New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions in Zimbabwe

35 Pages·2001·1.46 MB·English

Journal of Agrarian AC hRanegde,i vViodl.e d1 NLoa. n4d, ?O cNtobeewr 2 A001g,r appr.i a4n75 –C5o09n.flicts and Questions 475
A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts
and Questions in Zimbabwe
ERIC WORBY
The recent land invasions in Zimbabwe represent a profound andcontradictory
revolution in that country’s agrarian social order, with implications that have
already spilled over the borders of this small southern African country. Asettler
colonial heritage that tenaciously mapped land and tenure forms into unequal
zones according to race is giving way to a more complex and spatiallydiversified
configuration of agrarian property forms and production strategies. Controlover
access to the means of violence has been devolved to ruling party loyalists,war
veterans, army personnel, provincial administrators and local councillors, thus
shifting the forms and functions of power exercised in the name of the stateand
the nation. ‘Resettlement’, ‘squatting’ and ‘farm invasions’ constitute morally
charged alternatives in the lexicon of movement across tenurial boundaries.Con-
tested rights to land and to movement are mediated through discourses ofnational
and sub-national belonging and exclusion, with commercial farm workers –
deemed foreigners – the chief victims. The dramatic challenge that theinvasions
pose to private property, and to the rule of law more generally, suggest the
possible collapse of large-scale capitalist farming and the withdrawal of aidand
foreign investment. Yet, at the same time, new forms of capitalist investment
Eric Worby, Department of Anthropology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208277, New Haven, CT
06520–8277, USA. This special issue was launched at a workshop held at Yale University on 15 May
2000. The workshop, at which most of the contributors to this special issue were present, was
organized by Yuka Suzuki, Estienne Rodary, and myself, and generously supported by the African
Studies Council of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies (see Suzuki and Worby 2001).
My deepest thanks to Henry Bernstein for suggesting the project of this special issue and for his
unwavering support and confidence in it. He provided indispensable wisdom, more than his fair
share of editorial labour, and a perfectly proportioned measure of encouragement and coercion. The
help of Yuka Suzuki and Mieka Ritsema in assembling sources for this introduction is also much
appreciated. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan kindly provided the space in the SHADYC section of the
EHESS-Marseille, where part of this introduction was drafted and much of the early editorial work
was undertaken in the Fall of 2000. Sam Moyo generously made available his recent unpublished
work upon which I have drawn in this introduction. Amanda Hammar graciously provided an
opportunity for me to discuss some of these ideas in an informal way at the Center for Development
Research in Copenhagen, as did Suzanne Dansereau at St Mary’s University in Halifax. Finally, my
heartfelt thanks to every one of the contributors for their effort to meet deadlines and to bring
this project to fruition amidst numerous other pressing commitments, not to mention the personal
anxieties and suffering that all have experienced as Zimbabwe has followed a precipitous decline into
economic crisis and political violence. It should go without saying that the work represented here
builds upon and aspires to complement that of a distinguished group of more senior scholars who
have made agrarian studies in Zimbabwe such a rich and exciting area of research and meaningful
engagement. This collection stands as a tribute both to their exemplary level of commitment and to
their scholarly achievement.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres 2001.
476 Eric Worby
in transnational safari hunting and eco-tourism continue to nibble away at the
land base of the most peripheral of the old African reserves, facilitated by the
romantic idealism of international conservation NGOs, and the aggressivedis-
ciplinary impulses of Rural District Councils. The same shifts in patterns of
elite global consumption have led conservative white ranchers to take downfences
in favour of wildlife conservancies organized around a coextensivecommonage.
These profound, if contradictory, transformations in Zimbabwe’s agrariansocial
order are illuminated by a new generation of ethnographically grounded schol-
arship, the range of which is represented in the contributions to this specialissue
of the Journal of Agrarian Change.
Keywords: agrarian revolution, land reform, post-colonial state, prop-
erty, violence, Zimbabwe
Alliances between the state and local land self-provisioners, standing in
opposition to international forces and narrow, racially-defined landed inter-
ests, may become key definers of land reforms (Moyo 1999, 11).
