging.

The idea that “all white African literature is the literature of exile” (Lessing, 1958: 700) underlines the significance of place in white narratives, as images of place are, indeed, very often linked to exilic feelings or thoughts. It is difficult to identify a category of white Zimbabwean literature that does not emphasize the importance of place. Whether it is the war narrative, the autobiographical account, or the gendered narrative (often from a female point of view), one encounters familiar descriptions in which place is invested with a strong burden of meaning. Land reform narratives emerging after 2000 are a different category only in the sense that their utilization of place is more often than not agrarian. They construct dialogues between events, characters, and the land — the farm in particular. Among the works of this period are Catherine Buckle’s African Tears (2001) and Beyond Tears (2003), Ian Holding’s Unfeeling (2005), Richard Wiles’ Foredoomed is my Forest (2006), Ann Beattie’s Tengwe Garden Club (2008), Eric Harrison’s Jambanja (2008), Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), and C. G. Tracey’s All for Nothing? My Life Remembered (2009). Ostensibly, much of this literature emerges from the farming community, be it from white farmers themselves or their relations, such as in The Last Resort. This observation prompts Rory Pilossof (2012) to examine the representations of land in white farmer narratives in order to bring their “voice” into the existing dialogues about land reform and belonging in Zimbabwe. Pilossof rightly notes that white farmers’ renditions of land reform and attendant land issues betray an “affirmative parochialism” (2012: 70) that owes its existence to a tradition of colonial myths about the land and “Africa”, as observed by Anthony Chennells (1982). While we do not deal extensively with gendered notions of place in this article, it will be readily understood that the predominantly masculinist bias in representations of Africa as a primordial feminine entity in need of “ordering” or “taming” are also at play here (cf., e.g., Daymond, 2013: 208, citing David Bunn on the “feminization of the land, and the phallic nature of a penetrating civilization”).

Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993)

Cry of the Fish Eagle narrates the stories of several white individuals, all of whom are caught up in a tangle involving war, land, love, and loss. The events in the story span more than 50 years, beginning in 1943. The story covers a wide range of subjects such as Smith’s UDI, the Liberation War, independence, and the changes that occur during the first decade of Zimbabwe’s freedom. Rimmer, therefore, takes an expansive backward glance at places of belonging that whites carved out for themselves. The account places the “African” bush at the centre of its narrative by virtue of a contrapuntal invocation of lost ancestral land in England, with the protagonist Rupert Pengelly’s forfeiture of “King’s Water”, a farm in Cornwall. Driving this land dispute is a family feud that eventually leads to the Pengellys’ ceding their farm to distant relations, the Geakes, who happen to be the original owners of “King’s Water”. For Rupert, land dispossession, coupled with his mother’s suicide under circumstances involving the sacrifice of family land and loved ones during the Second World War, combine to sharpen his feelings in relation to the African bush, which he initially encounters during the search for a late friend’s daughter, Sasa Savage. Having been warned by Jamie Grant (his first white contact in the Umvukwes district, where much of the story takes place) that the bush — symbolized by the sound of the fish eagle — is “totally addictive” and “the only cure is to hear that sound again” (1993: 41),¹ Rupert finds himself compulsively travelling back to Africa. Other white characters, including Lewdly Jones, a former English remittance man, Freddie, and Dee, a female ranger, all respond in a similar way to the “call” of the bush, lyrically metonymized by the fish eagle.

In a similar manner, Zimbabwean white narratives often espouse the bush as a place of belonging for whites in “Africa”. The construction of the bush as a place of belonging is founded, in this argument, on an image of Africa as wilderness characterized by “empty” space paradoxically labelled “bush”. White Zimbabwean narratives that construct the bush as a place of white belonging do so with both an abstract and material idea of Africa in mind. Their characters and the resolutions of emplacement consistently collocate bush and Africa so that the place imagined is neither explicitly Rhodesian nor Zimbabwean but a near-mystical evocation of a primordial Africa. Such a construction, as will be seen in the analysis of Cry of the Fish Eagle, betrays a deep-seated ambivalence about, and suspicion towards, “national” spaces of belonging.

One of the striking passages in Cry of the Fish Eagle reads:

Man had not lived on the plateau since the days of Monomotapa, those ancient kings and queens of Central Africa who some thought had built Zimbabwe. All they had left behind were legends and a vast and empty land with only the Rongwa’s, their rough, stone-built fortifications long fallen to ruin, as evidence of their existence. Into the void had first come Mzilikazi, a renegade Zulu general who had feared the wrath of King Shaka and taken his regiments deeper into Africa […] But he and his impi were few and the land, so vast and wild, made man seem so very small among its hills. This part of the earth had stood fallow for hundreds of years, the roof of the world. And then in 1890, the white man had taken up the challenge. (32–3)

This passage encapsulates the visualization of Africa as a vast and all but empty space consisting of bush, wild animals, scattered humans, and “fallow” land. The obvious paradox of emptiness that is somehow also loaded with wild animals, human beings, bush, and wasteland suggests the somewhat myopic colonial attitudes held by whites about Africa and blacks who, in the case of the Shona in Zimbabwe, had been on the continent for at least a thousand years before colonial occupation (Beach, 1980).

