GENERATIONAL WEALTH: THE CASE FOR LAND

One of the most overlooked ways of dominating a people is through the limitation of their language or mother tongue. To deny someone the ability to learn and understand their own history in their own language is equivalent to dictating their future. For any two people of the same land to communicate using a foreign language, simply because they are of different tribes raises more concerns of the country’s destiny than its past. Until we possess our own story, our history and language, any victory can be short lived.
Indeed, language is partly the reason that the savagery of slavery and colonialism is understood differently by those who were oppressed and those who oppressed others and wrote the story from their perspective. Those who wrote history purport that they found bare land and people ready and willing to sell their own flesh and blood for less valuable things like mirrors, gunpowder and whiskey. Those who wrote history assert that after improving the lives of the natives, it was time to hand over administrative power of the colonies, willingly.
Most of this handover of the colonies was more administrative than much else. Even in countries such as Zimbabwe, Namibia and the Republic of South Africa (RSA) that gained their independence between 1980 and 1995, commerce remained outside the immediate reach or control of indigenous people. The wealth of the land remained safely for the benefit of the descendants of colonial governments. These lands now had title deeds formalised and legalized under colonial rule, with transferable authority over the newly independent governments.
The same story of pre-independent Africa in the 1940s and 50s resonated still, that natives were ill-equipped to grasp the commerce of farming or mining. More so, the technological advancements and transnational trade would not welcome immediate disturbances. Countries like Zimbabwe were the first to establish forms of truth and reconciliation commissions to dissuade any appearance of vengeance against pre-independence benefactors and beneficiaries. Independence and pacification were instrumental for the survival of the new nations.
South Africa went further and established a black empowerment program to formalize transfer of levers of national wealth without perceived vengeance. In Zambia, the story of independence still carries illusions of grandiose asset nationalization which, paradoxically, kept the nation in poverty and without ownership of basic housing or farmland. Even so, the aftermath of liberalization has been over-politicized that the benefits of value endowed in the soil of country still eludes natives – by and large.
Until the interruption of the generational wealth of land is corrected, the angst will not be silenced. Times have certainly changed, and the term native does not apply to just Africans of African origin.  The term is multi-racial on many levels. This means that the value of land and its wealth is a national matter, not regional or racial, but national. As a lesson, in 1951, Mr Godwin Mbikusita Lewanika acknowledged that the fight for Zambia’s independence was supported by both Asians and (some) Europeans.
There is also evidence that the fight for the second or economic and social independence of Zambia in the 90s was not only fought by indigenous Zambians but Zambians of Asian and European heritage. But if the value of land and its benefits are distributed unevenly; if the benefits of generational wealth endowed in the land still elude a larger portion of the population, the only recourse is redistribution of wealth that retains value to the country.  The irony for those that own large parcels of land is that they must freely let go of some parcels of land or be forced to do so under xenophobic pressures which may ultimately reduce the value of their land owing to the kind of neighborhood they would have forcibly created.