The Land Belongs to Zimbabweans, Not a Race – President Mnangagwa

Описание: Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa firmly pushed back when American journalist Tucker Carlson suggested that Zimbabwe’s land reform was rooted in race. His response was clear: land is about sovereignty, not skin colour.

For over a century, fertile land in Zimbabwe was controlled by a small white minority after it was violently taken during British colonial rule under figures like Cecil Rhodes and his company, the British South Africa Company. The land was not peacefully acquired. It was seized from Indigenous Africans and redistributed to settlers through colonial decree. To frame its reclamation as racist ignores that original theft.

Colonial land theft was never legal in moral terms. It was enforced through conquest and racial hierarchy. Correcting that injustice means restoring ownership to Zimbabweans as a people, not targeting anyone based on the colour of their skin. Those who were willing to remain under the same legal framework as Black Zimbabweans were allowed to do so.

However, Zimbabwe’s economic collapse cannot be discussed honestly without acknowledging the impact of Western sanctions imposed in the early 2000s after the land seizures. These sanctions restricted financial flows and deepened economic isolation. Economic warfare has long been a geopolitical tool, just as France used it against Haiti in 1804.

The West’s pattern has been to punish a nation for asserting sovereignty, then point to the resulting instability as proof of incompetence.

African governments are criticised relentlessly for their policy failures, yet the centuries-long atrocities of colonial powers are often treated as distant history. The same global powers that destabilised regions through conquest and extraction now position themselves as referees of governance and morality.

So reclaiming stolen land is not racism. It is an assertion that sovereignty belongs to the Indigenous people of a nation.