The image of Africa as vast and empty space has been recognized as a myth in several scholarly works on African literature (Chennells, 1982; Coetzee, 1988; Hughes, 2010; Pilossof, 2012). Chennells observes that “one image of Rhodesia that has, until very recently, had an extraordinary durability in the settler imagination is of the emptiness of the land” (1982: 160). He rightly points out that this concept was a myth, one that substantially informed beliefs and behaviours in Rhodesia. What Chennells had not anticipated, when he says “until recently”, is that this myth would persist in white Zimbabwean narratives more than a decade after the publication of his 1982 doctoral thesis. In imagining places of belonging for whites, Zimbabwe’s land narratives written long after the demise of colonialism continue, in varying degrees, to draw on this myth. Whereas a Rhodesian pastoral ideal created oppositions between nature and art manifesting themselves through characters’ dual allegiance to Rhodesia and Europe (Chennells, 1982), a reading of white Zimbabwean narratives sheds light on the significance of white emplacement in the bush as a claim to belonging to Africa.

In Cry of the Fish Eagle, the bush is depicted as mostly uninhabitable and acutely dangerous, so much so that when whites eventually inhabit it, against the odds, it becomes a place of fierce kinship. Indeed, Rupert’s first encounter with the bush is characterized by alarm and fear. The feeling of “being lost in the middle of nowhere” (26) dominates. The miles, we are told, “were endless” and Rupert feels like “the last man on earth” (26). In this bush narrative, the police post is “a small outpost of civilization” (27). The bush is the mythical empty space that is transformed into a recognizable place by the writer once whites humanize and demystify it. On Jamie’s map of the Umvukwes district, 90 per cent of the landscape is represented by wilderness. When Rupert asks him if people live there, Jamie proclaims “No-one. Tsetse-fly area. Domestic animals die. Kills people too. No cure. Place up there is full of game … Wild country. Very beautiful but wild” (29). Later, as they tour the Zambezi valley, Jamie tells Rupert that black people did not make it in the valley: “If it isn’t the malaria that gets them it’s the sleeping sickness. Bilharzia in the rivers. […] Black man never had a cure and to keep the cycle of death going he pissed in the rivers and started the little buggers breeding all over again. Africa” (39). He concludes by warning: “Africa doesn’t want to be disturbed, laddie” (39; emphasis added). Despite this we are told Jamie was “at home in the wilds” (27). Being at home suggests a sense of place. Not only does the narrative depict blacks as interlopers with little regard for the natural order of bush life, it also eliminates them from the historical narrative of the Zambezi valley.

In the process of appropriating the bush as a white place of belonging, blacks are estranged from the bush. Charehwa, a former labourer at Savage farm (owned by Sasa following the death of her father during the world war), moves into the farmhouse, reasoning, “why go and live in the bush when there’s a good house for the taking?” (34). Blacks are depicted as averse to the bush. In fact, the bush is averse to blacks. If it isn’t the tsetse-flies or diseases that is killing them, then it’s the animals. Chimanimani, the place Charehwa flees from, is gradually depopulated by disease. A white pathologist informs Jamie that in Chimanimani black people die from “pneumonia, malaria, cancer, influenza, cholera. Every disease known to Africa” (128). Included in this list is “a new disease [that] [d]oesn’t affect the white man” (128). Even the climate interdicts black people from living on the land. In Ginette (1980), a war narrative by Sylvia Bond Smith, we encounter Gondo, a black man fighting on the side of the Rhodesian army as a Selous Scout, as someone with “a great fear of wild animals” (1980: 26). Not only do the tsetse-flies settle on his arm, but his predictions of rain, supported by a black colleague, are ridiculously more than six days off the mark. It is only later, after Gondo no longer professes knowledge of the African landscape and is comically snatched away by a lion in a predatory kill, that it rains. In white Zimbabwean narratives, blacks either shun the bush or (if they attempt to court it) it is they who come off second best. In the process, white claims to the bush as a place of belonging are strengthened. By imagining Africa as bush, whites become the more “natural” inhabitants of the continent. Clearly, white emplacement in the bush is predicated on black displacement.

