Gender roles in agricultural knowledge in a land resettlement context: the case of Mupfurudzi, Zimbabwe

Abstract

The present paper discusses the social construction and reconstruction of gender roles in relation to agricultural knowledge claims in a land resettlement area. Many women were politically active in the war of liberation where the land question dominated the agenda. However, at independence this question was framed in terms of race, and gender issues were sidelined. Despite the fact that women were not resettled in their own right, they are not simply victims of the system but manoeuvre within the system to gain advantages. This paper discusses strategies that women use to challenge the males in their families and the resultant conflicts and contradictions. It also discusses decision-making, investments and poverty as concepts and practices that can illuminate the gendering and gendered nature of knowledge in resettlement schemes. Claims of knowledge by both men and women are in the final analysis claims to the ownership of household and family resources.

1. BACKGROUND ON GENDER AND LAND RESETTLEMENT IN ZIMBABWE

The present paper looks at how land resettlement in Zimbabwe affected the gendered nature of knowledge. It is based on a study involving 30 months of field work carried out between 2002 and 2004. The study, focused particularly on the Mupfurudzi resettlement scheme that was set up by the Zimbabwean Government in 1980, was an extension of an earlier interdisciplinary study – conducted between May and December 2001 and funded by the International Food Policy Research Institute – on poverty reduction and high-yielding varieties of maize. The earlier study had focused on three resettlement schemes in Zimbabwe that had been chosen because there were existing data from a 20-year panel study by Kinsey and others on these schemes.

Kinsey's study contained panel data on 424 households in three land resettlement areas in Zimbabwe, for the years 1984, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 2000. It covered aspects such as family composition, labour, agriculture, assets, institutional linkages, sources of income, nutritional status and anthropometrics. The database was then used as a reference point from which to select a sample of 14 households for further in-depth studies from Mupfurudzi resettlement scheme. The current study focused on two villages in this scheme: Mudzinge and Muringamombe. Of the total sample of 14 households, four were female headed – two in each village. The sample, however, remained relatively open so as to allow the researchers to follow interesting issues as and when they arose in the course of fieldwork. Hence conversations we had with people from these villages or from others who were not part of the sample were regarded as valid research data.

The study was in every sense of the word an extension of research work that had already been carried out in these resettlement schemes. The author continued to use Mupfurudzi because this is where she was based in the earlier study, and because she had a large quantity of data on the area and had forged close relationships with families and households in the area.

A large body of literature is available on the effects of land reform on gender and economic empowerment (Jacobs, 1993; Gaidzanwa, 1995; Waterhouse & Vijfhuizen, 2001) and on the social and economic justification for land reform in Zimbabwe (Zinyama, 1995). However, very little has been written about how land resettlement itself results in gendered knowledge. In this paper ‘gendered knowledge’ refers to the knowledge that men and women actively seek, or that is regarded as essential for them to fulfil their socially constructed gender roles. The paper discusses the social construction and reconstruction of gender roles in relation to agricultural knowledge claims in a land resettlement area. It does not follow that women and men do not possess similar knowledge, or that men know more than women; rather, the point is that sometimes men or women will deny knowing certain things, not because they are ignorant in those areas but because their social gender roles do not require them to have such knowledge.

The land question is an issue of major economic and political importance in Zimbabwe. At independence, 74 per cent of peasant land was located in drought-prone areas with poor soils (see Herbst, 1990); many social commentators attributed the high poverty in rural areas to this anomaly. Thus the anger at the gross disparities in land ownership between blacks and whites became the rallying point during Zimbabwe's liberation struggle from the early 1960s onwards, resulting in independence in 1980 (Chitsike, 2003:2). Although some emerging discourses question the assumption that the land question was the sole or most important issue in the struggle for independence (see Alexander, 2003), it was certainly a rallying point during the liberation war. Moyo (1995) correctly points out that land underpins the economic, social and political lives of the majority of Zimbabweans. A large number of women were politically active during the liberation war, and the Zimbabwean Government publicly acknowledged this. However, in spite of the fact that women had actively participated in the war of independence, at independence the land question was framed in terms of its racial component, and solving the land question was equated to increasing racial equity in terms of land ownership. As Mushunje notes, ‘while colonial injustices were being corrected, post-colonial injustices were emerging and these manifested in the discrimination against black women by black men’ (2001:1).

