WITH images flooding the news media of Zimbabwe's urban poor being bulldozed out of their homes by the Robert Mugabe government, it is hard to dispel the impression that this country is now ruled by a power-mad dictator who is hell-bent on consolidating his control no matter how far he drags Zimbabweans down the path of self-destruction.

How did a seemingly pragmatic Mugabe, one-time political prisoner of the breakaway Ian Smith regime in the former British colony of Rhodesia, turn from policies of reconciliation and reconstruction?

How did he become a man who can be heard to boast that he will govern Zimbabwe for a hundred years ? seemingly oblivious to the fact he is echoing comments made by his former antagonist Ian Smith, who said of the prospect of black majority rule coming to the former Rhodesia that such a development would not come about even in a thousand years.

It is hard to believe now that Prime Minister Mugabe was once considered to be pragmatic ? even conciliatory ? towards the white population who had fought the coming to power of Zimbabwe's black majority tooth and nail.

I remember listening to Mugabe's first speech as the newly sworn-in Prime Minister of Independent Zimbabwe in 1980. I remember him appealing to white Zimbabweans, saying they could stay on as citizens of the new state and that the white farmers could continue to farm their lands ? which amounted to 4,000 white people controlling 80 per cent of the arable land in a country with an African population of ten million (who were consigned to overcrowded and overworked farms on Tribal Trust Lands).

It was in those rural areas, the TTLs, where most of the fighting between Ian Smith's Rhodesian military forces and the liberation movements (who the people called "The Boys" but who the Rhodesians declared to be terrorists) took place. Those areas and the white-controlled farm lands.

The central question in the conflict in Zimbabwe has always centred around who has the right to control the arable land. Much has been made of the disruption to Zimbabwe's economy as a result of the take-over of formerly white-controlled lands (the consequences for Zimbabwe's export crops, the mainstay of that country's financial well-being, has been catastrophic).

But what is often forgotten is that these take-overs came about as a direct consequence of British colonial rule in that country ? originally named after the leading proponent of British colonialism in Southern Africa and the head of the then British South African Company, Cecil Rhodes.

He began British colonisation of what was then called Mashonaland and negotiated a treaty between the Matabele kings and the white settlers who came up from British-ruled South Africa in the late 19th century.

were two major African tribal groupings in what came to be called Rhodesia (and then Zimbabwe). These were the Shona, the largest group, and the Matabele. These two groups, though often rivals, soon saw that the greatest threat to their existence was the white settlers who began to settle their land with British military might to protect them. This resulted in the first joint uprising in 1896, quickly put down by the British.

The African peoples living in this area were not poor, landless peasants. They were farmers, they owned vast herds of cattle and found themselves increasingly pushed off their lands and being raided either by the British military or Cecil Rhodes' private armed forces, their cattle stolen and driven across the border into South Africa.

What happened was the systematic dismantling of the African economy and its replacement by a white settler-dominated economy. Africans who had once been farmers themselves now found themselves farm workers on the settlers' vast farms.

This state of affairs was reinforced by white-controlled governments which did not allow African participation in the political process, resulting in the liberation war that broke out in 1967 and which eventually overthrew the last white-controlled government headed by Ian Smith.

If the central issue was land then why didn't Robert Mugabe put this question at the top of his government agenda in 1980? Why didn't he tell the white farming community that they could no longer control the amount of land that they had, productive though it was? Even former British soldiers who settled in Rhodesia following World War Two were given cheap land at the expense of African people who had lived there for hundreds of years.

The answer to that is the agreements the liberation movement was forced to accept at the Lancaster House negotiations in London that led to the creation of an Independent Zimbabwe. Britain was still of a mind to protect settlers in its former colony.

So in order for the UK to accept Independence for Zimbabwe, London required the new African government to adhere to a constitution which allowed the white community to retain a certain number of seats in the parliament for ten years and put checks and balances into place to prevent constitutional amendments until that period had passed and any future government had attained a three-quarter majority of parliamentary seats.

Britain and the United States promised to give aid to the new Zimbabwe government to buy up white-controlled farmlands so that it could be given to landless Africans. These promises were not kept and over the years the question was increasingly being asked by Zimbabweans ? who had fought the Ian Smith government for African rights ? as to why the pace of change which would see them regain their lost lands was so slow.

Mugabe was in a political dilemma. He could no longer hold off an answer to that question coming from the bedrock of his political support base. And, of course, the whole issue became even more complicated and confused given the deep-seated corruption of the Mugabe regime ? the results of which we now see coming to the fore in Zimbabwe.

is no doubt that you could not dismantle white control of Zimbabwe's economy, especially in the important farming industry, without dire consequences for that economy as a whole. This is the situation the country now finds itself in.

And apart from the land redistribution programme it can no longer be denied that there is a political battle taking place between Mugabe and his supporters and those Zimbabweans who want political change and blame the Mugabe regime for their country's increasingly dire state of affairs.

It is hard for me to accept this but, short of a civil war, an army coup d'etat may be the only way out of Zimbabwe's worsening predicament. South Africa, the strongest country in the area, could intervene but it would have to do so with the general support of the other countries in Southern Africa. And, as has been demonstrated by the ongoing conflicts in West Africa, Central Africa and now in the Darfur region in the Sudan, Africa has yet to prove that it can speak with one voice to impose its own peace on regional conflicts.