The fact that this mayhem which Mugabe euphemistically calls his Third
Chimurenga (Revolution), has cost many lives and has as good asdestroyed
commercial agriculture in this country should be enough to make the Pres-
ident ashamed to describe it as a revolution. But since he insists on callingit
a revolution, we must point out that it is a revolution that has lost direction
completely, because, to use the late Mozambican President Samora Machel’s
own words, it is now devouring its own children. Apart from the rape,
torture and murder of innocent black farm workers on occupied white
farms, the invaders have shown that Mugabe’s claim that the invasions
were launched with the noble aim of giving land to the landless is not
entirely true. It was an excuse for a crude political campaign against the
opposition. (Daily News [Harare] 11 June 2001).
INTRODUCTION: AN AMBIGUOUS REVOLUTION
An agrarian revolution is unfolding in the landlocked state of Zimbabwe, the
former bastion of white settler colonialism, once known as Rhodesia, that lies in
the heart of southern Africa. Its hallmark is the occupation of white commercial
farms, ranches and wildlife conservancies. These ‘invasions’,1 as they have come
to be known, are tacitly supported by the state, tactically organized by the armed
forces and secret police, and effectively carried out by gangs of hired youtharmed
and trucked into the countryside by the ruling party. But they have been openly
1 It should be obvious that the term ‘invasion’ bears a heavy, if ambiguous, moral load. Both the
agents and objects of the process – invaders and invaded – have found sufficient righteousness in its
implications for the term to remain remarkably uncontroversial. Other descriptors are, however, in
circulation. The Commercial Farmers Union – the main political organ of white commercial farmers
– has used the term ‘illegal occupier’ to describe land invaders in the chronicle of events posted on its
official website. Moyo (2000b, 27) identifies several more terms in this morally laden lexicon, includ-
ing ‘land grabbing’, ‘trespassing’ and, his own choice, ‘self-provisioning’.
A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions 477
led by veterans of the war of liberation that brought about black majority rule in
1980, a group that in the past has had a palpable, if uneven, purchase on themoral
sympathies of both a national and an international public. Many who once stood
in solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle to recover the land lost to British and
South African imperialists and settlers at first found it difficult to condemn the
invasions outright. After all, there seemed to be more than a little justice in
impoverished ex-combatants doing an end-run around the neo-liberal alliance
that linked the World Bank, the British and American governments,multinational
agribusiness and white settler farmers – an alliance that held serious land redis-
tribution in check for a full generation after the conclusion of the struggle for
‘liberation’. For all but stalwart ruling-party loyalists, any remaining sympathy
was soon eclipsed by a more cynical interpretation that saw the invasions as a
desperate manoeuvre on the part of President Mugabe to secure support for a
transparently corrupt and unpopular regime. Regardless of their etiology, the
invasion of some 1700 commercial farms, and the continued occupation of the
majority of these, remains an accomplished social fact as much as an ongoing, if
highly contested, process. It will be difficult for any government to undo, even
if Mugabe does not remain in power long enough to see through his goal of
seizing virtually all of the farm properties still nominally in white hands.2
Despite the widely noted frustration with the glacial pace of land reform in
the 20 years following Zimbabwe’s transition to black majority rule in 1980, and
a recent upsurge in squatters’ movements (see Rutherford and Worby 1999), the
large-scale invasions took just about everyone by surprise. Some of the questions
they raise are of long-term structural significance. Do they herald the eclipse of
large-scale capitalist farming in Zimbabwe, or only the partial displacement of a
historically privileged white minority by their politically connected black bour-
geois counterparts – people who are equally committed to maintaining the con-
ditions of capitalist enterprise and accumulation? Yet even this question mayseem
like an irrelevant luxury at a moment of mounting fear and deprivation for the urban
and rural poor, a time when workers in formal employment (now a minority)
must choose between buying food for their families or paying exorbitant costs
for public transport to take them to work. As the links between foodproduction,
distribution and transport come unglued, a more immediate question arises. Will
the disregard for the rule of law by the state – as evidenced in the undermining of
the judiciary, the harassment of the opposition press and the deployment of the
army, police and paramilitary youth against the opposition party – bring aboutthe
further withdrawal of foreign capital, not to mention trade sanctions so severe
that the already failing economy will unravel entirely? Talk of national food riots
2 Under the Accelerated Land Reform and Resettlement Implementation Plan – ‘Fast Track’ Approach,
announced by Vice-President Joseph Msika on 15 July 2000, the provincial targets for resettlement
were specified at 3041 total farms distributed among the eight provinces. For full details, see the
Government of Zimbabwe’s official website: http://www.gta.gov.zw/Land%20Issues LAND.htm.
