MarxSchmarx
9th January 2011, 04:32
Has anyone else seen this film?
I found it really troubling on several accounts. For example, the claim is that the farm was purchased after independence - that is true, in the sense that it was after British rule ended, but the documentary doesn't mention that it was purchased during Ian Smith's rule, not after majority rule was installed in 1980. It also decides early on that Mugabe is in the wrong, and that the redistribution program is racist, in spite of findings to the contrary by Zimbabwe's rather independent judiciary. The farmers chosen were also quite sympathetic - whites who embraced being Zimbabwean and had amicable relations with their workers and whose farm is going to be given to a crony of Mugabe's.
All of this is fine, to the extent that it highlights the pathetic joke ZANU-PF has become. But it largely regurgitates what the western media criticizes about ZANU-PF without providing any context, any historical understanding. And sure, ethnic cleansing is probably a fair term to use to describe the implementation of the land redistribution program.
But this documentary, in its course of highlighting a particularly egregious and bigoted behavior of a failing dictatorial regime desperate to cling to power towards a group of rather well-meaning landowners, ultimately promotes the interests of the ruling class by painting redistribution schemes as the machinations of a thuggish despot and his cronies rather than an attempt to address the legitimate grievances of the highly uneven distribution of Zimbabwe's agricultural wealth. By focusing exclusively on the personal struggles of this family against Mugabe's onslaught, they fail to provide any constructive alternative except continued concentration of agricultural wealth in a select caste of individuals - either whites who had enormously preferential treatment prior to 1980, or Mugabe's cronies who enjoy the same corrupt advantages to this day.
I found it really troubling on several accounts. For example, the claim is that the farm was purchased after independence - that is true, in the sense that it was after British rule ended, but the documentary doesn't mention that it was purchased during Ian Smith's rule, not after majority rule was installed in 1980. It also decides early on that Mugabe is in the wrong, and that the redistribution program is racist, in spite of findings to the contrary by Zimbabwe's rather independent judiciary. The farmers chosen were also quite sympathetic - whites who embraced being Zimbabwean and had amicable relations with their workers and whose farm is going to be given to a crony of Mugabe's.
All of this is fine, to the extent that it highlights the pathetic joke ZANU-PF has become. But it largely regurgitates what the western media criticizes about ZANU-PF without providing any context, any historical understanding. And sure, ethnic cleansing is probably a fair term to use to describe the implementation of the land redistribution program.
But this documentary, in its course of highlighting a particularly egregious and bigoted behavior of a failing dictatorial regime desperate to cling to power towards a group of rather well-meaning landowners, ultimately promotes the interests of the ruling class by painting redistribution schemes as the machinations of a thuggish despot and his cronies rather than an attempt to address the legitimate grievances of the highly uneven distribution of Zimbabwe's agricultural wealth. By focusing exclusively on the personal struggles of this family against Mugabe's onslaught, they fail to provide any constructive alternative except continued concentration of agricultural wealth in a select caste of individuals - either whites who had enormously preferential treatment prior to 1980, or Mugabe's cronies who enjoy the same corrupt advantages to this day.