Uchendu Eugene Chigbu

“Your knowledge of the Gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like ‘Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven’ and, ‘It’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us”. 

The above words are from the second paragraph of a letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to the Colonial Missionaries in 1883. That letter, which he wrote to Christian missionaries who were to spread the Word of God, laid bare his evil mind. 

He was one of the most wicked people to colonise  African land. The atrocities he committed in the Congo are despicable and unimaginable. The rest of Europe may not admit it, but they did borrow those lines and applied them in their dealings with Africans in colonial times. 

Even in post-colonial times, we are stuck with pastors (church daddies and mummies) who continue to borrow those lines from the beatitudes in the Christian Bible (Matthew 5:3–12 and Luke 6:20–26). In all parts of Africa (and Latin America), a selection of these beatitudes, especially the four woes in Luke 6:24–26, of which the first two state: ‘Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort’ and ‘woe to you who are well-fed now, for you will go hungry.’ The phrase ‘poor in spirit’ in Matthew 5:3 has been subject to various interpretations. It is generally agreed that spirit poverty does not allude to material poverty. However, this upside-down thinking has let us down in all areas of life, especially land affairs.

The colonialists used the land to divide us. Surprisingly, our politicians today still use it to divide us. The colonialists dispossessed us of land depending on where you were in Africa. Our politicians   today continue to do the same by either not carrying out the redistributive reforms they promised us at independence or simply doing the reforming so badly that it impoverishes rather than empowers.

 When anyone looks critically at the history of the land issue in pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa, you will see what I mean. It seems our governments are still borrowing the lines of King Leopold II’s (not Jesus’) beatitudes – that is, woe to those who were rich in land, for their taken land shall never be returned or woe to those who were well-fed now, for they must be made to go hungry.

Wherever colonial land dispossession took place in Africa, one will observe that the Christian church played a role in that land dispossession. Whether their role was intentional or not is a subject of broader research. In my town of Uturu (in Nigeria), the Catholic church played a role in dispossessing my people of their land.

 In South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church supported Apartheid. The Apartheid system in South Africa and Namibia was supported not only within the political spheres but also within the religious circles. 

Also noteworthy is that our governments and elites across Africa appear to be looking into the playbook of King Leopold II regarding land governance. Political behaviour and policy implementation seem better set to make our people suffer than for us to have good living conditions. How else can anyone explain why good land policies are left unimplemented while bad policies are quickly executed? 

King Leopold II’s letter reflects a structural design for the impoverishment of the African minds from a colonial perspective. I leave it up to readers to decide whether it is still working. However, I see a link between our land issues, the beatitudes and poverty. 

Woe has befallen us because we are rich in land. Woe is now ours because our ancestors were once food secure, and now we must go hungry. 

Despite well-established links between redistributive land reforms and poverty reduction, empirical evidence of its efficacy is still scarce in Africa. The dispossession of the land rights of Africans (especially in the Southern part) was a part of the colonial legacy. 

The inability to implement win-win reforms (for redistribution and restitution) is the legacy of post-colonial African governments. There are several reasons for the failure of land reforms to alleviate poverty in Africa. The key reason is a lack of coherence in agricultural, water, forest and mineral, customary and informal sector and land policies. In all cases, the land reforms have not been conceived as part of a broader development reform aimed at restructuring the class structure that relegates people to poverty within the broader socioeconomic terrain. The illegality (or second-class legal) status of the tenures accorded to customary or communal and informal sectors means  the state does not provide much oversight of their functioning. 

This means the state has no grip over land rights abuses and various forms of gendered discrimination in those sectors. As a result, it follows the credo of the poor becoming poorer —a major interpretation of King Leopold II’s version of the beatitudes. It is high time our governments stepped away from this self-hurting approach to implementing land reforms.

*Uchendu Eugene Chigbu is an Associate Professor (Land Administration) in the Department of Land and Spatial Sciences (DLSS) at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST). The views expressed in this article are entirely his, and not that of NUST.