Harare — THE purpose of the global propaganda onslaught against Zimbabwe's land reform is to hide the agricultural histories of settler Rhodesia and white South Africa as well as to deny the reality of illegal economic sanctions in order to make it possible to condemn and reverse the land revolution. That is why there is money for constitution-writing for non-governmental organisations, but not for irrigation pumps and electricity transformers for the agricultural sector.

The Herald story (November 25, 2009), "Sanctions affecting indigenous farmers", was welcome. But it needed prominence, perhaps on the front page, given the challenges the farming industry faces right now as the rains begin.

The most ironic aspect of the challenges is that the very same Anglo-Saxon countries that have suffocated Zimbabwean farmers through illegal sanctions are offering token bags of fertilizer and seed to the very same African victims of their illegal and racist sanctions.

So, Zimbabwe is at an important point in nation building.

The United States Agency for International Development blueprint for agriculture in the former Frontline States was to let white settlers keep the stolen land; let them move away from producing maize in order to focus on tobacco, wild animal conservancies and horticulture; and import food from white South African farmers who should also be allowed to retain stolen land.

Leaving South Africa's land politics aside, it is clear that the combination of land restoration to white Rhodies and denial of support to resettled African farmers in Zimbabwe is meant to return the country to the policy path charted by Usaid in the 1980s. South Africa is already providing most of the food being consumed in urban centres in Zimbabwe and Tendai Biti and his party see nothing wrong with this since it will serve to condemn and stop the Third Chimurenga, so he hopes.

In order for Zimbabweans to defeat this Usaid-MDC-T policy, they have to review a bit of history. History will show that white South African agriculture was once in a much worse situation than our land reform is in today. At that time there was no expectation that South Africa would ever become one of the top seven food exporters in the world. In fact, South Africa was urged to focus on gold, diamonds, platinum, coal and manufacturing, while meeting its food requirements through imports from Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

The first lesson of the hidden history is that in both South Africa and Zimbabwe, indigenous African farmers fed both the African and settler populations for centuries (South Africa) or decades (Zimbabwe) before the whites learned how to farm on African soil.

For generations, the white settlers were mainly poachers, illegal gold and diamond panners or mere tuckshop owners and transport runners fed by Africans who knew how to farm.

According to Robin Palmer and Neil Parsons in "The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa", the grinding poverty associated with African communities in settler accounts was actually imposed by the settlers once they began to find their way around the conquered territories.

Whites arrived in South Africa in 1652. But as late as 1914, Africans in the Transkei were still feeding themselves and much of the country in spite of their diminished land holdings. According to Colin Bundy, author of "The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry":

"A generation of historical research demonstrated that in the late 19th century and even latter, black farmers had done well commercially until the state deprived them of land and prevented them from competing with white farmers."

Elizabeth Schmidt's book on Zimbabwe, called "Peasants, Wives and Traders", documents the same experience for Zimbabwe, as does Terence Ranger's "Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe".

Makoni District in Zimbabwe is the equivalent of Transkei in South Africa, which has been used to demonstrate that African farmers had to be destroyed at that point when white settlers had learned enough from them to be able to risk competition with them.

But for decades after the whites took most of the best land from the Africans, they still were not successful. And they continued to rely on Africans already dispossessed of land to do the actual farming for them.

Describing the period from the massive land seizure via the 1913 Land Act to the 1940s, C. W. de Kietwet expressed the pessimism of most economists at that time about white settler farmers and South African agriculture. This pessimism was prevalent despite the aggressive white farmer support policies of the government. Our resettled African farmers do not have any support close to what the white farmers received then, but it should be instructive to examine the similarities in the pessimism expressed about farming in South Africa in the late 1930s and farming in Zimbabwe today. According to De Kiewet's "A History of South Africa, Social and Economic", first published in 1941:

"Agriculture in South Africa is poor and precarious . . . The expenditure and effort required to overcome many of its handicaps are too great to be profitable. Indeed, South Africa is not an agricultural country. It has no natural advantages which, by the help of science or organisation, could win for its agricultural products a truly commanding position in markets of the world."

