Talk:Problems of land distribution in Zimbabwe/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.


Just a few questions for the expert who wrote this article. Who made the land productive and arable ??? How productive and arable is the land now ???? Oh thats right some how that will also be the white racits fault.

To start off, this article is in horrible shape. My only change to this article was the removal of the neutrality heading. For now, the article is a stump. But the idea of creating such an article is excellent.

But some recent controversies could prove challenging to users interested in serious history or sociology. Unfortunately, the above comments sound like those of an "angry white male" from the United States. However, the land problem in Zimbabwe shares far more in common with the origins of the civil war in Nepal, for example, than with race relations in the United States. So the status anxieties of angry white Americans have no place here. These comments are an example of trolling more than anything else. These users are merely distractions, and should be subject to auto-revert.

Thus, I am removing the neutrality dispute. This article should be the domain of users with a sufficient sociological background. That way, we can avoid the partisanship exemplified by the above comments. Users need to eschew moral judgments and catch-phrases. This is an extremely important social problem, regardless of where your political philosophy lies. Even if you are an unrepentant devotee of Cecil Rhodes and Ian Smith, or a white American to the right of David Duke, you cannot deny that the present-day land problem in Zimbabwe is a salient issue, insofar as it is a recipe for abject poverty, social conflict, and political instability.

Historically, the extreme concentration of landownership - along with the corresponding inequalities of wealth, power, and prestige - was at the root of the major revolutions, civil wars, and upheavals of the early modern era and in the developing world in the 20th century. Research the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the civil war in Algeria, the Cuban Revolution, and the wars in Indochina if you are skeptical. Thomas Wolf's landmark Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century is the seminal work in this field. If you want a more recent example, research the ongoing the civil war and political strife in Nepal.

If anyone is interested in developing this article, I can provide links to recent articles dealing with the Zimbabwe situation. There is a wealth of social science literature on this subject, so there is no need to muddle this article up with slogans by relying on the publications and statements of advocacy groups. 172 01:53, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

BTW, I am redirecting this page to Problems of land distribution in Zimbabwe. That way, the article has a better chance of retaining its focus on social problems, rather than recently unfolding controversies. 172 02:07, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I do not believe that "Problems of land distribution in Zimbabwe" is a NPOV title. I believe "Land distribution in Zimbabwe" would be more appropriate. What is a problem? The British? Cecil Rhodes? Mugabe and ZANU-PF? The MDC? Your unilateral removal of the neutrality disputed message was completely without merit. Use of the terms "racist" and "white-supremacist" implied that Rhodesia & Smith were comparable to Nazi Germany and the antebellum American South. At least in my reading of the history of Rhodesia & Zimbabwe, the European-Rhodesians/Zimbabwians were more concerned with the preservation of capitalism, property rights, and protection from Marxism. Opposition to majority rule was secondary to the fact that the majority was organized under the banner of Marxism. --Hcheney 18:03, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This article should be the domain of users with a sufficient sociological background. This is perhaps the most elitist comment I have ever read in wikipedia, and it really puts into context your unilateral removals of neutrality disputes. --Hcheney 18:03, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If you would stop foaming at the mouth and do some serious reading, maybe you'd figure out on your own what the problem is.

You don't need to be launching salvoes at me. I didn't contribute a word to this article. I just moved it to a new article with a different title. The article is just a stub consisting of a single paragraph written in the language of vulgarized Marxism. The rambling drivel currently posted hardly has any merit on its own. But I'm willing to forgive the anon responsible for it. He/she gave us an excellent idea for an article, and his/her text can be removed in an instant once work is started by someone.

Don't change the title. The use of "problems of" in the title does not translate into the contemporary popular political debates on the subject. It's common social science jargon. If you want to check for yourself, do a search on yahoo or google for "problems of land distribution in Zimbabwe." Be sure to put this search item in quotation marks so as to narrow down your search to items that include this exact phrase worded as such, and not just any entry that comes up with each of these individual words or names. If you do this, you won't find tirades from black nationalist groups and Marxist-Leninist parties, but articles from sociological journals with scant partisan attachment to any of the major political actors in Zimbabwe now.

For now, if reinserting the silly neutrality message would fulfill you personally, go ahead. IMHO, that this article hasn't even been started in a serious fashion should be obvious to the less obtuse among us by virtue that it's a stump entry reading like a lead in to a Leninist tract. Reacting to the comments on the talk page, my motivation to remove the neutrality flag was fear that users unfamiliar with the wealth of recent sociological literature on land in Southern Africa (better yet, users can't grasp why there's much to do about land over there) would over-react to the text and forget the merits of the topic. That wasn't to imply any belief that the article was in acceptable form, which I stated in my last posting.

If you want to work on this subject, you will have to take a deep breath and get your mind off American political passions and the inane, ethnocentric idea that this is just the product of some trouble-makers still fuming over some primordial obsession with 19th century crimes against their dead ancestors, despite the fact that it all bears no relationship to their welfare and survival today. So, instead of ranting and raving, do some reading. If you start looking at the work of some people who actually know a thing or two about Southern Africa, then you'd realize that land might be a salient issue in Southern Africa. You'd also find that the distribution of landownership can be considered irrespective of all the controversies surrouning Mugabe of late. 172 19:30, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)