Over 2000 additional farms were listed for acquisition at the end of June 2001. After discounting
duplicate listings and delisted properties, the Commercial Farmers Union calculates that 4593 farms,
comprising 9 million ha, are now targetted for acquisition (Zimbabwe Independent, 3 August 2001).
478 Eric Worby
and starvation may be defensive hype by besieged white farmers, but it may
equally prove prophetic. From this perspective, the repercussions of the invasions
will undoubtedly be large and lasting, both within and beyond the country’s borders.
This special issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change is stimulated by the polit-
ical and analytical challenges of the moment occasioned by the land invasions, by
the political and economic chaos that both precipitated and followed from them,
and by the mix of international support, outrage and puzzlement to which they
have given rise. In the brief 16 months since they began in February 2000, the
farm invasions have precipitated the widespread erosion or effective collapse of
freehold property forms that have underpinned the racialized distribution of land
and the consolidation of large-scale capitalist agriculture for over a century. One
possible, if as yet uncertain, outcome, is the permanent division of a large pro-
portion of Zimbabwe’s 4500 capitalist estates – both private and multinationally
owned – into petty commodity-producing smallholdings, secured through some
combination of state patronage and locally organized violence. If this does indeed
occur on the scale that now seems likely, it will be a transformation with few
precedents anywhere in the world. This alone makes it a revolution worthy of
wide attention. More ominous is the likelihood that it will come about at least
in part through political violence on a scale only dimly visible from the already
harrowing accounts emerging from both city and countryside at the presenttime.
The contributors to this issue represent – though hardly exhaust – a new
generation of scholarship on contemporary agrarian society and politics in
Zimbabwe.3 All have completed dissertations (or dissertation research) on
Zimbabwean rural society within the past decade.4 In method, their work is
determinedly ethnographic. Emphatically this does not mean the comprehensive
study of so-called ‘tribes’, the hallmark of a discredited colonial anthropology in
Africa as elsewhere. District councillors and national politicians, human rights
organizations and World Bank economists all fall equally within the domain of
ethnographic inquiry in the sense used here. Nor does it suggest a strictly worm’s
eye view of social change that precludes any interest in grasping larger-scale
3 Zimbabwe has benefited from exemplary work in agrarian historiography and political economy,
the importance of which – in terms of both method and theory – is of far wider significance,
beginning with Ranger’s (1967) pioneering exploration in the political sociology of pre-colonial
rebellion, and Arrighi’s (1970) use of the Rhodesian case to model the economic logic of super-
exploitation in the colonial labour reserve economy. The work of Palmer (1977) documented in a
more or less definitive way the process of land alienation over the first half century of colonial rule,
which Phimister (1988) situated in a socially grounded analysis of capital and class formation for the
same period. Ranger (1985) continued to probe the relationship between what he called ‘peasant
consciousness’ and the struggle for national liberation by documenting the history of peasant–state
relations in a single district. This work was closely followed by Lan’s (1986) pathbreaking and
controversial effort to explain the synergistic convergence between the culturally grounded authority
of local spirit mediums and the socialist-nationalist project of ZANU-PF’s young guerilla insurgents
who drew upon their protection as they passed through the Zambezi Valley en route to engage the
Rhodesian forces. The most important recent monographs (Werbner 1991; Ranger 1999; Alexander
et al. 2000) have shifted to Matabeleland, exploring how phases of exposure to colonial and post-
colonial state violence have shaped the memories and meanings attached to agrarian environments.
4 See McGregor (1991), Worby (1992), Alexander (1993), Rutherford (1996), Nyambara (1999),
Hughes (1999a). Hammar and Suzuki are currently completing their dissertations.
A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions 479
orders of transformation. Rather, it means that their work is grounded in long-
term research that normally involves sustained engagement in the daily lives of
those about whom they are writing, and in the effort to understand the latter on
their own terms.