In white narratives such as those under discussion the bush is therefore adopted as a place of belonging by whites, subjects who also choose to expunge blacks from the same space. This clearly contradicts other colonial narratives that were content to designate the bush as a primitive place in which wild black people and the spectre of degradation loomed large. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902), as in the representation of Dick Turner in Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1973), the bush plagues whites. Their efforts to court the bush result in psychological meltdown, as we gather from Conrad’s Kurtz and Lessing’s Mary. Lessing, in particular, shows that not all whites were at home in the bush. Dick Turner and, particularly, Mary Turner, are not eagerly embraced by it. In a synecdoche typical of colonial discourse, the black people of imperial novels such as Heart of Darkness are the bush. They are entangled in and with this primitive space to the extent that at times it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. In Cry of the Fish Eagle the bush overwhelms its initial inhabitants, who all happen to be black, and retains its status as empty space. That the landscape has remained fallow and the stone walls built by the Rongwa (or the Rozvi) have “long fallen to ruin” further demonstrates that black people have failed to humanize Africa, thereby failing to transform it into a place of belonging.

While not all white Zimbabwean narratives are quite as crude as Rimmer’s, the appropriation of the African bush, in varying degrees, is a predominant theme in most. White Zimbabwean writing claims the African bush by imagining how white characters get entangled or entwined within it in diverse ways. Cry of the Fish Eagle contributes to the symbolic appropriation of the bush through its depiction of characters that thrive inside its frontiers. The literal cry of the fish eagle, appealing to the sense of hearing, invokes a “sense of place” in Jamie, Rupert, and later Lewdly Jones, all of whom become residents of the bush. Lewdly Jones can “hear” the fish eagle’s cry all the way from Europe and also during his wanderings across the oceans. He associates this call with the beckoning of Africa, to which he eventually “submits”. Although born and raised in Europe, we are told that by going to live in the Africa, which he calls “historical wilderness” (134), Lewdly Jones “had comfortably gone back to his roots” (264). Kobus and his granddaughter, Sasa Savage (named after the indigenous Msasa tree), are said to have “disappeared into the bush” (25). These incidents are represented as forms of consummation; the coming together of humankind and bush. By and by we are informed that Sasa “had the bush [and] the animals that lived in it” (31; emphasis added). Consistent with the discourse of tenure suggested by the pluperfect verb form “had”, Sasa raises a lion’s cub that develops into a fully grown lion. The lion later watches over Kobus’ body when he finally lies down to die peacefully in the bush. Furthermore, Sasa’s children, brought up in the ways of the bush, are accommodated by the wild. “Recognising who they were” as they wander the bush, a leopard rolls back on its side and goes to sleep (254). As can be expected, the bush speaks the language of whites. Only white characters perceive the sound of the fish eagle in the special way that they are said to do. What is consistent about such a representation in Cry of the Fish Eagle is that white subjects who claim the bush ultimately also receive its recognition, presented almost as a kind of benediction.

“Bush”, of course, is a metonym for Africa. In the discourse of places of belonging, the “bush” is a convenient way of negotiating belonging in wider and relatively permanent places. The permanence of “bush” as Africa is only possible when considered in opposition to the mutability of nation states. That Africa can cease to be Africa is unthinkable, or at least that is the way it is presented in white Zimbabwean literature. White narratives claiming the bush for their authors and characters are therefore more in danger of alienation from the nation than the continent. In Cry of the Fish Eagle, as in several other white Zimbabwean narratives published after 1980, white characters claim the bush as a way of relinquishing national identities. Africa, as place of belonging, enables a supra-national identity that is not always at the risk of transmutation, such as when “Rhodesians” suddenly find themselves having to become “Zimbabweans”. Characters are placed within the ambit of an Africa imagined as bush, a place that outlives nations and governments. In the bush, identity is permanently African and temporarily Rhodesian or Zimbabwean.

Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009)

The Last Resort highlights the experiences of Lyn and Ros Rogers, owners of a resort farm, from the early stages of the white-owned farm occupations in the 2000s, through the official launch of the fast-track land reform and resettlement scheme by the ZANU PF government, the subsequent economic meltdown in the country, and the period of political unrest following the emergence of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The question of white belonging in Zimbabwe was never far from these events, which are all cast retrospectively in this white Zimbabwean land reform narrative. The story, which happens to be a memoir, is told from the perspective of Douglas, son of the Rogers family. Notable here are the parallels with Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (2006) and the final section of Mukiwa (1996) in which the protagonists return to Zimbabwe and express sympathy for white farmers.

While the Rogers’s farm, “Drifters”, is not formally occupied by the end of the narrative, the Rogers are at the centre of transformations that occur on their farm, their neighbours’ farms, their home town, and the country at large, to the extent that the author hypothesizes the farm as a microcosm of the entire nation. It is interesting to examine, through an analysis of The Last Resort, how the farm is constructed as a white place of belonging in opposition to the bush. We argue that land reform narratives shift the discourse of bush to a new plane, one that involves the emplacement of white characters on the farm and certain Africans in the bush. White land reform narratives also embrace the discourse of white Zimbabweanness by associating the farm with Zimbabwe. This time around places are clearly distinguished and given specific names, unlike imaginings of the bush.