In the independence euphoria, gender debates in terms of land ownership were not regarded as necessary. This situation in which gender debates are regarded as divisive and expunged from national discourse in the interest of ‘nation’-building is not peculiar to Zimbabwe. Involving traditional leaders in decisions about land resettlement ensured that gender debates on land were pushed under the table. Writing about Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa, McClintock maintains that ‘no nationalism in the world has granted women and men the same privileged access to the resources of the nation state. So far, all nationalisms are dependent on powerful constructions of gender difference’ (1991:105).

In judging the efficacy of land redistribution in Zimbabwe in the years following independence, scholars were also not so much concerned with gender issues as with discussing how many of the targeted black families had been resettled (Skalnes, 1995; Moyo, 2004), and others – like Kinsey (1982, 1999) – were more interested in the resettled families' asset accumulation, incomes and livelihoods. Scholarship was not interested in the compositional structures of the families that had been resettled. It was not until the early 1990s that dissenting voices were heard questioning and evaluating the land redistribution exercise in terms of its gender component.

The first phase of resettlement in the 1980s was criticised by social commentators for not being gender sensitive since it did not target women as a group (Jacobs, 1991, 1993; Rukuni, 1994). For example, Jacobs (1991) was disappointed that the land reform did not challenge gender relations since divorced women were normally not able to settle in their own right because they were not regarded as household heads. Moyo also recognises the gendered nature of access to land when he comments that ‘patriarchal land tenure value systems among both the white and black community have consistently discriminated against women land owners’ (2000:21–2). It is in the nature of resettlement that no women initially had plots registered in their names.

The nature of the settlement pattern in these households also deserves further comment. Unlike the homestead pattern of settlement found throughout much of rural Zimbabwe, households in these resettlement schemes live in clustered villages (of between 12 and 60 households) that are relatively far apart. The physical isolation of these villages has precluded the development of small markets in these localities. Indeed, a striking visual feature of these places is the absence of shops or trading areas. The only shop in Muringamombe was always well stocked with alcohol but did not offer any basic commodities, for which people had to travel about 20 kilometres to Madziwa Mine. To access medical services and markets, villagers had to go to Zvomanyanga or Chakonda, a great distance from most villages – which was a burden to women as they are the ones who normally cater for the health needs of their families.

2. SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION OF GENDER ROLES

Waterhouse and Vijfhuizen maintain that gender is about the socio-cultural construction of women and men. According to them:

it is necessary to realize that these processes of construction are both reproduced and transformed, by both women and men. Hence analysing gender relations means getting to grips with these processes. It must be emphasised that both men and women are involved in constructing gender, by their actions (practices), assigning meanings and reproducing norms and values. From this perspective women are seen as strategic actors and not passive victims of patriarchal and matriarchal structures. (2001:7–8)

This section looks at the social construction and reconstruction of gender roles by men and women in the study villages. As mentioned above, women were not resettled in their own right (Jacobs, 1990; Rukuni, 1994; Gaidzanwa, 1995). This is not an experience unique to Zimbabwe. The International Labour Organization notes that:

Reforms have almost always defined beneficiaries of land titles and of any concomitant support services to be the male head of the household. This proved to be disastrous for women who had enjoyed customary use rights and for female heads of households … Women's access to agricultural land in resettlement areas … has not always been secured. First, schemes often grant land titles or leases to male heads of household. Second, where land acquisition or allocation is open to everyone, men or women, a number of socio-cultural and economic factors prevent women from enjoying or exercising this equal right. (1995:26, 27)

In Mudzinge, one woman managed to obtain a plot permit on her own when her husband, who had been the initial receiver of the land, ran away with another woman and did not turn up to claim the land. Other women in the sample became plot owners and de facto household heads when their husbands died. In Muringamombe, both women in the sample became heads after the death of their husbands. Considering the large number of women in the area, particularly after taking into account that some men have more than one wife, there is a gender imbalance in the ownership of stands.