The main purpose of this introduction is to summarize the argument andsigni-
ficance of the essays in this special issue. Before that, I provide an overview of
the agrarian political economy set against the background of Zimbabwe’scolonial
and post-colonial history, and then suggest some of the broad themes and ques-
tions that make these case studies pioneering efforts in the critical ethnography
of Zimbabwe’s agrarian formation and ambiguous revolution. The case studies
presented by the contributors to this issue reveal the invasions to be only the
most explicit manifestation of revolutionary change.5 They may also be seen as
symptomatic of a more multifaceted, if equally profound, set of social transforma-
tions, some of which have been underway for at least a decade. As will become
apparent, these transformations involve: (1) qualitative shifts in the integration of
agricultural production and trade into transnational circuits of investment and
commodity exchange (involving, for example, high-value horticultural crops
flown on a daily basis to European markets, multinational agribusiness, sub-
contracted vegetable and tree crop farming, game ranching and eco-tourism); (2)
the incorporation of communal areas as sites for capitalist investment in wildlife
tourism and hunting safaris – this in the name of decentralizing local government
finance; (3) the emergence of a substantial black capitalist class with investments
not only in farms, but also in agriculturally related industries and marketing
ventures (Moyo 1995, 260); and (4) the massive expansion of the informal
economy alongside the collapse of the national currency, the outflow of invest-
ment, and the closure of numerous manufacturing concerns, consonant with the
failure of ‘adjustment’ under an IMF-imposed programme known as ESAP (Eco-
nomic and Structural Adjustment Programme) initiated in 1990. Before expanding
on these and related themes, however, it is useful to sketch the historical context
that shaped the broad contours of Zimbabwe’s agrarian structure and its‘agrarian
question’ in the first decade following Independence in 1980.
5 The invasions launched early last year, however, came at a time of severe political tension and
economic crisis (Worby 2001). Mugabe’s effort to gain a popular mandate on a new draft constitution
was stunningly rejected in the face of a mass democracy movement that cut across a wide swath of
civil society organizations. Pre-eminent among these was the Movement for Democratic Change, a
new opposition party born out of the independent trade union movement and led by Morgan
Tsvangirai, former economist and then general secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade
Unions. It was the rejection of the draft constitution – most notably the clause providing for land
acquisition without compensation – that precipitated the armed occupations of white farms. Mugabe
and his allies in the ruling party refused to fully endorse the invasions, while doing nothing to stop
them. Despite these equivocations, the President’s implicit authorization appeared as transparent as
his motives. With the economy in tatters, parliamentary elections looming and the MDC rapidly
gathering steam, Mugabe evidently decided to gamble, playing both the ‘land’ and the ‘race’ cards
that he had reserved in his hand since Independence. After nearly losing the parliamentary elections,
he stands to lose the presidential polls as well which, barring a coup or the introduction of martial
law, must be held by April 2002. For a fuller account, see Worby (2001) and Suzuki and Worby
(2001).
480 Eric Worby
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Only the barest outline of Zimbabwe’s colonial and post-colonial agrarianhistory
is attempted here, and that solely for the purpose of placing contemporaryagrarian
debates and conflicts in a suitable context for those unfamiliar with the country’s
past.6 The high plateau that lies between the Limpopo and Zambezi valleys was
for many centuries occupied by Shona-speaking peoples, who cultivated grain in
riverain gardens using hoes and who herded cattle for milk, hides and meat.Large
polities organized around centres of chiefly power grew from the control of trade
in gold and ivory that linked the plateau to the east coast of Africa from early in
the second millenium AD. When the Ndebele established themselves in what is
now the southwest of the country in the 1830s under Mzilikazi, they brought
scattered Shona and Tonga populations into relations of tribute andsubordination
through raiding and trading for cattle, as well as for young men and women.The
occupation of the eastern part of the region (known as Mashonaland) by Cecil
Rhodes’ Pioneer Column in 1890 was followed by the conquest of the Ndebele
state, centred in the southwest of the colony, in 1893. Rhodes’ British SouthAfrica
Company (BSAC) was assigned the role of administering the new colony onbehalf
of the British government. Large parcels of the best land were rapidly seized by
the BSAC or granted to members of the Pioneer Column and others who aided
in securing the fruits of conquest against the Ndebele and the Portuguese. Thefirst
native reserves were established in Matabeleland after the crushing of the anti-
colonial risings of 1896–7 (the ‘first Chimurenga war’). In the following dec-
ade, most European landowners made a living from what was known as ‘kaffir
farming’ – drawing rents in cash, crops or labour from Africans who remainedon
land alienated to European settlers. African cash-crop agriculture flourishedunder
these conditions, as markets for the supply of food and tobacco to mines and
towns expanded rapidly. In Mashonaland, where relatively fewer Africans had
been displaced by white property-owners, labour for European farms was largely
recruited from neighbouring colonies – Nyasaland (now Malawi), Northern
Rhodesia (Zambia) and Mozambique.