The entanglement of farm and country

Land reform narratives in Zimbabwe recall the promises of reconciliation put forward by Robert Mugabe and his new government at the time of independence in 1980. Whites, especially farmers, were repeatedly reassured that they had a place in Zimbabwe. Speaking to white commercial farmers in 1980, Mugabe pledged: “There will be a place for white farmers, who have an important role to play in our new nation […] you must go on farming […] there is a place for you in the sun”.² In this discourse of place, the farm and the nation loomed large as sites of white commitment to Zimbabwe. Ironically, Rhodesia’s early land titles had also insisted on “improvement or ‘beneficial occupation’, without which settlers could forfeit their land” (Palmer, 1977: 60).

The Last Resort represents a shift from “bush” to “farm” characteristic of white Zimbabwean land reform narratives that seek to address white Zimbabwean experiences during the land reform process. More traditional white narratives emphasized what they saw as the importance of farms, albeit not as property but as extensions of the bush. Farm novels by whites were by and large indictments of urban livelihoods, regarded as corrupt and spiritually inept (Chennells, 1982; Coetzee, 1988). In other words, farms were celebrated for the rural and pastoral values that they encoded. The farms as functionally agrarian enterprises were less important in white claims to belonging. Rather, white writers’ ties to the land were often rendered as appeals to a rural ideal constructed in opposition to cities and city life. Before 2000, white Zimbabwean literature has little to say about the farm as such. Of course one comes across the rare farm in pre-2000 white narratives such as in the Liberation War novels White Man Black War (1988) and Ginette (1980). In these texts, however, the farm does not customarily provide the core narrative as is the case in land reform texts. In The Last Resort, however, the farm is at the very centre of what one might style as the moral action.

The Last Resort, then, does not make bold claims about rural values or corruption in the cities. It principally lends primacy to Drifters farm and draws attention to the larger polity of the country. Stating his intentions for writing the book, Douglas Rogers says: “I wanted to write about the farm as a metaphor for the condition of the country” (2009: 136).³ In contrast to the bush metaphor in earlier landscape narratives, belonging is conceptualized as necessarily entangled with farm ownership and residence. This sense of entitlement to one’s farm is presumed to indemnify one against the charge of being a foreigner. During one conversation with their son Douglas Rogers, following the murder of a white farmer by armed men during the land invasions, Ros declares: “We are Zimbabweans. This is our land” (3; emphasis in original). The discourse of white Zimbabweanness is considered by Ros in the context of belonging to — or more crudely, possessing — the farm. Being Zimbabwean is imagined in the context of farm ownership and attachment to plants, crops, and labour. Ashleigh Harris (2005) observes, and accounts for, how the discourses of belonging and land ownership became entangled during and after the land reform exercise in Zimbabwe:

Recent constructions in the western press of emigrated white Zimbabweans as exiles and refugees reinstate the significance of the relationship between white Zimbabwean identity and ownership of land. The identity of the “exile” and the “refugee” is one deeply entwined with the loss of land, or belonging in/on the land of one’s nation of origin. This has allowed white Zimbabwean (ex) land owners to shed, along with their land, the identity of “settler”: in the past the marker of colonial occupation and oppression. Ironically then, in the loss of ownership of land the somewhat tenuous relationship between self and land implied by the word “settler” is replaced by a seemingly authentic claim to the land as the place of origin. (2005: 105–6)

Several white identities — exile, refugee, and settler — are seen to coalesce in these discourses of ownership as belonging and they all point to an ambivalence of belonging to Zimbabwe. In the crudest form, belonging occurs inside the parameters of the fence that marks the boundary of the farm.⁴ Never mind what happens beyond the fence. The white Zimbabwean farmer’s place is his farm, which bears his name and to which he has title deeds. The “he” here is intentional. We are dealing with the (albeit now somewhat challenged) extenuation of a patriarchal imaginary with immemorial roots stretching back to Enlightenment journeys of discovery (such as found in Defoe and Camoens), the “path-clearing” work of masculinist explorers, missionaries, and “field scientists” (the likes of David Livingstone and Robert Moffat), and the gendered fictions of feminized Africa lodged in Victorian and modernist novels (most notably Haggard and Conrad). The redacted elements of this tradition are then apotheosized in a “robust” settler masculinity in the colonies, such as one finds in the colonial fictions of Percy Fitzpatrick and John Buchan, among others. That such longstanding discursive fastnesses in masculinist mode are now, in the twenty-first century, significantly threatened serves only to make their protectors, “strong” white men, more determined to hold on. So, in a work such as The Last Resort the farm is both an assigned place, one which the government has conferred upon the white man, and a self-entitled place, one to which the white farmer feels he has earned the right to belong permanently as a settled, entitled “African”.

