New land, old claims and the politics of belonging during a changing agrarian situation in central Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article examines the way discourses of autochthony and belonging were deployed by various groups of people to make claims over land during the implementation of Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000. Although the FTLRP was not officially restitutive, people who occupied farms in Mhondoro Ngezi in central Zimbabwe claimed they were recovering their ancestral lands lost during colonial-era forced removals. As a result, discourses of autochthony and belonging became salient during land occupations. The paper concludes by arguing that claims of autochthony and belonging remain hugely contested and that such claims have underpinned the way various groups of people who occupied a former white-owned conservancy made claims over land and how they sought to legitimise such claims.