Contested histories and contested land claims: traditional authorities and the Fast Track Land Reform programme in Zimbabwe, 2000–2017

ABSTRACT

This article analyses conflicts among traditional authorities over ancestral lands, and boundaries during and in the aftermath of Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform programme (FTLRP). It argues that the FTLRP gave a fresh impetus to conflicts over land and boundaries among traditional authorities as they sought to recast their authority into areas from which they were displaced during the colonial period. It further argues that land claims in the post-FTLRP period were often entangled with contestations over history and legitimacy as rival groups made use of oral traditions and archives to bolster their claims. Most of these struggles over land ended up being decided in the country’s court system. Overall, the article argues that struggles over land claims in the post-FTLRP period have largely ended up being struggles over versions of the history of land ownership and colonial displacements.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article analyse les conflits entre les autorités traditionnelles concernant des terres ancestrales, et les délimitations de terrains décidées dans le cadre du Programme accéléré de réforme agraire (PARA, Fast Track Land Reform programme) ainsi que celles dans son sillage. Il avance que le PARA a offert un nouvel élan aux conflits de délimitations de terres agricoles entre les autorités traditionnelles puisque ces dernières ont tenté de réexercer leur autorité dans des zones desquelles elles avaient été évincées durant la période coloniale. Plus encore, il défend que les revendications de ces terres dans la période post-PARA étaient souvent mêlées à des contestations de nature historique et de légitimité puisque des groupes rivaux furent usage de traditions orales et d’archives pour soutenir leur cause. La plupart de ces luttes pour l’obtention de terres agricoles ont fini par être résolues auprès du système juridique du pays. Dans l’ensemble, cet article défend que ces luttes revendicatrices dans la période post-PARA ont largement fini par devenir des luttes portant sur des versions antagonistes de l’historique des droits de propriété des terres agricoles et des expropriations coloniales.

KEYWORDS:

• Chiefs
• land
• history
• boundaries

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Chefs
• terres
• histoire
• frontières
• délimitations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Innocent Dande is a PhD student in the History Department, University of Stellenbosch. His doctorate is titled ‘A social history of African dog-owners in Zimbabwe, 1890–2015’, and focuses on rabies, dog taxation and the mobility of Africans and their dogs in farms and in cities in both colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. His major interests are in the socio-environmental history of southern Africa generally and Zimbabwe in particular. He is also interested in the historiography of the land reform and land redistribution in Zimbabwe.

Joseph Mujere is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Zimbabwe and a Research Associate in the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP), University of the Witwatersrand. He graduated with a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh (2012). He is also currently a VW Foundation-Knowledge for Tomorrow, Cooperative Research in Sub-Saharan Africa Post-Doctoral Fellow (2017–2019) doing a research project titled ‘Migration, Community Formation and Belonging in Informal settlements around Rustenburg Platinum Mines, South Africa c.1994–2014.’ His research interests include mining, informality, migration, belonging and practices of waiting in informal settlements. He has just published his first book, Land, migration and belonging: a history of the Basotho in Southern Rhodesia c.1890–1960s (James Currey, 2019).

Notes

1 See Section B, National Archives of Zimbabwe, after the main references section, for archive records cited in text.

2 See Section A, Makoni District Records, after the main references section, for district records cited in text.