The farm is thus conceived as a singularly defining place of national belonging despite the reality that most whites lived in towns during and after colonialism (Godwin and Hancock, 1995). Moreover, the majority of Zimbabweans were displaced from farms during colonialism, thereby concentrating the black population in towns and cities. Belonging envisaged this narrowly thus disenfranchises the majority of people who imagine themselves as Zimbabweans. Leaving the farm now, however, is suddenly regarded as renouncing one’s Zimbabweanness. In addition, the Rogers family purchases the Drifters farm as a retirement home. The farm is therefore enlisted to serve also as a mark of stability.

To Rogers, white farmers defended their farms as symbolic acts to safeguard their Zimbabwean citizenship. Summarizing his father’s laborious efforts to retain ownership of Drifters, the narrator pronounces: “[H]ere was my father having to defend his right to be a Zimbabwean — to be an African” (35). During the land reform exercise, whites were indeed given the option to “go back to England”, where they supposedly belonged. Whites were persistently interpellated as foreigners during this period (Fisher, 2010). Because the government justified the land reform exercise on a historical basis, a blanket designation of all whites as foreign not only to Zimbabwe, but also to Africa, fuelled the “go back to Britain” crusade that characterized the actions of farm invaders and the government. President Mugabe is quoted saying: “We want whites to learn that the land belongs to Zimbabweans”.⁵ During this period the farm occupations and the government “recast Zimbabwean whites as European settlers — minus colonial power” (Hughes, 2010: 109). Inevitably, white Zimbabweanness and farm ownership became complexly entangled, and white belonging came to be measured by one’s relationship to the space of the farm. White narratives are therefore seen to adopt this form of entanglement in their depiction of the farm as a place of belonging. As long as one was on the hallowed site of the farm, he or she belonged to Zimbabwe.

What is barely mentioned in land reform narratives are the larger political, natural, and economic forces that contributed to the land crisis in Zimbabwe, such as the imposition of economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, the international isolation that resulted, and the effects of drought, all of which coincided with the land reform programme.⁶ This omission is nevertheless matched by the omission or downplaying of the disastrous effects of the land reform programme in official narratives. As can be expected, conflating farm and country in land reform narratives provides writers with the option of a myopic representation of events in Zimbabwe. What is significant in this depiction is that the land reform business, in its crudest sense the invasion of white places of belonging, transformed the socio-economic geography of the nation that white Zimbabweans recognized, rendering it unfamiliar territory. The sense of alienation accompanying the burning of crops, the killing of livestock and the destruction of property on farms is powerfully conveyed in The Last Resort. From one dispossessed farmer to the next, we get a narrative of farm and country falling apart at the same time. It emerges in the narrator’s interviews with refugee farmers in the cottages at Drifters that in losing the farms, they have also lost their place in Zimbabwe. Drifters becomes a temporary shelter from which most of them would eventually leave the country.

The transformation of bush into farm

White land reform narratives often include references to the appropriation of bush as the first step towards white emplacement. A dispossessed white commercial farmer in The Last Resort complains: “[T]his government says we stole [the land], but the country was empty back then. No one around. We had to recruit workers from Mozambique and Malawi.⁷ We cleared the bush and planted tobacco” (103). The Rogers bought Drifters farm in 1990 at a time when “there was nothing […] but bush” (10). The narrator fervently points out: “My parents had taken a barren range of hills in Africa with nothing on it but bush and stone and turned it into a thriving resort” (13). The significance of transforming bush into “a thriving resort” is that “[t]hey had staked a claim on the land in Africa” (13). Ironically, the “bush” the narrator refers to had been in the possession of an old Afrikaner and his wife, who part with it in order to go and live where they can find better television reception. The narrator reluctantly concedes that “it was a farm” while maintaining that it was more bush than farm (11). The narrator, therefore, deliberately recycles a white Zimbabwean narrative pattern of bush to farm in order to legitimate his parents’ claims to it.

In land reform narratives the bush is now a place that must be transformed at all costs. The black Zimbabwean government, by courting the friendship of white farmers, had set the stage for this resourcefulness by acknowledging the country’s dependence on white farmer contributions to the national economy (Palmer, 1990; Stoneman and Cliffe, 1989). Since 1980, the Zimbabwean government had “signalled white accommodation, the conditional acceptance of minorities and their inclusion on the basis of personal change and contributions to national projects” (Fisher, 2010: 32). Whites were called upon to “[f]ight poverty or leave the country”.⁸ Whites were co-opted into Zimbabwe as “potential nation-builders” (Fisher, 2010: 33). This was the price for emplacement.

Land reform narratives take up the discourses of nation-building and commitment on the farm as motivations for belonging. Through hard work on the farm white characters cultivate their Zimbabweanness. This hard work and commitment is demonstrated through spatial practices appearing in two distinct forms: environmental practices and social practices. On the farm, white characters apply themselves to the land and to the welfare of black people as symbolic acts of ridding the farm of bush. The farm is made productive so that it can generate much-needed approval on behalf of the white man. Responsive to the discourses of conditional belonging, white land reform narratives are by and large success stories.

