{"id":1488,"date":"2009-12-14T23:52:18","date_gmt":"2009-12-14T23:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1488"},"modified":"2024-11-19T10:47:19","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T10:47:19","slug":"lancaster-bombing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/lancaster-bombing\/","title":{"rendered":"Lancaster bombing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement between the British Government and the major political forces in Zimbabwe, an agreement which led to Zimbabwe momentarily becoming – for the first time in its history – a British colony.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

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Before 1979, Rhodesia had initially been governed from the first European settlement in 1890 as a concession of the British South African Company* (advised from 1898 to 1923 by a semi-elected council), and then from 1923 as a self-governing British territory with dominion-like status.\u00a0 From 1898 onwards the franchise, as in other British-controlled territories in Southern Africa\u00a0starting in 1836, was a conditional one – in order to vote one had to satisfy certain conditions: age, gender, literacy, education, income,\u00a0and property-ownership.\u00a0\u00a0 These conditions were biased against non-whites, but did not exclude them completely, as I explained here<\/a>.\u00a0 Because the franchise was not race-based, white Rhodesians like Ian Smith could delude sympathetic foreigners, and themselves, that they were running a democratic and non-racial government.<\/p>\n

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That brief colonial interlude\u00a0\u00a0from December 1979 to April 1980 saw the holding of nationwide elections which were won by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU (PF), who won 57 of a possible 80 seats in the Zimbabwe House of Assembly.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Lancaster House constitution, which came into force at Independence on 18 April 1980, reserved 20 of the 100 House of Assembly seats for MPs elected by voters on a separate, non-black voters’ roll.\u00a0 In the 1980 elections, Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front (RF) party won all 20 of these seats, and 2 whites – one a member of the RF – were appointed by Robert Mugabe to his Cabinet.\u00a0\u00a0 The separate non-black voters’ roll was still in force at the next election, in 1985, but by then the white community was no longer as supportive of Smith’s recalcitrant belligerence towards the Government, and the white vote was split.\u00a0 Candidates opposed to the RF won 5 of the 20 seats, with the anti-RF vote inversely proportional to the distance of the constituency from Mount Pleasant, the Harare suburb containing the University of Zimbabwe.\u00a0\u00a0 The 20 reserved seats were abolished in 1987.<\/p>\n

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Given the economic and social disaster into which Mugabe and his ZANU (PF) cronies have, with malice aforethought, led the country,\u00a0it would not\u00a0be surprising\u00a0if anyone considered the Lancaster House Agreement a great historical error.\u00a0\u00a0 In my opinion, such a view would be mistaken.\u00a0 By creating a mechanism to engage the Patriotic Front (the parties ZANU and ZAPU) and their military wings in the electoral process,\u00a0Lancaster House did achieve the ending of\u00a0the Second Chimurenga<\/em>, the war of liberation, and thereby allowed the country to have Independence with majority rule.\u00a0\u00a0 Also, by containing provisions\u00a0which entrenched non-black privileges for seven years \u00a0(eg, the separate voters roll and the reserved seats in the Assembly), Lancaster House provided some assurances to the verkrampte <\/em>wing of the white community, allowing them time, for example, to leave the country without the economically-disastrous fire-exit rush of skilled whites seen when Portugal granted Angola and Mozambique independence in 1975.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n

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The racism, duplicity and recalcitrance of many members of the Zimbabwean white population in 1980 provide no justification, of course, for the murderous evil, racism, chicanery, peculation and complete corruption-of-intentions of the Mugabe regime.\u00a0 A Government that uses its armed forces to operate protection rackets in other countries so as to enrich its senior officers, as the ZANU (PF) regime has done in Zaire, has lost\u00a0any moral superiority it may have had over colonialism.<\/p>\n

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* In Mauritius in 1981 I met the son of the first European baby born in Fort Salisbury, the white settlement of 1890 that became the capital of Southern Rhodesia, and later Zimbabwe. \u00a0ChiShona-speaking Zimbabweans nick-named this settlement the city that does not sleep, or Harare.<\/p>\n

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This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement between the British Government and the major political forces in Zimbabwe, an agreement which led to Zimbabwe momentarily becoming – for the first time in its history – a British colony.\u00a0 Before 1979, Rhodesia had initially been governed from the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,35,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-history","category-politics","p1","y2009","m12","d14","h23"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1488"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13396,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions\/13396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}