Expropriation without compensation? Ask the British.
On the eve of Zimbabwe's elections, it's worth reflecting on the British government's expropriation of Southern Rhodesia, and the mark that act left on the country 100 years later.
Chimanimani 2013. Image credit Ciaran Cross.
One hundred years ago, it was the British Empire doing all the expropriating.
On 29 July 1918, the Judicial Committee of the UK’s Privy Council handed down its infamous ruling, In Re Southern Rhodesia. Lord Sumner took the occasion to offer Britain’s most expressly and egregiously racist justification for the land dispossession of indigenous peoples. He declared that the “natives” could not have had rights to land, because they were “so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or legal ideas of civilized society.”
The court upheld the expropriation of the entire territory of Southern Rhodesia for the British Crown, with the immortal words: “Whoever owns the land, the natives do not…”
Tomorrow, as Zimbabweans go to the polls, they continue to pay the price for that malediction.
