Women's struggles to access and control land and livelihoods after fast track land reform in Mwenezi District, Zimbabwe

Abstract

Women's access to land and the shaping of livelihoods after fast track land reform should be viewed with a new social and economic lens in Zimbabwe. This paper examines the extent to which negotiations and bargaining by women with the family, state, and traditional actors has proved to be useful in accessing land in one semi-arid district, Mwenezi, in southern Zimbabwe. Based on multi-site ethnography, it shows the complex and innovative ways women adopted in accessing land and shaping non-permanent mobile livelihoods. I challenge the assumption that Western notions of individual rights to land are the best mechanisms for women in Africa; rather it is the negotiated and bargaining processes that exist in patriarchal structures that lead to cultural contracts enabling women's land access. Off-farm activities involving trading in South Africa became a major activity undertaken by the women. Trips to South Africa intensified due to land acquisition, leading to new market searches beyond national borders. The role of collective action and women's agency in overcoming the challenges associated with trading in South Africa is examined within the ambit of the livelihoods analysis.

Keywords:

• women
• access to land
• fast track
• land reform
• negotiation
• livelihoods
• non-Western
• rights
• non-permanent mobility

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the anonymous reviewers who made constructive comments that led to the outcome of the paper. I wish to thank also Professor Lionel Cliffe, Dr Prosper Matondi, Dr Eveson Moyo, Professor Robin Palmer, Professor Paul Hebinck, Professor Michael Bollig and Professor Rudo Gaidzanwa for useful suggestions. The research grant from the Volkswagen Stiftung (Germany) under the Project, Human Mobility, Institutions and Access to Natural Resources in Contemporary Africa is sincerely appreciated.

Notes

¹Livelihood refers to the capabilities, assets and strategies that people use to make a living and to achieve food andincome security through engaging in a variety of economic activities.

²Non-permanent mobility is defined as the irregular movement of men and women. It could be either internal orexternal. The aim of the movement that people embark upon is to gain better living conditions or work and earn an income. Non-permanent mobility is also used interchangeably with irregular migration in most studies on migration in human geography.

³Gender refers to the socially assigned roles and relations between men and women. Gender attributes are not biological or natural. Gender relationships relate to a range of institutional and social issues rather than a specific relationship between men and women.

⁴This line of thinking has been been put forth by Moyo (2011), Jiririra and Halimana (2008) and Jacobs (2010).

⁵However it should be noted that these land coverage measurements differ between households, and are based on the government's policy of what constitutes the A1 model of fast track farms in Zimbabwe. For a detailed account of the debates on the dynamics of farm sizes under fast track land reform see Matondi (2011), Moyo (2011) and Marongwe (2009).

⁶Interview with Margaret Spencer and Karen Caister, original owners of Merrivale before fast track, Pietermaritzburg, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, February 2010.

⁷Interview with village head, Tavaka village, January 2010.

⁸Mwenezi Rural District Council files on farm populations, accessed in February 2010.

⁹ Mativi is a Karanga term which refers to natural water sources that do not dry up. They are associated with certain specific symbolism such as the sacredness of the place where they are found in Karanga society.

¹⁰These were semi-formal planning groups that were enacted during the fast track process so that order could be asserted in the beneficiary selection criteria and land demarcation exercise.

¹¹Water gardens (magadheni) refer to the vegetable gardens that women control, which are also known as hand irrigated gardens in some instances.

¹²Interview with Mbigi, Tavaka village, May 2009.

¹³Offer letter for Mrs Ziracha, Tavaka village, June 2009.

¹⁴This extract is based on discussions I had with the women as I interacted with them either in their fields or as I helped them look for firewood in the village. These discussions were useful as they unravelled the critical dimensions of women's access to land at Tavaka village, Merrivale farm.

¹⁵ The issue of tsewu (the female field acquired from the husband after giving birth to at least two children) was critically explained to the researcher by Mrs Elisah Chauke, the Assistant District Administrator of Mwenezi.

¹⁶Interview with Assistant District Administrator, Mwenezi Rural District Council Offices, Mwenezi, February 2010.

¹⁷Interview, G.C.M.,Tavaka village, July 2009.

¹⁸This refers to the importance of family and village ties in resource distribution in Africa. This is also known as the politics of villagisation in which distribution of resources is done with the family members and relatives of the distributor benefitting first before the other villagers that are not relatives of the distributor.

¹⁹See Matondi (forthcoming) for further critical reflections on the ongoing land reform process in Zimbabwe and what it means in the land and livelihoods revolution in Zimbabwe.

²⁰A totem is equated with a specific animal in Shona culture. Every person has a totem, this is done to respect family relations (ukama) and avoid intermarriages among people of the same totem. At Merrivale the most common totems are fish, elephant, rat, zebra and lion. For instance the men who belong to the fish (hove) are addressed as muzikani or save and the women as sambiri. People belonging to the fish totem are not supposed to eat fish as doing so leads to loss of teeth or sickness. Information on totems and the resultant effects of not adhering to them is based on my own cultural knowledge and my personal communication with the people at Merrivale farm.

²¹War veteran refers to a person who joined the war in 1962 or before and underwent military training, Sadomba (2008). I treat this group as a semi-formal structure because they accord themselves status that they think is useful in the dynamic nature of governance and societies, although this is controversial in the Zimbabwean context. Sadomba (2008, 265), himself a war veteran, in his PhD thesis based on participant observation of the fast track process in Mazowe argues that war veterans are a governing body and hence a formal structure as they form the central pillar of governance in the country.

²²Nemarundwe (2003) notes that social capital refers to standardised networks or networks of variation or flux that people enter into so as to regulate their livelihoods. Standardised networks for example are burial societies which have constitutions, and networks of variation or flux are the ones loosely created just for a specific time and continuously change. People can negotiate in networks of variation and they do not have formal rules.

²³Operation ‘Maguta’ was a programme of the Government of Zimbabwe during fast track to provide the newly resettled farmers with farming machinery and fuel so that they could boost agricultural production.

²⁴Interview with Care International Programme Officer, Masvingo Province, April 2009.

²⁵I define non-permanent mobility as the periodic movement of women to South Africa to trade their agricultural commodities normally for periods ranging from three days to two weeks. The women do not settle in South Africa but travel every month and maintain their livelihood base at Merrivale in Mwenezi, Zimbabwe.

²⁶The case history developed gives an indication of how access to land after fast track land reform has changed the lives of the women as they develop other agro-commodity chain platforms where they can trade their agricultural products.

²⁷This refers to the different forms of social networks that the women were involved in their logistical trips to South Africa, which involved different actors such as bus drivers, courier syndicates that involved groups of men, and women at the border posts.

²⁸This entails cooperation and cooperative efforts that regulated the women's agricultural commodity trading activities in South Africa.

²⁹It should be noted that as I travelled with the women, I also met and interacted with different women from Harare, Bulawayo, Masvingo, Mutare, Chiredzi, Beitbridge and Gutu. They all sold many different items and they would purchase different items for resale, with urban women purchasing electrical goods and clothes as compared to myself and the rural women I travelled with purchasing mostly food items. This was mainly due to the different market spaces and consumers. During August 2010 women from Merrivale also started buying cell phones for resale, demonstrating how trading also opens up the global world of the technology revolution since in Mwenezi Econet cell phone lines now have reception and a network after major upgrades by Econet wireless company.