This specialist and popular view was driven by impatience generated by the gold and diamond rushes and by the mining companies who hated to see tax revenues from mining being spent on subsidising slow agriculture.

But, as we can appreciate now, by the 1980s Usaid was busy telling our region that it should forget about food production and rely on the same South African agriculture to feed all of Sadc.

What was the problem? What is the problem now which threatens to relegate our Third Chimurenga to a bad dream and nothing more?

The problem is partly ignorance, partly impatience driven by the gold-panner mentality, and partly the failure of our people to see the struggle for power that lies behind the gloomy prognoses and racist condemnations of the Third Chimurenga.

De Kiewet documented that struggle for South Africa, without recognising his own bias towards the gold-panner mentality or toward the interests of mining capital then.

But in the Third Chimurenga, as in the construction of a white South African capitalist society free from the empire, there was a great deal more at stake than quick profit. There is more to nation building than instant profits. There are strategic concerns about food security and national sovereignty. South African industry now benefits from investments made in agriculture almost a century ago. And this is happening at a time when minerals are running out and the world's food deficit is huge, with more than 1,2 billion hungry people worldwide.

Yet detractors, just like the champions of mining capital in South Africa in the 1930s, would not see beyond the instant balance sheet. De Kiewet paraphrased criticisms: "Much of the resources which were transferred to rural industry was a waste of capital and not an investment for the future."

That is incredible, with the benefit of hindsight. The investment has indeed turned out to be of strategic importance, even though Biti and MDC-T refuse to learn from it and apply it to Zimbabwe now.

Current attacks on our Third Chimurenga are even more backward than those on the white South African state's investment in white agriculture. Critics of the Third Chimurenga are not saying agriculture is not profitable. They are saying that it won't be profitable in the hands of Africans led by an African liberation movement, and they are saying that in order for the resettled Africans to be allowed to remain on the land they should be able to shrug off illegal sanctions and prosper on the land in one-tenth of the time it took whites in Rhodesia or South Africa to prosper without illegal sanctions! Now, that is really backward.

The South African state pursued aggressive agricultural subsidies from about 1910 to around 1986, that is more than 76 years! Our Third Chimurenga is hardly five years old. And all the five years have also been years of financial war and illegal sanctions targeted at the resettled farmers.

"The National Party (of South Africa) had initially, after its election in 1948, adopted a policy of keeping whites on the land with indiscriminate subsidies, regardless of land usage," according to Tom Lodge. This policy was not discontinued and the white farmers not weaned until 1986.

The results can be measured in Usaid's advice to the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (the forerunner to Sadc) in 1987 not to grow food, but to rely on a future free South Africa to provide the food without any land redistribution.

The result can be measured in terms of the state-assisted mechanisation of white agriculture. According to Merle Lipton's "Apartheid and Capitalism": "In 1936 there were 6 019 tractors on white farms; in 1967 there were 170 000 tractors or almost two tractors for every white farm. The value of capital assets in agriculture attributable to machinery, vehicles, tractors and implements grew from R134,7 million in 1947, to R763,1 million in 1971."

The value of output also grew. So, the main complaint against South African agriculture up to 1986 from an African point of view was not that it was heavily subsidised by the state; but that the subsidies were racist and discriminatory. So, when Biti and MDC-T advocate killing off the Third Chimurenga, they should be honest enough to tell the people that the massive imports of food from South Africa on which they want us to depend indefinitely are also the product of massive state intervention, the product of quasi-fiscal activities over many decades which were criticised in the very same ways the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe's interventions have been criticised. Unfortunately, where South African farmers got 76 years of support, RBZ Governor Dr Gideon Gono was allowed only a few years of quasi-fiscal intervention which was disrupted by droughts, by illegal sanctions and by an externally orchestrated financial warfare invited by the MDC formations.

Zimbabwe's resettled farmers are not asking for a grace period on the land equal to the 76 years of aggressive support which white farmers in South Africa received. Zimbabwe's farmers are asking, first, for the immediate removal of sanctions and, maybe, just one-tenth of the time in which the South African whites received subsidies. Just seven years of committed and adequate support would do, instead of the 76 years achieved down south.