By 1908, when it became clear that gold deposits would not prove sufficient
to sustain investment in the colony, the BSAC began to promote the settlement
of Europeans on agricultural estates, as well as to invest in crop production oncom-
pany land. Various programmes to support white agriculture – includingscientific
agronomy, extension services, the deliberate depression of farm prices and thepro-
vision of cheap credit through a Land Bank – emanate from this period. All these
measures were used to establish a class of European capitalist farmers who would
ensure the stability and prosperity of the colony. Efforts to secure a local labour
supply for white farms involved increasing taxes and rents, with the long-term
6 The skeletal account that follows, which can scarcely claim to be scholarly, draws especiallyheavily
upon the foundational work of Palmer (1977). See also Mosley (1983), Moyana (1984), Phimister (1988),
Schmidt (1992) and Alexander et al. (2000) for a fuller agrarian history of Zimbabwe under colonial
rule. Hughes (this issue) provides an instructive account of land alienation and the Native Reserve
formation in a single eastern district that aptly exemplifies the process across much of the colony.
A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions 481
goal of dislodging African tenant farmers from European lands and relocatingthem
in much-diminished reserves – distant from markets, but near enough to migrate
to farms to sell their labour. These efforts were much more strenuously resisted,
on the whole, in Matabeleland, where the only reserves made available were in
waterless and malarial tracts of gusu land far from the Ndebele homeland.
In 1923, Europeans voted to become a self-governing colony, rather than a
fifth province of the Union of South Africa, bringing the period of British South
Africa Company administration to an end. At the time, the colony had an estim-
ated population of 35,900 Europeans and 890,000 Africans (Palmer 1977, 132).
The Morris Carter Land Commission of 1925 – whose recommendations were
largely embodied in the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 – established the
principle of racial segregation in the division of the colony’s land. The Act
created African Purchase Areas adjacent to the reserves with the objective of
absorbing the demands of Africans who aspired to own land without challenging
favourable access by whites to as yet unalienated land along the main line of rail.
The Maize Marketing Act of 1930 further guaranteed preferential access of Euro-
peans to domestic and export grain markets. In these ways, the protection of a
white commercial farming class was firmly secured by the colonial state in the
inter-war period. Remaining anomalies in the spatial segregation of land tenure
and occupancy rights were resolved in the period immediately following the
Second World War with the eviction of labour tenants from large estates in the
Midlands and Matabeleland.
The 1930s also saw an increasing preoccupation on the part of the colonial
government with the viability of what was called ‘native agriculture’ in relation
to the increasingly crowded and ecologically pressured resource base of the
reserves. Centralizing village settlement and demarcating land for cultivation
and grazing were core features of the rural development package vigorously dis-
seminated by A. D. Alvord, an American missionary appointed Agriculturalist
for the Instruction of Natives in 1926. The Natural Resources Act, passed in
1941, further concentrated the power of Native Commissioners in the reserves
to intervene decisively in matters of natural resource management, including
the forced destocking of cattle. Highly interventionist and disciplinary forms
of colonial governance reached their apogee with the Native Land Husbandry
Act (NLHA) of 1951, under which the planning and forced reorganization of
settlement and land use in the reserves were placed largely in the hands of techni-
cians in the Native Department. The measures the NLHA authorized inspired so
much resistance that it was abandoned a decade later. The single most massive
development intervention of the period, however, was the construction of the
Kariba Dam, which resulted in the forced displacement, in 1956–7, of tens of
thousands of Tonga-speaking people from the banks of the Zambezi and its
tributaries.
