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.

At the turn of the millennium, Zimbabwe underwent the most controversial and divisive episode of land redistribution in recent history, with ZANU PF sanctioning farm occupations and amending the law to permit expropriation without compensation. The reasons for doing so were both real and opportunistic—not necessarily in that order. Julius Nyerere, then-President of Tanzania, warned presciently on the eve of Zimbabwe’s independence that it would be untenable “to tax Zimbabweans in order to compensate people who took [land] away from them through the gun.” That’s why Zimbabwe has since 2008 put the onus of compensation for land reform on the British, a clause which was consolidated into the constitution in 2013. After all, the British mandated Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company (BSAC) to invade and conquer the territory. The British continued to maintain full oversight of the continuing land dispossession of the indigenous population by white supremacists from 1889 through to 1965. After the Privy Council’s 1918 decision, which rejected the BSAC’s claim to ownership of the entire territory of Southern Rhodesia, the British even paid several million pounds in compensation… to the BSAC. But now, Zimbabwe seems to be heading in the opposite direction (at precisely the moment when South Africa looks set to emulate its neighbor’s stance on compensation). Front-runner for President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, keen to lay the foundations for the country’s re-integration into the international economic order, has committed to compensate the former landowners. Only, slapping a retrospective billion-dollar price tag on former President Robert Mugabe’s land reform program is not something to celebrate—however much one dislikes him. It will not make the past less violent or shambolic, or help restore a sustainable and equitable agricultural sector. For the incoming government in Harare, it could cost. A lot.