Changing ideas of belonging and identity in post-land reform Zimbabwe

This is the third in a short blog series on Zimbabwe research published recently. The theme of belonging and identity in the post-land reform setting has attracted a lot of research attention recently. As a whole suite of papers published in 2022 showed, negotiating belonging in a complex, fast-changing political landscape is not straightforward.

In 2000 or thereabouts people moved onto land from communal areas and towns to land that they often had no previous association with. Farm workers who joined the land invasions may have worked on the land and lived there sometimes for generations, but it was definitively not theirs. Many claimed ancestral connections to the land, given the existence of grave sites and chiefs and headmen competed with different narratives about who ‘owned’ the land. As resettlement farms became ‘home’ – where people lived and died and were often buried – then associations with the land changed, but the mix of people who came on land reform to the A1 resettlement farms meant that the process of creating communities and a sense of belonging was a process, one that continues to this day.

As reported on this blog before, Walter Chambati and Freedom Mazwi published a great paper in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy in in 2022, which delves into these themes. Just as the important book – Livelihoods of Ethnic Minorities in Rural Zimbabwe–  also reviewed last year, Chambati and Mazwi’s paper titled “The Land Belongs to Us”: Ethnic Claims Over Land During Zimbabwe’s Land Reforms explores how ethnicity – and what they call ethno-regionalism – intersects with class, political party affiliation, gender, citizenship, and generation. They argue that “ethno-regionalism was inevitable in the small-scale A1 farms, since it mainly resettled peasants near their communal areas of origin. However, in the small capitalist A2 farms, ethnic tensions were perceived through exclusions of the “insiders,” as they were edged out of the allocations by the urban middle classes seeking accumulation opportunities in the context of an economic crisis.” Such exclusions fuel ongoing grievances in certain areas, where demands for land from ‘indigenous’ people is seen to be marginalised by those connected to political elites, with either Zezuru (in the Mugabe era) or Karanga (in the Mnangagwa era) identities. The attempt to sideline ethnically based claims in Zimbabwe’s land reform (there is no provision for ‘restitution’ for example, unlike South Africa) may be undermined by an increasingly embedded ethno-regional politics.

A great paper by Malvern Marewo, Belonging and Agrarian Labour Exchanges in Zimbabwe: Navigating Between Communal Areas and Fast Track Villagised Settlements, published in Africa Spectrum looks at labour exchanges between A1 resettlement farmers and those in their communal areas of origin based on kinship and friendship ties. A case study from Mashonaland West shows that a sense of belonging is vital in labour exchanges and so enabling livelihoods. The article concludes that “belonging-based labour exchange enhances agricultural production and livelihoods in a new land ownership and economic circumstances.” Another paper by Marewo in the Journal of Southern African Studies explores other connections of ‘belonging’ between A1 farms and communal areas. These remain important, although in our sites they are on the wane given the span of time since settlement. Even burials are now occurring much more frequently in the resettlement areas. However, despite changes, more than 20 years after land reform these relations, connections and networks are central to sustaining the very social basis of production and livelihoods in the resettlements. Far from the idea of the resettlements being separated from ‘traditional’ systems, and so becoming ‘modern’ and ‘productive’ according to a technical frame, long run social ties based on extended kin networks are important, and the links between the communal and resettlement areas remain strong.

An ethnically identified, racial sense of belonging to the land of course continues to influence policy debates that plague the post-land reform period. Claims of compensation by former white farmers still have not been resolved, as political disputes persist about who are the rightful ‘owners’ of the land in the context of a liberation struggle and decolonisation process. Racially inflected assumptions abound, whether around who are the ‘successful’ farmers and what ‘farming’ should look like in contemporary Zimbabwe (often by implication of white colonial styles of farming) and who is ‘indigenous’ and so has rights to land and commitment to the nation. As an intriguing paper by Ntina Tzouvala – Invested in Whiteness: Zimbabwe, the von Pezold Arbitration, and the Question of Race in International Lawon the famous case centred on the appropriation of land in the Forrester estate in Mvurwi. This investment was protected by a Bilateral Investment Treaty (a so-called BIPPA arrangement) and the case, the paper suggests, highlights how some of the assumptions of international law assume particular versions of racialised ownership and claims, allowing “the arbitrators to artificially separate the question of race/ism from questions of property and wealth distribution, capitalist accumulation, and exploitation.” A focus on racially defined property relations is a reflection of (neo)liberal domestic and international legal systems”, which acts to make “racial capitalism as a structure of dispossession, exploitation and abandonment” invisible.

Race, ethnicity and constructions of identity have a huge influence on narratives of land ownership and senses of belonging to the land. In the context of Zimbabwe, the legacy of settler colonialism means that debates about land and race are never far away. While Mugabe’s post-Independent Zimbabwe initially strived to create a unified nation, inclusive of all ethnic identifications, the land reform caused divisions as forms of politicised ethno-regionalism and claims of racial discrimination in land appropriation held sway. Exacerbated by the framing of legal interventions and the ethnicization of political patronage systems in Zimbabwe, these themes are increasingly surfaced in today’s on-going struggles over land.

This blog was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland

Negotiating ‘belonging’ in Zimbabwe’s land reform areas

Much of the debate about land reform in Zimbabwe focuses on the material, livelihood consequences of getting new land and its politics, but what does it feel like? How does land reform alter the sense of belonging to a place, the forms of identity and the nature of citizenship? These themes are explored in a number of great new papers (and some older ones too) that I briefly review in this blog.

Competing claims

All these papers of course pick up on long-running discussions about rural identities and belonging in Zimbabwe, most notably as explored by Blair Rutherford in his books on farmworkers. As people often of ‘foreign’ origin, at least a few generations back, and with ambiguous associations with place, either as precarious employees in a white farm before land reform or as workers living in old compounds in new resettlements, ‘belonging’ has never been easy, despite living on a farm often over generations. There is, as Rutherford explains, a ‘cultural politics of recognition’.