Environmental practices

The typical white Zimbabwean land reform narrative catalogues several environmental practices that enable the creation of productive farms. These practices, confined to the farm, almost always suggest white ingenuity, creativity, and commitment to the land. The suggestion is that without such practices, the farm would remain bush — unproductive in this visualization. Environmental practices not only ensure that the bush is kept at bay, but they also grant whites entitlement to land.⁹ In the case of Lyn and Ros, whose farm is developed into a resort business, the reader learns that in just three years they erected an electric fence and stocked the land with animals. They build a two-storey lodge with an open restaurant, a bar, an art gallery, and a kitchen. They plant lawns around the lodge and develop a campsite as well as “a dozen chalets modeled on African huts, all set around a gleaming swimming pool” (13). Furthermore, the Rogers build 16 “two-bedroom brick cottages” for renting out (13). Their entire pension goes into this project, demonstrating the risks whites took in transforming the bush. Extolling the virtues of his parents for these environmental exertions, Rogers reiterates: “My parents had taken a barren range of hills in Africa with nothing on it but bush and stone and turned it into a thriving resort. They had staked a claim on the land in Africa” (13). It emerges from Rogers’ assertion that physical constructions and the erection of buildings are meant to be insurance against unbelonging. The Rogers therefore successfully negotiated the hills and the bush in their claim to emplacement. The Rogers’ ability to manage wildlife, something the Africans in Cry of the Fish Eagle fail to do, also serves to project them as environmental conservationists. Indeed, the land reform of the 2000s invited “apocalyptic headlines” such as “A holocaust against our wildlife” (Wolmer, 2007: 1). For Suzuki (2001), who cites the example of farming in Mlilo, Zimbabwe, wildlife ranching “enables [white] farmers to refashion their identities with the aim of legitimizing their continued presence in an increasingly hostile post-colonial terrain” (2001: 603). These exertions are represented as affirmations of whites’ affinity to the land and opportunities for white farmers “to reinvent themselves as good citizens, rather than white ones” (2001: 604). Ostensibly, the Rogers paid a sufficient price to guarantee an unbreakable bond with the land. Suzuki suggestively argues that environmental conservationists (such as the Rogers) seek new forms of legitimacy via “interactions with biologists, international donors, politicians and tourists”; further, “wildlife production affords farmers the opportunity to interface with the global arena vis-à-vis the emotionally and morally charged domain of conservation”, and from “this relatively apoliticized angle, people insert themselves into both national and international debates concerning citizenship and human rights, strategically invoking their self-articulated roles as conservationists working in the interests of the nation as a whole (Suzuki, 2001: 603). Such gestures, of course, downplay the financial motives that underlie wildlife conservation (Suzuki, 2001; Wolmer, 2005, 2007).

Because the same government that was taking away white commercial farms had provided the blueprint for white belonging, land reform narratives partly address themselves to this discourse by projecting white characters toiling and suffering for emplacement on their farms. Having been called upon to contribute to the national economy by environmental farm practices, the farming community’s writers emphasize this aspect of white agrarian existence. About an evicted farming family, the narrator notes: “Like my parents, the De Klerks had invested all their money into their farm; they hadn’t filtered a fortune outside the country, as other white farmers — wisely, it could now be seen — had done. They were paying a price for investing in their own country” (111).

In The Grass is Singing (1973), Lessing suggests that not all whites met with success in their farming endeavours. Dick Turner is a miserable failure. Land reform narratives, on the other hand, are by and large success stories of whites transforming the bush into viable and enduring farmland. Their environmental practices, although sometimes met with challenges, are shown generally to succeed in the long run. Rogers laments that “a country that once had been known as the Breadbasket of Africa, able to feed itself and its neighbours […] was turning to bush” (6–7). In the discourse of environmental practices, then, a calculated silence on agrarian failure predominates. What we get is a picture of white characters falling in love with their agrarian environments, settling comfortably on the farm and experiencing a sense of emplacement, a valid attachment to place, in the process. Challenges and hardships are mentioned in the narratives in order to strengthen the white cause of commitment and hard work. The more whites apply themselves to the farm, the more they distance themselves from the bush. Alternatively, the conservationist ethos allows them to mix elements of the immemorial bush into a reconfigured “farm” space, the curated bush now bounded and “husbanded” but nevertheless pristine. However configured, though, land reform narratives present the farm as places of wholesomeness prior to the land reform programme. Indeed, white commercial farms flourished throughout the 1980s and performed surprisingly well in the 1990s, when the politics of land reform began to become increasingly intense (Selby, 2006). A favourite cliché in land reform narratives and white farmer discourses is that prior to land reform, Zimbabwe, and Rhodesia before it, had been the “[b]readbasket of Africa”. The reality is more complex than this. Not all white farmers were successful farmers,¹⁰ not all commercial farmland was being utilized,¹¹ and both Rhodesia and Zimbabwe at one period or another imported grain from other countries in the region.¹²