Even in those households where the woman is the head, she remains household head only in as far as her name appears in the official documents. Most of the decisions on farming are taken out of the hands of women (see Mudege, 2007). Thus, simply comparing the number of female household heads with the number of male ones tells us little about gender politics in the area. Where there are grown-up sons, the mother who is the official household head defers most of the important decisions to them. These decisions may be about land use or the commercial crop varieties the family cultivates.

Although one of the female plot holders in Mudzinge had the land in her own name, because she did not have any children of her own, her brother sent his son to stay with her and look after her. There was a lot of conflict between the woman and her nephew over the cultivation and use of the land and other household resources, and at the same time the woman claimed that the nephew and his wife thought she was a witch. This woman, however, could not chase the nephew and his wife away because she was afraid she might antagonise her brother. When the plot holder died, the plot became her nephew's. This situation is not unique – in most instances where female plot holders die the land reverts to their male relatives, and from then on inheritance will follow the male line. Thus what government gives in the interest of gender equity, custom takes away. So although academics such as Gaidzanwa (1995) and Jacobs (1990) demand that women should also be given individual rights to land, gender equity in terms of land cannot be achieved by simply giving them land, as this does not guarantee that the land will remain in their hands in the generations to come. It also has to be realised that it is not always the case that if women own the land then they are empowered to do what they want with it, without any control from their male relatives and ‘guardians’.

Compared with women, men were also able to command plenty of labour. For example, there is a general sentiment among male stand-holders that it is the women who are labourers. Some villagers equated having many wives with the ability to farm the whole 12 acres or at least most of it. In her study of resettlement areas in Zimbabwe, Jacobs (1990:173) notes that ‘some men may hope to pursue polygyny, as a strategy for accumulating capital through accumulation of wives … small capitalist farmers who were polygynists treated wives (especially younger ones) virtually as labourers’. Similarly, in the two villages I studied, a man was usually said to have married the right woman if the woman was able to work very hard. Marriage for any other reason was viewed as an error of judgement. During a discussion, one female trader remarked that men oppressed women since they did not allow their women to use the maize to get what they wanted, despite the fact that women did most of the fieldwork. The ability of men to marry labour gave them an edge over women. Women, on the other hand, depended on their children's labour, which they could lose at any time if their children married and moved out.

Household conflicts over resource sharing indicate that proceeds from farming are not distributed equitably within the household. Thus, the same resource can have different effects on different people in the household. In one of the households in the sample, the wife had to take her husband to the village court because she felt that the proceeds from farming were not being distributed fairly. According to her, the husband was always buying cattle, which, culturally, are not regarded as a woman's property and can be taken over by her husband's relatives upon his death. She also maintained that, although resettlement land was regarded as the family's land, in the event of the death of the plot holder (in this case the husband), staying on the plot usually depended on whether the widow had adult sons – if not, then the woman would be at the mercy of her husband's relatives. At the end the village court resolved that the husband had to buy his wife a wardrobe, a bed and some kitchen utensils using cash from their farming activities. The husband complied with the court's decision. This shows that women have room to contest their husband's decisions if they feel their needs are being overlooked.

In another case, a man who was married to a female stand-holder took his wife to court because he felt that she was controlling all of the income from their farming ventures. The wife, on the other hand, argued that she was investing the money in family assets and that her husband was mentally disturbed and could not be trusted with any household money. Furthermore, the husband was very abusive and notorious for beating his wife and frequently threatening to murder her. Thus, even in cases where there is an observable increase in the asset base of individual families, it does not necessarily improve the livelihoods of everyone in the family. Although Kinsey (1999) points to the positive effects of resettlement shown by certain economic indicators of household poverty levels, he fails to notice that these perceived increases in household wealth could be experienced quite differently by different people. A household may be wealthy, but it does not necessarily follow that the members of that household enjoy the fruits of that wealth in equal measure. A focus on gender thus enables us to keep in mind that people in the same household often experience phenomena differently. Women and men are both entangled in the production and reproduction of their gender identities within their individual households.

