The Historiography of Land in Zimbabwe: Strengths, Silences, and Questions

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Notes

¹ I owe thanks to JoAnn McGregor, Debby Potts, Brian Raftopoulos, Terry Ranger and Blair Rutherford for their generous comments and suggestions. A version of this paper will appear in Ennie Chipembere, Gerald Mazarire and Terence Ranger (eds), What History for Which Zimbabwe? Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press. (forthcoming).

² Raftopoulos, “Nation, Race and History,”167–8.

³ Notable omissions are literary representations of the land and urban land. See contributions from Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac in Chipembere et al., What History?, for considerations of literary themes. On urban land see, for example, Rakodi, Harare; Zinyama et al., Harare; Brown, “Cities for the Urban Poor in Zimbabwe.” The vast changes in periurban land use consequent on the recent policy of Fast Track resettlement await comprehensive study.

⁴ Palmer, Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia.

⁵ Other path-breaking studies included Arrighi, “Labour supplies in historical perspective” and The Political Economy of Rhodesia; Palmer & Parsons, The Roots of Rural Poverty. Also see Moyana, The Political Economy of Land, and for a broader picture, Phimister, A Social and Economic History of Zimbabwe.

⁶ Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War.

⁷ Lan, Guns and Rain.

⁸ Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War.

⁹ CASS remains a hub for research and research collaboration on land issues, though a far less influential one than it once was. See the CASS website, www.uz.ac.zw/units/cass, for current work, and for publication lists. Marshal Murphree, the centre's founding director, was a crucial figure in promoting the CASS agenda. There were many other important sites of policy-oriented research or “action research” in the University, NGOs, and parastatal and government institutions.

¹⁰ The work collected in two special journal issues provides a good introduction to this research: the Journal of Southern African Studies 15, no. 2 (1989) on “The Politics of Conservation in Southern Africa,” edited by William Beinart, and Environment and History 1, no. 3 (1995), on Zimbabwe, edited by JoAnn McGregor. Also key in developing these debates was a batch of doctoral theses completed in the early and mid-1990s, notably those by James Murombedzi, JoAnn McGregor, Ian Scoones, Ken Wilson, Billy Mukamuri, and Eric Worby. Scoones has since been a prolific contributor to debates on pastoralism and dryland farming. See Scoones, Living with Uncertainty and Scoones et al., Hazards and Opportunities.

¹¹ This is a vast literature. For a range of approaches, see Cousins et al., “Social Differentiation;” Pankhurst, “Constraints and Incentives;” Weiner et al., “Land use and agricultural productivity;” Worby, “What does agrarian wage labour signify?”

¹² See, for example, Potts & Mutambirwa, “Rural-Urban Linkages.”

¹³ Moyo, The Land Question. For a pre-“crisis” range of views, also see the collected contributions in Bowyer-Bower & Stoneman Land Reform in Zimbabwe.

¹⁴ Kinsey, “Land Reform, Growth and Equity.” Also see Kinsey's study of authority in resettlement schemes in recent years, “Fractionating Local Leadership.” For other recent work on resettlement, see contributions to the special issue of World Development 32, no. 10 (2004) on “Land reform and conflict in Southern Africa,” edited by Bill Kinsey, and Goebel, Gendering Zimbabwe's Land Reform. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.

¹⁵ See for example Andersson, “The politics of land scarcity;” Cheater, “The Ideology of ‘Communal’ Land Tenure;” Hughes, “Refugees and squatters;” Moore, “Clear waters and muddied histories;” Nyambara, “Immigrants, ‘traditional’ leaders and the Rhodesian state;” O’Flaherty, “Communal land tenure in Zimbabwe.”

¹⁶ A number of recent monographs, all based on extensive field work carried out largely in the 1990s, have further developed these themes. See Hughes, From Enslavement to Environmentalism; Moore, Suffering for Territory; Spierenburg, Strangers, Spirits and Land Reforms. Also see David Maxwell's important study, Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe and Matondi, “The Struggle for Access to Land and Water Resources in Zimbabwe,” for an insightful study of rural struggles over irrigation schemes and wetlands.

¹⁷ Drinkwater, The State and Agrarian Change.

¹⁸ Studies since have, in a variety of ways, further pursued the continuities and contradictions in the state's modernizing project; e.g., see Worby, “ ‘Discipline without Oppression’ ” and Wolmer & Scoones, “The Science of ‘Civilized’ Agriculture.”

¹⁹ Munro, The Moral Economy of the State.

²⁰ Tshuma, A Matter of (In)justice.

²¹ Alexander, The Unsettled Land.

²² See Eric Worby's discussion, in “A Redivided Land?”

²³ Moyo, Land Reform under Structural Adjustment; Yeros, “The Political Economy of Civilisation.”