The events of the 1960s and 1970s are perhaps more widely known. In 1965,
under mounting pressure to decolonize from both the British and from a nation-
alist movement in which Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe were emerging
as key leaders, Prime Minister Ian Smith proclaimed the infamous Unilateral
482 Eric Worby
Declaration of Independence (UDI) for a largely unrecognized state of ‘Rhodesia’
on behalf of a divided white constituency. International sanctions followed. In
a bid to diffuse the appeal of African nationalists and to create a cadre of African
collaborators in the countryside, the Smith regime devolved increasing author-
ity to a greatly expanded number of government-appointed chiefs and headmen.
Meanwhile, agricultural extension services continued to be provided to ‘pro-
gressive’ black farmers in the reserves (tellingly relabelled ‘Tribal Trust Lands’)
and a ‘growth point’ strategy for the establishment of rural industries was estab-
lished around a nexus of irrigated government estates and outgrowers. The first
guerilla strikes were launched in 1966, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the
liberation war (the ‘Second Chimurenga’) decisively transformed daily life for
people throughout the rural areas. White farmers as well as black civil servants in
rural areas (including chiefs, teachers and agricultural extension workers) were
targeted by the main guerilla armies. Peasants were incarcerated in ‘protected
villages’ (also known as ‘keeps’). At the time peace was negotiated and a new
constitution drafted at Lancaster House in 1979, most rural areas were under the
effective control of either Nkomo’s ZIPRA forces (the armed wing of ZAPU) in
the west and northwest, or Mugabe’s ZANLA forces (the armed wing of ZANU-
PF) in the northeast and east. Mugabe won the elections in a surprise landslide
victory, paving the way for ZANU-PF control of the independent state.
The suffering, dislocation and terror experienced by rural people at the height
of the war (1975–9) was enormous. But its impact on agricultural productiv-
ity proved to be temporary. Buoyed by peace, good rains and the provision of
credit and marketing facilities, African smallholders dramatically increased – in
aggregate – the production and sale of all crops, and especially maize, in the
decade following Independence. The recovery and its benefits, however, were
unevenly distributed both socially and geographically. In general, smallholders
with access to draft animals or to a steady income from employment were able
to weather the drought of 1983–4, while those without were forced to sell assets
or fell deeply into debt. The people of Matabeleland, having thrown theirelectoral
support behind Nkomo’s ZAPU party, soon felt neglected in the apportionment
of resources for resettlement and rural development by the state. But they were
soon to experience much worse. Following the discovery of arms caches on a
ZAPU-owned farm in 1982, Mugabe unleashed the North Korean trained Fifth
Brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army on much of Matabeleland and the
Midlands, with a carte blanche to root out ‘dissidents’ by whatever means neces-
sary. Rural people in these regions were subsequently subjected to a systematic
terror, not only widespread murder, torture and illegal detention, but also forced
deprivation of food stocks during the drought. These atrocities, which reached
their greatest intensity in 1983–4, were only brought to an end with the pro-
clamation of a unity accord that incorporated ZAPU within ZANU-PF in 1987.
Although the remainder of the country prospered to the extent that Zimbabwe
was widely heralded as a rare ‘African success story’, it was at the cost of an
increasing debt burden (borne by individual peasants and by the government)
and by rising inflation. These conditions set the stage for the adoption of the
A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions 483
ESAP in 1990. That same year, it became possible for the Lancaster House con-
stitution to be amended by Parliament, opening the way for an end to its special
protection of private property and allowing for unilateral land acquisition for
redistribution by the state.
NEW QUESTIONS FOR A NEW AGRARIAN FORMATION
While few have disputed the moral imperative to redistribute land on grounds
of justice and fairness, a substantial amount of policy-oriented scholarship since
Independence has been devoted to demonstrating the rationality of resettlement
on grounds of efficiency and productivity alone (see, for example, Weiner et al.
1985). These scholars (notably Moyo 1986, 1995, 1999, 2000a, 2000b) have con-
sistently made the case that petty commodity producers on smallholdings in
Zimbabwe are at least as productive per cropped unit of land as their large, cap-
italist counterparts, provided that land quality (not to mention technology and
irrigation) is held equal. On this view, because smallholder agriculture is more
land and labour intensive, it amounts to a more rational way of utilizing thenation’s
prime agricultural land; therefore, it is argued, state-led acquisition of land for
redistribution is as justifiable in terms of macroeconomic management as it is in
terms of ensuring social welfare or simple political expediency. One thread of
this argument has been adopted by the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (representing
prosperous black farmers in communal areas and resettlement schemes): ‘trained’,
‘experienced’ or ‘successful’ farmers should be given preference in land redistribu-
tion/resettlement, a new perspective registered in the Land Policy announced by
the government in 1990 (Moyo 1995, 245).