There were also cases where husbands beat their wives for exchanging all the maize for clothes and other utensils with the traders popularly known as madhaiza, who exchange their wares for maize and sometimes cash. Men deplored this practice and claimed it threatened the family's food security, and at times men chased away these madhaiza traders from their homes. Some women, on the other hand, regarded madhaiza trade as fair practice, since they claimed men used all the money from their cash crops to purchase ‘manly’ things or things the women could not call theirs or even use. The following is what one village head had to say about a good farmer who resided in his village:

X here buys a motorcycle, which does not benefit his wives. Do you think you with your wrappers you can ride a motorcycle … Y was very poor, he became rich because of farming. He bought a car and a television. If his wife wants she can learn to drive a car but can I encourage anyone to buy a motor bike which women in their wrappers1 cannot ride?

The above indicates that some male household heads were not sensitive to women's needs. These male heads would purchase property that could add to the men's prestige in the villages but that female members, and indeed other members of the household, could not readily use. Thus, faced with husbands who were not sensitive to women's needs, women could purchase from the madhaiza things for the whole family and, on top of that, utensils that they could claim ownership over. Even in those households that were regarded as well off and whose household head was seen as someone who invested wisely, these conflicts could occur.

Contrary to what the author initially believed, the madhaiza was not an innocent trade viewed similarly by both men and women. In an earlier conversation with a male household head he had mentioned that ‘women can take some maize even without the knowledge of their husbands and swap this maize for clothes’. Then the researcher had assumed women sold surplus maize. It could not be imagined that the trade was furtive, risky and potentially dangerous. In later encounters with women engaging in madhaiza trade, it became clear that this kind of trading had to be done without the husband's knowledge. Many madhaiza traders would come with their wares at a time when they were sure most male heads would not be at home, otherwise they would not get much business. It was over madhaiza that some of the bitterest gender wars about the control of resources were fought. In discussions, male heads maintained that in the granary maize was under the control of women. However, this turned out to be an illusion. There had been cases brought to village courts in Mupfurudzi in which women sold all the maize to traders, leading to violent conflict with their husbands.

3. GENDERING KNOWLEDGE

After marriage the woman's knowledge becomes redundant as she has to adopt the ways of her husband's people. Sometimes during the interviews with both husband and wife, the husbands expressed surprise at things their wives knew.

Researcher: What of sunflower? Why do you cultivate it?

Mr Mbanda: We grow sunflowers for sale. We also use sunflowers for making cooking oil.

Researcher: Are there people who have these oil making machines in this village?

Mr Mbanda: Yes there is someone with the machine at Danken.

Mrs Mbanda: But I can make some oil.

Mr Mbanda: Iiii! … [in a tone of surprise and disbelief] you can make oil!

Mrs Mbanda: Yes I can – my mother taught me how.

Researcher: So how do you do it?

Mrs Mbanda: You just pound the sunflower in a mortar. After that you process the cooking oil from the sunflower just like you do groundnuts. My mother used to do it and she taught me.

Mr Mbanda: [Still not convinced] This one knows since her mother taught her.

Mrs Mbanda: My mother used to do it, but since I came I do not do it because the sunflower is mostly grown for sale.

Women's knowledge about growing and processing crops may remain unused when they move into a new household, as Mrs Mbanda's did, although she and Mr Mbanda had been married for many years.

The redundancy of women's knowledge was not limited to the older generation. One young married woman in her late twenties admitted that after she got married she had never used any of the agricultural knowledge she had acquired from school. Instead she just did things her husband's way:

When we were still at primary school, that is when we grew groundnuts in a school plot. However, … if you finish school and get married soon afterwards, you start to think all the things you learnt in school are not important. You do not even want to think about whatever it is you learnt, and if you do, in most cases you do not even want to use them in case they conflict with what your husband wants. The husband is the government and one does what government wants.

Women preferred not to practise what they knew because they did not want to be blamed in case what they knew failed to work and jeopardised the family's food supply. There was one incident where wives of an absent male household head did not use a method that could have saved their ailing ox from death because they were afraid that if they did it they would be blamed if the cure failed and the ox died.

Although all household heads concurred that school knowledge was important, most male household heads denied that they learnt much from their children. All female heads in the sample claimed that they had successfully used most of what their children had learnt from school and they had found it very helpful. This is what Mr Arumando and his wife had to say about school knowledge:

Researcher: Do your children ever teach you new knowledge on farming that they learn from school?

Mrs Arumando: Yes.