Social entanglement

In land reform narratives, the farm is not just a white place of belonging. It is a shared place. Unlike the bush, where black people are blighted by disease and animals, the social environment of the farm is seen as far more beneficent. Whites therefore create farms and extend the parameters of their embrace to include blacks, who are then duly depicted as comrades. John Muranda, servant to the Rogers, is said to be “more than just an employee at Drifters”, becoming Lyn’s “right-hand man” (82). Douglas even contrives a resemblance between the two in order to underline their racial entanglement enabled by the farm environment. Seeing John Muranda would remind Douglas of his father and the identical role they seemed to be playing to combat farm invasions (83). This relationship of resemblance would pass for what Sarah Nuttall (2009) calls “entanglement”, a condition which suggests the rejection of overstated difference and concedes the confluence of seemingly contrary streams of identity.

In the narratives under discussion, white farmers stimulate “pride of place” among the blacks on the farm. The average black person in land reform narratives is shown to identify with the white farmer, with whom s/he joins forces to combat farm invasions. Rogers explains that:

John had as much to lose if Drifters was taken as my parents did. Here, he and Naomi had a house, a job, a salary, regular food […] Who could beat that kind of deal? John must have known that if the war vets took over, all that would go. It was just as much in his interest for my dad to hold on to the farm, and therefore he kept my father abreast of the more important developments in the valley so he could plan ahead. (83)

Blacks, then, are projected as being happy and content in the space of farm. The depiction of whites in the service of blacks takes precedence over blacks labouring for whites. By extension, the transformation of bush into farm was also a transformation of black lives, a provision for black belonging. The land reform programme is seen to disrupt all this. It takes away not just the white man’s basis for belonging but also the majority of black people’s stability, who relied on the white man’s finding a place for their own “place in the sun”, as the popular cliché goes. The farm typifies white benevolence, creativity, industriousness, and fulsome capabilities. It shows the ability of whites to transform bush into habitable place. Invading the farms is seen as a return to bush, a reversal of progress. It would appear, then, that whites appropriated the bush when it suited them. Once their belonging to place was threatened by the Liberation War and land reform, belonging in the bush was no longer a viable option. Belonging through environmental and social activities became imperative.

Conclusion

It has been argued that white Zimbabwean landscape narratives imagine the bush and the farm, in varying degrees, as places of belonging. The representations of these places exhibit an ambivalence of place that characterizes white Zimbabweans in the postcolonial period. Bush, it has been argued, is appropriated in white narratives as a way of excluding blacks from the land while simultaneously including whites on the same land. Even as white characters claimed the bush as a place of belonging, what they have in mind is an enduring and permanent Africa to which whites can belong with ease, minus the demanding constraints of nation states. This metonymic approach enables whites to become supra-national citizens, belonging to a larger geo-political environment. Even as whites claimed the bush, a separate narrative undermined this assertion of belonging. The nationalist war in Zimbabwe took place in the bush and it is there that nationalists created a home. The bush would not quietly lend itself to white appropriation. It remains a contested place, unstable and shifting as it yields now to one group, now to another.

The discussion of Rogers’ The Last Resort has suggested that in white Zimbabwean land reform narratives, the bush still serves an important function in the project of belonging, although in different ways. The bush came to represent the antithesis of white belonging while paradoxically lending itself to other forms of belonging. In land reform narratives, it is the farm that looms large as the white place of belonging. Yet the bush does not disappear completely. In The Last Resort, the bush returns in the form of wildlife ranching and a deliberate neglect of the farm at the height of the land reform process, when the protagonists encourage the bush to grow so they can hide from farm invaders. A reconstruction of whites’ past idealized bush inside the farm seems to take place.

The farm is not construed as productive for its own sake. Rather, it is seen as the embodiment of white ingenuity and, more importantly, commitment to place. This is a commitment which, as argued, should entitle whites to the farms. In land reform narratives, white individuals are seen to exert their financial resources, time, and energies in service of the environment as well as black people. In this case, belonging is tied to practices that occur on a particular site or place. The uses of bush and farm that have been identified appear, in varying degrees, in the bulk of white Zimbabwean narratives. There are always exceptions to the rule, of course. It remains to be seen how greater dialogue on white Zimbabwean literature will help to provide insight into further nuances regarding representations of the land and landscape, places of belonging in particular.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was assisted by funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa.

Notes

References

Beach

(1980) The Shona and Zimbabwe 900–1850: An Outline of Shona History. Gweru: Mambo Press.

Beattie

(2008) Tengwe Garden Club. New York: Anne Beattie.

