Zimbabwe’s land reform: challenging the myths

Most commentary on Zimbabwe’s land reform insists that agricultural production has almost totally collapsed, that food insecurity is rife, that rural economies are in precipitous decline, that political ‘cronies’ have taken over the land and that farm labour has all been displaced. This paper however argues that the story is not simply one of collapse and catastrophe; it is much more nuanced and complex, with successes as well as failures. The paper provides a summary of some of the key findings from a ten-year study in Masvingo province and the book Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities. The paper documents the nature of the radical transformation of agrarian structure that has occurred both nationally and within the province, and the implications for agricultural production and livelihoods. A discussion of who got the land shows the diversity of new settlers, many of whom have invested substantially in their new farms. An emergent group ‘middle farmers’ is identified who are producing, investing and accumulating. This has important implications – both economically and politically – for the future, as the final section on policy challenges discusses.ESR

Data for: Origin of the Mashava Igneous Complex, south central Zimbabwe: evidence from Prince Mine chromite compositions

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Partisan citizenship and its discontents: precarious possession and political agency on Harare City’s expanding margins

On the margins of Zimbabwe’s expanding capital Harare, the ruling ZANU–PF party promotes a view of access to urban land, housing and security as ‘gift’, conditional on demonstrations of party loyalty. This article discusses contestation over this form of partisan citizenship, making the following broader arguments. First, it argues that the notion of partisan citizenship draws attention to the role of party political affiliation as a source of differential entitlements in illiberal democracies, countering a tendency to emphasise ethno-regional, racialized or religious communal identities as the primary sources of graduated citizenship in Africa. Second, it casts clientelist subjection as a contextual and contentious domain of ideas and action, rather than presenting it as cultural persistence or reducing it solely to material bargaining. Third, the article uses the Zimbabwean case to caution against a tendency within debates over southern urbanism to celebrate land occupations and informal construction as political resistance and route to full citizenship. In these ways, the article offers partisan citizenship as a means of taking forward debates over re-configurations of citizenship in Africa’s illiberal democracies and the politics of precarious peripheries in the urbanising global South more broadly