Mr Arumando: Yes they tell us what they would have learnt at school. They do agriculture at school. We encourage them to do what they are capable of doing. But as far as our knowledge on farming is concerned we got it a long time ago from our forefathers and we still use that knowledge.

Researcher: Do you think the stuff they learn at school works?

Mr Arumando: Yes. My eldest son who did agriculture at school is doing very well.

Researcher: Do you think this knowledge is important?

Mr Arumando: I am not quite sure because my son lives close to me and farms in my field. I think he still learns from me and uses my knowledge. I will start to be real sure whether the knowledge works or not when he starts to live far away from me.

When it came to farming, men and women often knew different things and therefore often clashed when making decisions. For instance, because they sometimes used different knowledge sources, men and women in the same household sometimes came to different conclusions about how the family farm should be cultivated. One man's wives wanted to inter-crop, but the man said this was not the kind of good farming practice he had learnt long ago at the big farms and from lessons in agriculture. In the end the wives planted cow peas and pumpkins with the maize and the husband ploughed up the cow peas and pumpkins. He was furious that his wives had risked the family food basket by refusing to listen to his good sense.

Agritex officers formally impart knowledge on agriculture, through courses of formal lessons for Master Farmers' certificates. In Mupfurudzi, being a certified Master Farmer could mean the difference between accessing some resources from the Agricultural Research and Extension Department (AREX) or not, because some government resources were channelled through AREX. The government adopted this strategy to avoid accumulating bad debtors, by giving enough fertiliser and seed loans to those farmers who were vouched for by AREX officers. Some people therefore attended the formal lessons in order to establish a good relationship with the AREX officers, hoping they would put in a good word for them to access the loans. None of the female heads in Mupfurudzi had ever attended the lessons offered by Agritex officers, and only one of the wives of the male heads had attended the Master Farmer training lessons. On the other hand, all male heads claimed to have attended Master Farmer Training lessons at some time.

High illiteracy rates among women were usually mentioned as one of the reasons why most women chose not to attend the lessons. The following were the responses of two female household heads in Muringamombe when they were asked why they had never attended the formal lessons:

Others went but I did not go. It was like a school. You have to read and take notes and remember everything. I would not have been able to cope. It was a school, where those who passed were given certificates and resettled kuminda mirefu [‘at the long fields’].

I am not able to write. In addition, the classes are always full of men and it's a little embarrassing to be the only woman in a class full of men.

However, further investigations indicated that although illiteracy could have contributed to the women's lack of confidence to attend agricultural lessons, this was not the only reason – as many illiterate men had attended the Master Farmer training lessons and managed to acquire the certificates. On being asked about the importance of literacy for attending these lessons, the AREX officer Mr Nyamaharo claimed that illiteracy was not a valid reason for not attending. He was convinced of this because one of the male farmers had benefited from their programme and was now a successful farmer, although he could not read and write. One must note that the agricultural officials also taught oral classes and gave oral examinations. Consequently, the women's failure to attend the lessons may be related more to the gender division of space, where the public domain was for males and the women would be embarrassed to compete with them for that space. Cheater and Gaidzanwa point out that in Shona societies ‘traditions of male mobility contrast sharply with female immobility’ (1996:191). Women who were highly mobile and ventured out of the bounds of their immediate residential neighbourhoods were often labelled prostitutes. Negative associations of this kind may have militated against women attending agricultural lessons that were often held far away from the village and sometimes entailed being away from home for a few days.

In some cases where women attended the lessons, they would meet with a variety of obstacles to obtaining the Master Farmer certificates. In the past, after going through the necessary training the person had to build a shed for implements before being awarded the Master Farmer certificate. It may have been requirements such as these that discouraged some women from going for the training, as they would need approval from their husbands to initiate certain developments on their homesteads and the approval was not always forthcoming. One woman who had attended the training for a number of years but had still not managed to get the certificate gave the following reason for not implementing what she had learnt:

What happens is that if we who wear dresses go to the workshops, if we come back and try to implement what we have learnt, there will be conflict in the household. When I came back, I tried to have the shed built, but my husband insisted that he had never seen that since he was born. He kept asking why a plough should be kept in a built shed. He could not understand it. There was a lot of conflict until I decided to drop the shed issue. As a result one cannot implement everything one learns.