Bond

Manyanya

(2003) Zimbabwe’s Plunge. Harare: Weaver Press.

Buckle

(2001) African Tears. Weltevreden Park: Covos-Day Books.

Buckle

(2003) Beyond Tears. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball.

Chennells

(1982) Settler Myths and the Southern Rhodesian Novel. PhD Thesis. Harare: University of Zimbabwe.

Coetzee

(1988) White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Conrad

(1902) Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether). London: William Blackwood and Sons.

Daymond

(ed.) (2013) South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990–1994. London: Routledge.

10.

Ethington

(2007) Placing the past: “Groundwork” for a spatial theory of history. Rethinking History 11(4): 465–493.

11.

Fisher

(2010) Pioneers, Settlers, Aliens and Exiles: The Deconstruction of White Identity in Zimbabwe. Canberra: ANU Press.

12.

Godwin

(1996) Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. London: Picador.

13.

Godwin

(2006) When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. London: Picador.

14.

Godwin

Hancock

(1995) Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia c.1970–1980. Harare: Baobab Books.

15.

Hammar

Raftopolous

Jensen

(eds) (2003) Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis. Harare: Weaver Press.

16.

Hammond

(2000) This place will become home: Emplacement and community formation in a Tigrayan returnee settlement, Northwest Ethiopia. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

17.

Harold-Barry

(ed.) (2004) Zimbabwe: The Past is the Future. Harare: Weaver Press.

18.

Harris

(2005) Writing home: Inscriptions of whiteness/descriptions of belonging in white Zimbabwean memoir/autobiography in Zimbabwe. In: Primorac

Muponde

(eds) Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture. Harare: Weaver Press, 103–118.

19.

Harrison

(2008) Jambanja. Durban: Just Done Productions.

20.

Holding

(2005) Unfeeling. Toronto: Key Porter Books.

21.

Hughes

(2006) The art of belonging: Whites writing landscape in savannah Africa. Paper presented to the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 6 October.

22.

Hughes

(2010) Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

23.

International Crisis Group (2004) Blood and Soil: Land, Politics and Conflict Prevention in Zimbabwe and South Africa. New York: International Crisis Group.

24.

Lessing

(1958) Desert child. New Statesman 15, 700.

25.

Lessing

(1973) The Grass is Singing. Oxford: Heinemann Educational.

26.

Locke

(1690) Second Treatise on Government. New York: Barnes and Noble.

27.

Manjengwa

Hanlon

Smart

(2013) Zimbabwe takes back its land: Is this the “best use” of the land? Paper presented to ‘Land Divided: Land and South African Society in 2013, in Comparative Perspective’, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, 24–27 March.

28.

Maravanyika

Huijzenveld

(2010) A failed neo-Britain: The labour question in colonial Zimbabwe c.1850–1948. African Nebula 1(1): 18–33.

29.

Moore-King

(1988) White Man Black War. Harare: Baobab Books.

30.

Nozick

(1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

31.

Nuttall

(2009) Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University.

32.

Palmer

(1977) Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia. London: Heinemann.

33.

Palmer

(1990) Land reform in Zimbabwe, 1980–1990. African Affairs 89: 163–181.

34.

Pilossof

(2012) The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmer’s Voices from Zimbabwe. Harare: Weaver Press.

35.

Rimmer

(1993) Cry of the Fish Eagle. Harare: HarperCollins.

36.

Rogers

(2009) The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.

37.

Selby

(2006) Commercial farmers and the state: Interest group politics and land reform in Zimbabwe. DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, UK.

38.

Schmidt

(2011) Theorizing place: Students’ navigation of place outside the classroom. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 27(1): 20–35.

39.

Smith

(1980) Ginette. Bulawayo: Black Eagle Press.

40.

Stoneman

(1981) Agriculture. In: Stoneman

(ed.) Zimbabwe’s Inheritance. Hong Kong: Macmillan.

41.

Stoneman

Cliffe

(1989) Zimbabwe: Politics, Economics and Society. London: Pinter.

42.

Suzuki

(2001) Drifting rhinos and fluid properties: The turn to wildlife production in western Zimbabwe. Journal of Agrarian Change 1(4): 600–625.

43.

Tracey

(2009) All for Nothing?: My Life Remembered. Harare: Weaver Press.

44.

Uusihakala

(2008) Memory Meanders: Place, Home and Commemoration in an Ex-Rhodesian Diaspora. Finland: Helsinki University Printing House.

45.

Wiles

(2006) Foredoomed is my Forest. Bloomington, IN: Trafford.

46.

Wolmer

(2005) Wilderness gained, wilderness lost: Wildlife management and occupations in Zimbabwe’s southeast Lowveld. Journal of Historical Geography 31: 260–280.

47.

Wolmer

(2007) From Wilderness Vision to Farm Invasions: Conservation and Development in Zimbabwe’s South-East Lowveld. London: James Currey.