I grew up in the Southwestern Desert of the United States, the Chihuahua Desert, the driest desert of North America. I once wrote an essay about how the land shapes the people there—only survivors are left, I wrote, but we have grace for people who fail because all desert people know what it means to fail, to pick up again and start over.
Maybe that sentiment is true and maybe that’s just my romantic imagination, inspired by generations of thought filtered through Walt Whitman’s consciousness. But there is no doubt that people’s perceptions of the land they currently own, aspire to own, or once owned in the recent or even distant past can shape the historical outcome of nations and ruin many, many lives. In recent history, nowhere is this truer than in Zimbabwe.
It is this sense of belonging to the land and the land belonging to one’s self—the violence it engenders, the awe it inspires, the willingness of people to sacrifice everything they hold dear, including children and family, to hold onto that land—that Na’ima B. Robert explores in her forthcoming young adult novel, Far From Home (Frances Lincoln, 2012).
The novel starts in the 1960s, when the country was still known as Rhodesia and ruled by a privileged white minority who held ownership to most of the land, denied blacks the right to vote, and created a protected status for whites to enjoy the fruits of black labor. Yet although the statement I just wrote is true, it also fails to probe the psychosocial layers of a complex and subtle history where both blacks and whites loved the African land they simultaneously occupied and fought for.
In her recent memoir about her mother’s life in Africa, much of which was spent defending ownership of a farm in then-Rhodesia, Alexandra Fuller writes how her mother’s choice to live in Africa (rather than to return to Scotland or to England) was a choice of life and death, since two of her four children died as a direct result of the decision to stay there; and yet she decided to stay because she had been possessed by the land, like many of the whites who settled there.
Robert explores both aspects to the question of “who owns the land,” offering both a black and white protagonist, linked not only through the same piece of land but through a violent secret that has the potential to destroy both of their lives.
Tariro narrates her experience of being forcibly removed from the land her family had lived on for generations, herded like cattle to live in dusty tribal territories so that the lush farmland could be sold to white farmers. But the second section, set thirty years later, portrays the experiences of Katie, a white girl who, like Tariro before her, is forced to leave the only home she had ever known. Although Robert clearly shows the way Africans were violently cheated out of the land they had lived on for hundreds of years, she also shows how whites who had turned the land into productive farmland were thrust into the cold, losing all their worldly goods, as former guerilla soldiers reclaimed rights to the land that they had fought for in Zimbabwe’s long war for liberation. In the end, it is possible to have sympathy for most of the protagonists involved, with the exception, perhaps, of Katie’s parents.
Rhodesia was built on several racist assumptions and Africans suffered the injustices and economic deprivations that came with colonialism and white settlement for a hundred years before finally winning independence and the ability to claim back the land their ancestors had lost at the turn of the 19th century. Yet white farmers also invested enormous sums of money, time, and energy into the land they lost during the farm seizures earlier this century. When they lost their farmland, they lost their homes, their country, and their money—just as Africans had lost the same things so many years before.
In Far From Home, Robert reveals that although justice can come for some, it is often delivered at a cost for others.
Postscript: Of the war in Zimbabwe, Alexandra Fuller writes, “No one starts a war warning that those involved will lose their innocence—that children will definitely die and be forever lost as a result of the conflict; that the war will not end for generations and generations, even after cease-fires have been declared and peace treaties have been signed. No one starts a war that way, but they should. It would at least be fair warning and an honest admission: even a good war—if there is such a thing—will kill anyone old enough to die” (Cocktails Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, p. 196).