The importance of land in rethinking rural transformation, agrarian revolution and unfinished liberation in Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Dar es Salaam debates of the 1970s provide a starting point for a discussion of the need for sweeping rural social transformation and ‘finishing’ liberation in Africa through examples of Zimbabwe’s ‘fast-track’, 20 years of failed land reform in South Africa and Burkina Faso’s short period of radical reform. Too often, liberation is conceptualised as correcting inadequate formal democracy. More than meeting the needs of the rural poor or righting historical wrongs, the struggle for land can open a pathway based on mobilising the population for developing a new system of agriculture, linked to an independent national economy and radically different society.