Thus, to say illiteracy is the main variable explaining the non-attendance of women is simplistic and fails to take account of the household dynamics that are involved.

It was not only the agricultural lessons that women did not attend, but also other agricultural meetings that were held in the village. Although these were usually held on Fridays (Chisi – traditionally sanctioned rest days in honour of the sprits of the land), women still could not attend as they used this day to focus on the domestic tasks they had neglected during the week. It was usually on Fridays that women cleaned their houses, redecorated them, washed the family's clothes and watered their gardens, and they also had to prepare meals for their families. On the other hand, men would be visiting friends, and those who drank would spend the Fridays at the local bar talking to friends and generally lazing around. It emerged that men had more time than women to attend these meetings. The AREX officer confirmed that the men's attendance rate was higher than the women's, for both agricultural lessons and agriculture-related meetings.

This is a sad situation if the man dies and the woman has not attended meetings to hear things for herself. As an Agriculture Research and Extension Officer said:

That is the problem. Yesterday I was in Derude carrying out a crop census on behalf of the central statistical office where I have to ask farmers how much they produced this year. As it happened many male heads died. So I had to ask the women and their answer was invariably that ‘we do not know anything – father is the one who knows but unfortunately, he is dead. We only know how to work. At the end of the day, we just guess’. That affects the accuracy of our statistics.

Because of the gendered nature of access to public information, women lacked competent knowledge in certain aspects along the agricultural production chain.

3.1 Making decisions

The process of making decisions helps us understand the gendered nature of knowledge. In nine of the 14 cases in the sample, household heads claimed that they consulted other members on the selection of maize variety. Five of these household heads were men. This information was not always reliable: in one case the head said he made decisions alone and then when his wife was present said he consulted her; and in another, the husband claimed he consulted his wife but she denied this when alone with the interviewer. Three of the four female heads consulted with their adult sons or other male relatives before deciding which seed variety to plant, especially where maize was concerned. In the fourth female-headed household there was no real consultation as the grandson who worked in Harare just bought whatever seed variety and fertiliser he managed to secure for her.

Women in all households were involved in decisions affecting the choices of peripheral crops such as groundnuts, roundnuts (bambara nuts or ground peas), rapoko (finger millet) and open pollinated varieties of maize, which are regarded as women's crops. This was a recurrent theme throughout interviews with the various households, indicating that knowledge has gender. The following excerpt illustrates this:

Researcher: Do you think men and women have the same knowledge or that they know differently?

Mr Arumando: [Laughing] Some women have more knowledge than men, but some women have no knowledge at all.

Mrs Arumando: Both men and women know different things. For example, groundnuts, round nuts and cow peas, those are a woman's crop. Beans and sunflower belong to both men and women so they have almost the same knowledge on those crops. Soya beans are a man's crop.

Researcher: Why do you say that beans are a crop for both men and women?

Mr Arumando: Because if there is plenty of it, let's say you get a lot of tonnes, the beans could be sold to the GMB [Grain Marketing Board]. So it is a man's crop. In case of surplus the man and woman share. The woman would get her share for domestic consumption whilst the man would get his share for sale.

Researcher: What about when it comes to cotton?

Mr Arumando: Women normally do not know about cotton. We are the owners of cotton so we know more. If it refuses to germinate we will know what to do.

Mrs Arumando: Aah, but I have a lot of knowledge on cotton. I know everything. Cotton is very difficult. If it refuses to germinate you will have to sow more seed.

Mr Arumando: Like this time, for cotton, we should have tilled the land already. By the time you send a bale of cotton to the CMB [Cotton Marketing Board] you will have worked. Maize is very easy. For beans if you do not spray when it starts to flower, pests will eat it. Soya beans for bread is difficult at sowing, but once it germinates you are home and dry.

It can be argued that knowledge was gendered to the extent that female expertise was rarely questioned in areas that were traditionally considered their domain. However, when it came to farming crops like maize, cotton and tobacco, men generally regarded themselves as more knowledgeable. Men's advice was also more actively sought on these crops. In all the interviews, both women and men pointed out that crops like cow peas, round nuts and groundnuts were women's crops and that women had more knowledge where those crops were concerned. What is interesting, however, is that women also claimed expertise on the men's crops while males always deferred questions on women's crops to their wives, professing complete ignorance where these crops were concerned. This suggests that these are not simply knowledge claims but rather a fight over resources. Women were said to have knowledge where non-commercial crop varieties were concerned. As a result they could not rightfully claim full ownership of the proceeds from the commercial crop varieties because they were supposed to know nothing about how to grow these.

