In reply to Max du Preez's column on "Zimbabwe's flourishing farms" (see Cape Times column here).
Joe Hanlon, quoted in Max's piece, is a distinguished author and commentator on Southern African politics and economics, notably on Mozambique. However, his book, "Zimbabwe Takes Back The Land," published earlier this year, makes assertions that are so wide of a truth so vividly apparent on the ground, that they leave one open-mouthed with disbelief.
There are volumes of misapprehensions in his book, but I will confine myself briefly to a few fundamental points. I have been reporting as a journalist on the euphemistically-named "fast-track land reform programme" since it began in 2000 and its implications.
Drive through the former commercial farming areas and you will find cropping land that was intensively farmed in 2000, reverted to wild grassland, except for scattered subsistence plots of stunted maize. Cattle have disappeared almost entirely.
The seizures of white-owned farm land were not the spontaneous impulse of land hunger asserted by Mr Hanlon. The recorded evidence is that it was initiated by President Mugabe as a strategy to prevent Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC from winning elections in 2000. It was effected by the Central Intelligence Organisation, which is under his direct control, and using army, police and other government agencies for transport and logistics.
"Settler" communities were rounded up from peasant areas and dumped on commercial farms without provision of any of the necessities for farming, shelter, health or education. They were Zimbabwe's version of the "Discarded People," the forced removals by the apartheid government of blacks in KwaZulu Natal in the 1970's that were exposed by Catholic priest Cosmas Desmond.