²⁴ For an excellent introduction to this literature, see McGregor, “Landscapes, Politics and the Historical Geography of Southern Africa” in the special issue of the Journal of Historical Geography on southern African landscape.

²⁵ Ranger, Voices from the Rocks.

²⁶ Wolmer, From Wilderness Vision to Farm Invasions. Also see Zachrisson's Hunting for Development for a rigorous study of wildlife and development, land and landscape in the southwest.

²⁷ Moore, Suffering for Territory, 2.

²⁸ McGregor is completing a book on the Zambezi. See her “Living with the River,” “The Victoria Falls,” and “Crocodile Crimes.”

²⁹ Fontein, The Silence of Great Zimbabwe.

³⁰ See his “Changing Landscape and Oral Memory.”

³¹ Hughes, From Enslavement to Environmentalism.

³² E.g., see the important work of Herbst, State Politics in Zimbabwe, and Bratton, “The Comrades and the Countryside.”

³³ See Clarke, Agricultural and Plantation Workers; Loewenson, Modern Plantation Agriculture.

³⁴ Rubert, A Most Promising Weed. The publication of Joseph Mtisi's magnum opus on tea plantations is eagerly awaited.

³⁵ Rutherford, Working on the Margins.

³⁶ Sachikonye, “The Situation of Commercial Farm Workers.” Also see Rutherford's “Desired Publics.”

³⁷ Selby, “Commercial Farmers and the State.”

³⁸ Sachikonye, “The Promised Land.” Also see Alexander, “Orphans of the Empire.”

³⁹ Suzuki, “Drifting Rhinos.”

⁴⁰ Taylor, “The Politics of Uncertainty.”

⁴¹ Raby, “Ethnicity and Identity.” Raby has embargoed his thesis owing to concern for the safety of his informants.

⁴² Buckle, African Tears, and see subsequent volumes. Also see, e.g., the websites of the Commercial Farmers’ Union and especially Justice for Agriculture.

⁴³ Worby, “The New Agrarian Politics”; Hammar et al., Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business. Also see Lee & Colvard, Unfinished Business, and the special issue of World Development 32, no. 10 (2004), edited by Bill Kinsey. A sophisticated NGO literature is also emerging. For a substantial contribution, see ICG, Blood and Soil.

⁴⁴ Ranger, “Nationalist Historiography”; Raftopoulos, “Nation, Race and History.”

⁴⁵ Moyo recently coauthored a lengthy policy study for the World Bank in 2004: Moyo & Sukume, Agricultural Sector and Agrarian Development Strategy. The report draws on a range of field studies undertaken under the auspices of Moyo's African Institute for Agrarian Studies, as well as the work of the official Presidential Land Review Committee to which Moyo made a central contribution.

⁴⁶ Moyo & Yeros, “Land Occupations and Land Reform,” 165–6. Also see Moyo, “The Land Occupation Movement” and Yeros, “Zimbabwe and the Dilemmas of the Left.” Moyo and Yeros are equally unenthused by the work of Patrick Bond and John Manyanya, Zimbabwe's Plunge, lumping it into the same category as Hammar et al.

⁴⁷ Moyo & Yeros, “Land Occupations and Land Reform,” 166.

⁴⁸ For the ongoing debate, see responses to Moyo & Yeros in Raftopoulos & Phimister, “Zimbabwe Now,” Moore, “Marxism and Marxist Intellectuals,” and Henry Bernstein, “ ‘Changing before our eyes.’ ”

⁴⁹ Nearly 30 years ago, Terence Ranger explored the ambiguities of constructing a “usable” African past: Ranger, “Towards a Usable African Past.”

⁵⁰ See Willems, “Peasant Demonstrators,” on the official and independent media's coverage of land issues.

⁵¹ Moore, “The Zimbabwe People's Army”; White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo.

⁵² Alexander et al., Violence and Memory; Ranger, Voices from the Rocks; Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead.

⁵³ At a panel on land issues organised by the new Centre for Rural Development (located at the University of Zimbabwe, but with funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation) in August 2005, CASS researchers pointedly asked what the purpose of policy-oriented research was in a context where the state no longer listened. CRD researcher Prosper Matondi (whose work on the effects of Fast Track resettlement is among the most insightful) responded that it was important to keep a record of what was happening on the ground so as to inform policy at whatever point in the future the state might again find a role for researchers.

⁵⁴ See Raftopoulos & Phimister, “Zimbabwe Now.”

⁵⁵ See Chaumba et al., “From Jambanja to Planning.”

⁵⁶ See reports of the army's involvement in irrigation schemes in Matabeleland in Solidarity Peace Trust, “Operation Taguta/Sisuthi.”