On occasions when women were consulted about cash crops it was not usually because their knowledge about these crops was highly valued. All the women in the sample concurred that their husbands would ask them for their opinions but when their opinions did not agree with those of their husbands they ended up doing what the husband wanted. When one farmer started to cultivate flue-cured tobacco instead of the air-cured varieties, he did not consult his wife because he thought she knew nothing about tobacco farming. However, at first the wife resisted this crop because she knew it was very labour intensive and she withdrew her labour by pretending to be sick for part of the farming season. Although the husband strongly suspected her of feigning illness, he could not force her to work without seeming like a villain in the village. She later agreed to cultivate flue-cured tobacco because it paid well, but the husband now consults his wife before adopting any new technology because he does not want his wife to withdraw her labour.

Women who were pointed out as knowledgeable about crops like tobacco and cotton were usually widows. Especially when it came to tobacco, people agreed that these women were usually free to attend AREX training courses and their success could not easily be attributed to the presence of men. One woman had successfully taken up tobacco farming after her husband's death. People claimed that it was because she had attended training courses on growing tobacco and gained the requisite knowledge. However, where a widow had adult sons, any success she might achieve as a cash crop farmer – or indeed in farming in general – was quickly explained in terms of these sons.

To prove that women had less knowledge than men, one farmer pointed out that it could be seen by the yield that women achieved when they farmed alone. Even with the traditionally female crops like groundnuts, women still achieved a lower yield than men when men decided to venture into groundnut farming, because men could access knowledge from AREX and use it in their ventures. However, one woman maintained that this was not because women knew less than men but simply because it was the men who allocated the farming land, and they naturally allocated the most fertile land for men's crops. In explaining why she had harvested only a small quantity of groundnuts, one woman in Mudzinge village explained:

I think it's because of the soil. When I got enough to sell, I had been given the shapa [sandy] soil … Baba [literally ‘father’ – but referring to her husband] is the one who gives me a piece of land to plant my crops. So I just plant wherever I am given.

The man who blamed the women's low productivity on what he perceived as their lack of knowledge conveniently did not mention that, as he had earlier mentioned apropos of farming in general, sometimes lack of access to resources such as money to purchase inputs might also explain this low productivity.

However, although women feel they can do better if given good soil, they are generally not bitter about the way land is allocated. This is because women's crops are not grown for commercial reasons and, although these crops allow for diversity in people's diets, they do not provide food security the way maize does.

Women were partial to open pollinated varieties whilst men expressed preference for the certified seed. All questions relating to open pollinated varieties were usually deferred to the wives of household heads during interviews. It was also the women who named open pollinated varieties because they were the ones who dealt most with these varieties and could name them according to their characteristics. The issue of open pollinated varieties was gendered because these varieties were usually not cultivated for commercial reasons, and hence fell under the control of women.

3.2 Poverty and the poverty of knowledge

Female-headed households predominated among the poor households in the two villages. Of the four female-headed households in the total sample of 14 households, two were categorised as poor, one as very poor and the fourth as moderately wealthy. The very poor woman had no children and had thus no access to labour, while the two poor households had all their children living at home and had no other sources of income. The moderately wealthy woman had sons and grandsons who were well educated and worked in the urban centres.

To measure the relative wealth and poverty of the households, an arbitrary measure was used based on indices the farmers used to describe rich and poor people in the villages. Farmers were asked to identify who in the village they thought were rich and who were poor, and why, and what kinds of lifestyle in the villages were associated with poverty and which with wealth. It emerged during these discussions that, although farmers were sometimes not willing to refer to themselves as poor or rich, in a general discussion of wealth and poverty certain themes recurred that then allowed the researchers (the team that had been involved in the International Food Policy Research Institute-funded project) to rank households in the sample according to wealth. Taking into consideration the farmers' perceptions, the team developed the index presented in Table 1. Using this arbitrary wealth ranking scale, they classified two households as very poor (0–1), five households as poor (2–6) and seven households as moderately wealthy (7–11). None were in the very wealthy category.

