Would Cecil Rhodes have signed a Code of Conduct? : reflections on global land grabbing and land rights in Africa, past and present
Palmer, Robin
Land grabbing in early colonial Zimbabwe and Mozambique An early chapter in my 1977 book Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia is called the Age of the Fortune Hunters‟. It describes how, in late Victorian times, the British Government granted a Royal Charter to the millionaire imperialist Cecil Rhodes, which gave him carte blanche to exploit for 35 years the territories we now know as Zimbabwe and Zambia. That Charter was based on highly dubious land and mineral concessions signed with local chiefs spuriously claiming to rule all of those lands. After Zimbabweans rose up against the misrule of Rhodes‟ British South Africa (BSA) Company in 1896, a new administrator ruefully observed that his predecessor had given nearly the whole country away‟ to speculators who promise any amount of things, but the execution thereof is delayed till the Greek Kalends‟ (i.e. forever).1 A decade of reckless speculation, extensive land grabbing, corruption and maladministration bequeathed a bitter legacy.
Event: International Conference on Global Land Grabbing
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