This theme is taken up in a paper by Patience Chadambuka and Kirk Helliker, which documents the nature of disputes on ‘two sides of the stream’ between ‘foreign’ farmworkers (who had been resident on the farm before it was taken over) and new A1 settlers in Shamva district. Despite attempts at exclusion by the new settlers, the former workers also have claims to belonging and have tactics to negotiate these, as their settlement has gold deposits that the A1 farmers also wish to use. With their labour power and skills, as well as territorial access to resources near their settlement, farmworkers have agency, even if little formal power.

As Malvern Marewo explains for an A1 case study from Zvimba, a continuous negotiation of social relations around labour with A1 settlers is vital for former farmworkers to gain a new, reconfigured sense of connection with the farm, and some stability that comes with a feeling of ‘belonging’. This is often fraught and contested, but, as we have shown in our work in Mvurwi, can result in them gaining access to land, inputs and piecework.

A similar dynamic is seen as land is contested between settlers within A1 areas, highlighted in a nice paper based on a case from Bubi district by Senzeni Ncube and Malvern Marewo.  Here different types of claim are evident – with ancestral claims of ‘indigeneity’ competing with those that do not claim autochthony. In this case, there was one group that got the land in 2000, following the land invasions – including some with ancestral claims to the land – and another group that were added by administrators in 2014, as demands for land continue. This is quite a common phenomenon, as those often displaced from other state infrastructure or mining projects are squeezed into existing A1 schemes and where ‘I was here before you’ becomes the simple basis for claims-making.

Reshaped authority and the role of ‘tradition’

Land reform has reshaped not only land but also patterns of rural authority, with chiefs and headmen often tussling over who is in charge of land reform areas with competing versions of where graves and other ancestral sites are, as Grasian Mkodzongi, Joseph Mujere, Joost Fontein and others have discussed. Even though the resettlement areas were supposed to shed the limitations of ‘traditional authority’ with new revolutionary institutions – the Committee of Seven and so on – these soon were replaced by new, often invented, forms of tradition, as Malvern Marewo and Senzeni Ncube explore for a case in Zvimba. As they show, lineage and totem ties to their original areas remain strong in A1 resettlements. As we have found across our sites, even 22 years after the ‘fast-track’ land reform, such disputes over land, authority and who is a ‘citizen’ in the new land reform areas are far from settled.

The liberatory possibilities of land reform were claimed by many women in the early 2000s, escaping (at least for a while) the patriarchal limitations of ‘tradition’, as well as being able to farm and earn income independently. In many publications, Patience Mutopo documents this for a case study from Mwenezi, where women not only claim land (both independently and as part of marriage contracts) and are able to use this as a basis for mobile livelihoods based on trading to South Africa. The ‘belonging’ to the new land claimed as women, unlike in the communal areas, was she found central to how they were able to construct their livelihoods, and deal with conflicts with others, both at home in the new settlements and when on the move to South Africa.

Ethno-regionalism

How land reform affected populations on the margins, especially those of ‘minority’ ethnic groups is especially telling. Here land is firmly linked to cultural identities – whether of the Shangaan in the southeast or the Tonga in the Zambezi valley, as Felix Tombindo and Simbarashe and Gukurume discuss in their chapter in the recent book on Tonga Livelihoods in Rural Zimbabwe, edited by Kirk Helliker and Joshua Matanzima.

The claims of belonging have given rise to tensions across land reform areas, as locals with territorial and ancestral claims were squeezed out by those claiming the land in what was always touted as a national programme (Zimbabwe unlike South Africa did not undertake ‘restitution’ but only ‘redistribution’ and reform). This ‘ethno-regionalism’ as Walter Chambati and Freedom Mazwi dub it is centred on claims of belonging – to a place, to a region/ethnicity/language, to the nation.

White identities and belonging

The new identities of displaced white farmers are discussed by Rory Pilosoff and Sibanengi Ncube, focusing in particularly on tobacco farmers, many of whom – both former farmers and their children – have found new roles in the industry, working for the major leaf companies, on auction floors or in a diversity of contracting companies. No longer on the land, many have struggled with a new sense of belonging and identity, even if the work is sometimes better paid and easier than farming was. Quite a number of those who left the country have returned, citing the sense of belonging to Zimbabwe, rooted in social networks and the (continued) privilege of the white minority.

This is reflected in memoirs and journalistic writing by white farmers and others that have come out over the past 20 years. These often offer angry memories of displacement – and with this the reiteration of racist, colonial tropes portraying the new black farmers as unskilled, backward and so on. As David Hughes described in his 2010 book, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging, how those of European descent negotiate their sense of belonging is often at odds with local understandings of nature, wilderness, environment and farming, bringing them into conflict. Of course, as Rory Pilossof and Amanda Hammar have pointed out, not all ‘white’ experience is the same and not all whites in Zimbabwe were farmers. For former farmers, finding a new sense of belonging in urban-based office jobs, even if linked to agriculture, has been especially challenging for some, making the dislocation even harder.

Where is home?

‘Belonging’ is always negotiated and is always changing. As the land reform areas have become ‘home’ to new people over the last 20 years, others still have memories of them that are part of their identity, even if they no longer live there. Different people associate with a new place through different processes – links to ancestors, political allegiance or just through living there and delinking from other places that were once ‘home’. Indeed, today many settlers in the ‘new’ land reform have lived most if not all their lives there. As an A1 settler in Bubi explained to Senzeni Ncube and Malvern Marewo, “Things have changed. I no longer buy property and take it to my parents’ home for safekeeping. Now I have my own home where my property is. I have a place where I belong”.