Table 1: Calculation of wealth

Cattle ownership	0 cattle = 0; 1–2 cattle = 1; 3–5 cattle = 2; 5–9 cattle = 3; 10 + cattle = 4	0–4 points
Ownership of equipment	Ploughs, scotch carts, cultivator, harrow, tractor	0–4 points
House	Cement, plastered floor, and windows of main house, roof of extension	0–4 points
Other investments	Grinding mill, rental of house in town, solar panel, other significant livestock, etc.	0–4 points
Maximum range		0–16 points

The female heads of poor households explained their poverty in different ways. One maintained that they were poor because the male household head had been ill before he finally passed away and had not been able to do much field work. Another maintained that it was because the husband had many wives and many children and everything he produced went towards family consumption. Another poor household attributed its poverty to the lack of labour. One of the successful male farmers pointed out that the poor households were very poor because they did not have the knowledge required to farm profitably. Something these households had in common was their lack of access to resources when they came into the resettlement scheme. They owned no cattle and only one of them owned a plough. Most of the moderately wealthy households came into the villages with a few resources of their own that gave them a head start over other households.

The fact that women predominated among the poor households may have been because of their lack of mobility. Only one female household head in the sample had regularly attended meetings. None of these female household heads had ever gone to the Grain Marketing Board depot or to Cottco (the Cotton Company of Zimbabwe) in Bindura where some respondents claimed they got information about new developments in farming by talking to farmers from other areas or the employees of these organisations. A highly mobile woman (not in the sample) headed one of the progressive female-headed households in Mudzinge Village. She was a traditional healer and almost everyone in Mudzinge and Muringamombe claimed some sort of relationship with this woman. She attended most of the agricultural meetings, which other women shied away from, and in 2001 she diversified into tobacco cultivation – a crop she had not cultivated when her husband was alive. Although other factors might explain her success, one factor that stands out is that, compared with other women, she was highly mobile and could access information that other women could not. In the same village there was another female traditional healer who did not have a husband to limit her movements but was not a successful farmer and barely produced enough to eat. Although she was confident and most people in the village affectionately referred to her as ‘grandmother’ or ‘aunt’, she did not actively seek information on how to access resources and loans from outside and did not attend lessons to learn about new crops. Mobility was a critical factor especially in those houses that did not have grown male children to take over this function of gathering information from other sources.

4. CONCLUSION

This paper has argued that women are not simply victims of gender discrimination and gender inequality. Women use a variety of strategies to challenge the males in their families, and this sometimes results in conflicts and contradictions. It has also argued that independence does not necessarily imply freedom and equality for all, but that some may lose so that others may gain. In this case women were not regarded as people who could be resettled in their own right despite the fact that they had participated in the liberation struggle. Even in those few homes were women were resettled in their own right, it is necessary to investigate decision-making. The present paper has shown that what land the women received from the government was a mere formality, since the power to make decisions about that land was usually taken over by their male relatives and ‘guardians’. A way to make sure that land awarded to women remains in women's hands might be for the government to make a law that land given to women should be inherited only by women in the event of the death of the female plot holder. If women have full rights over that land then they can be empowered to make decisions on how that land is used.

The paper has shown that ownership of land does not mean female empowerment. In some cases, women with access to land suffer from extreme forms of domestic violence at the hands of their landless husbands who want to wrest control of the land from them. Economic, cultural and social considerations might, however, make it difficult for women to exercise full rights to land, and to take advantage of opportunities to better themselves.

The paper also discussed conflict, decision-making and poverty as concepts and practices that can illuminate the gendering and gendered nature of knowledge in resettlement schemes. Claims to knowledge by both men and women are in the final analysis claims to the ownership of household and family resources.

Acknowledgments

This paper is the result of research funded by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) and was presented at the 16th International Sociology Association Conference in Durban, South Africa, 23–29 July 2006.

Notes

1 By ‘wrapper’ the speaker meant the piece of cloth that women tie around their waist on top of their everyday clothing, usually of sufficient length to reach to their feet.