In the light of such antecedents, what if the current land invasions are some-
thing more than a political gambit bereft of economic logic? What if, indeed, we
read them as a planned effort to transfer the historic means and substance of
agrarian capital accumulation to the hands of an elite capable of deploying viol-
ence in the name of a parochial nationalism and the redistributive functions of the
state? To pose this question is, at least tangentially, to address the political di-
mensions of the classical agrarian question. And the answers to that question
in Zimbabwe have thus far duplicated, more or less, those of South Africa, albeit
on a significantly reduced scale (see Weiner 1989; Bernstein 1996).
The Zimbabwean Agrarian Social Formation
As in other settler colonial societies on the continent, a dominant, dualistic struc-
ture of land tenure and governance has continued to inform analyses of, as much
as policy prescriptions for, the agrarian political economy long afterIndependence
(Weiner et al. 1985; Moyo 1995; O’Laughlin 1996; Mamdani1996; Tshuma 1997).
Freehold commercial farms and farm labour
Zimbabwe possesses a technically sophisticated and highly productive capitalist
agricultural sector, the owners of which are the historic heirs of the colonial
484 Eric Worby
dispossession that gave white settlers the most fertile and well-watered land and
consigned blacks to ‘Native Reserves’, now known as ‘Communal Areas’. This
large-scale sector, today comprising some 5000 farms,7 is organized around the
production of exportable commodities such as flue-cured tobacco (of which Zim-
babwe is a leading world producer), although crops with a sizeable domestic
market such as wheat and cotton are also significant. Estates owned by multina-
tional companies such as Anglo-American are the largest producers of tea, coffee,
timber and sugar.
The role of cheap and relatively tractable farm labour in enhancing profit-
ability has been central to the accumulation pattern across agriculture as a whole.
But the source of that labour has not, in the main, been those with land and
residence rights in the communal areas. Both the colonial state and producer
organizations collaborated in recruiting extra-territorial (especially Malawian)
labour on limited contracts, especially during the tobacco boom of the post-war
period (see Clarke 1977; Phimister 1986, 269). Their descendants, supplemented
by refugees from Mozambique and mostly female casual workers drawn from
adjacent communal lands, constitute most of the wage labour force in large-scale
agriculture (Moyo et al. 2000).8 These features of labour recruitment contribute
to workers’ isolation, insecurity and internal division, all of which facilitate the
forms of domination, dependence and exploitation that characterize the social
organization of labour and everyday life on farms (Rutherford 1996, 1997).
Although strikes are not unknown (most recently in 1998), farm workers have
been notoriously difficult to organize, perhaps even more so since casualiz-
ation (and feminization) has been pursued as a response to legislated increases in
the minimum wage.9
Small-scale commercial farms
This land-holding category, comprising some 9000 farms of 20–200 ha,originates
from the African Purchase Areas established by the Land Apportionment Act in
1930. Occupying a relatively small proportion of the national land, the main
significance of this category has been its role as a cultural and economic incub-
ator of African middle-class intellectuals, businessmen, professionals and nation-
alist politicians (see Ranger 1995).
7 These farms now occupy approximately 11 million ha, or one-third of the total cultivable land.
They vary dramatically in size and pattern of ownership. While most are still owned by whites, or
by companies controlled by them, Moyo (2000a) reports that some 800 are now owned by blacks.
In May 1993, a clandestine programme to transfer lands with expired leases to persons closely
connected to the government was initiated; 98 black farmers had acquired land in this way by 1995
(Moyo 1995, 114), although Tshuma (1997, 134) claims that the policy was abandoned after a public
outcry.
8 Permanent and semi-permanent farm workers number some 320,000 today; when their dependents
are included the number rises to roughly 2 million (Moyo et al. 2000) or fully one-sixth of the
national population.
9 Over 50,000 jobs in commercial farming were apparently shed following post-Independence
minimum wage legislation (Moyo 1986, 192).