Fast Track Land Reform Programme Research Articles

Keeping African women in social reproduction roles: a systematic qualitative review of literature on post-FTLRP Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT The capitalist sytem has been underwritten by unpaid social reproduction labour mostly provided by women. This article deploys social reproduction theory (SRT) to systematically review scholarly literature on Zimbabwe's fast track land reform programme (FTLRP) published since 2011. Research evidence indicates reasonable improvement on women's access to and control of land, but whether or not FTLPRP led to a more egalitarian division of social reproduction labour remains to be researched. The paper concludes by proposing a new research agenda on the shifting boundaries between workplace and home, paid and unpaid labour, for women on post-FTLRP farms.

Implications of peri-urban land reform programs on urban land markets: a case study of Harare, Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe implemented the Fast-Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP) in the year 2000. This program has had far-reaching implications on urban development, especially on urban land markets in cities and towns. This paper highlights the implications of the land reform program on urban land markets, using Harare as a case study. The paper is based on document review (policy, academic and development literature) and interviews with key informants with experience and knowledge of the land reform and its associated implications on urban land markets. Our analysis demonstrates that the land reform process in peri-urban spaces was complex and largely driven by political interests. The land reform process distorted the urban planning processes, leading to disparities in the land markets. Such disparities include informal and uncontrolled processes of accessing land and, ultimately, rapid development of informal settlements in the city. Political elites and land barons took advantage of the land reform program extorting money from desperate home-seekers. We conclude that the distortion of urban land markets by politically driven land reform processes negatively affects sustainable urban development. Overall, the paper makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on land reforms and peri-urban development in Africa, demonstrating the complex and multidimensional implications of land reform programs on peri-urban land markets. Based on the study findings, the paper provides a set of policy recommendations aimed at improving the effectiveness and equity of land reform programs in African peri-urban areas.

Informal land leasing and social relations: Insights from Zimbabwe’s small scale farms

This article examines the role of social relations in enabling informal land leasing in Zimbabwe's small scale (A1 villagised) settlements after the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). After Fast Track Land Reform (FTLRP) in Zimbabwe, although some studies have explored informal land leasing, limited attention has been provided to the increasing informal subdivision in A1 villagised plots. The paper uses social relations as a basis for understanding the nature of informal land subdivisions, drawing insights from Zimbabwe’s small-scale farms in Zvimba District, Mashonaland West Province. Using qualitative insights, the article argues that in cases where land is provided through land reform, policy formulators should acknowledge the existence of these subdivisions for people with limited access to land. This article concludes that social relations enable people to access land through informal channels in resettlement areas enabling people to bypass legal policy directives through land subdivisions.

Culture, politics and material landscaping as strategies of belonging: the case of ex-farm workers of foreign origin in Bushu communal areas, Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT This article examines the movement of former farm workers of foreign origin (mainly from Malawi, and a few from Mozambique) into the Bushu communal areas of Shamva District in Mashonaland Central Province in Zimbabwe subsequent to the disruptions caused by the state’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme beginning in the year 2000. It focuses more specifically on the project of belonging pursued by these ex-workers and their families in Bushu and the various non-economic strategies adopted in constructing this project. This project involves potentially transitioning from their historical status as farm people, people of foreign origin and cultural-ethnic strangers to becoming authentic autochthonous communal villagers. While these ex-farm labourers seek to actively immerse themselves in the milieu of Bushu, they also maintain – to some extent – a separate cultural identity, thereby developing their own unique version of communal-area belonging.

(Un)packaging the “sweetness” in the naming of farms by resettled Black sugarcane farmers in Chiredzi, Zimbabwe

Abstract This chapter makes a socio-onomastic analysis of farm naming by resettled “Black” sugarcane farmers in Chiredzi District, Zimbabwe. It focuses on the beneficiaries of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme initiated by the government from 2000. The research unravels the motives behind the selection of the names and their significance. This was achieved mostly through interviewing the owners responsible for naming their farms. It was observed that most of the names are in the Shona language and only a few in English, which points not only to the ethnicity of the beneficiaries but also to the change of ownership from “Whites” to “Blacks”. These names are largely celebratory, as they reflect on the elevation of the farmers’ socio- economic status and their hopes and aspirations, whilst some names indicate racial tensions characteristic of the period, the political rhetoric of the regime and the ruling party, as well as the spirituality and identity of the farmers.

Land use/cover change and transormations in Upper Runde Sub-catchment area in Zimbabwe

The study assessed land use/cover changes in the Upper Runnde sub-catchment in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2020 using GIS and remote sensing techniques with the support of interviews and field observations. Faster land use/cover changes were experienced within the 2000–2010 decade when compared to the 2010–2020 decade; for instance, bare land increased by 92.1% between 2000–2010 compared to 16.5% between 2010–2020. Major land cover transformations included change from forest land to bare land, grassland and shrub land, and change from grassland to bare and shrub land to grassland. The results confirmed conversion of forests to agricultural lands and settlements following the fast-track land reform program in 2000, and livestock increase induced overgrazing as major human activities driving land cover changes. There is a need for serious attention from resource management stakeholders before depletion of critical resources like water and woodlands. Therefore, the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Water, and Rural Resettlement and the Zimbabwe National Water Authority may consider strict auditing of land uses and water resource use in catchment areas to guard against encroachment of agriculture and other land uses in protected lands and fragile ecosystems like water bodies and wetlands.

Revisiting Enduring Labour Questions and Social Reproduction Dynamics in Rural Zimbabwe’s Post Land Reform Context: Implications on Citizen Welfare and Wellbeing

Enduring agrarian labour questions and social reproduction dynamics in former settler colonies like Zimbabwe have always been a subject of much scholarly interest. Two decades after Zimbabwe’s controversial fast track land reform programme (FTLRP), the agrarian labour questions and social reproduction dynamics are receiving renewed attention. This is partly attributable to an uneasy political transition, neo-liberal economic trajectories, and the perceived reversals of the policies of the Robert Mugabe administration. With these changes occurring, questions are arising on how this is implicating on agrarian labour and social reproduction in the resettlement areas created by the FTLRP. In a context of trying to understand the outcomes of land and agrarian reform framed within the transformative social policy conceptual framework, this article explores emergent agrarian labour and social reproduction dynamics in the two rural districts of Goromonzi and Zvimba in rural Zimbabwe. Using an interpretive research paradigm and a mixed methods research approach, the study elicited responses from 200 small to medium scale farmers who are beneficiaries of the FTLRP. Arguing from the position that land and agrarian reforms are an overlooked vector of social policy, the article investigated the extent to which the FTLRP has facilitated the creation of employment opportunities, enhanced the productive and reproductive capacities of land reform beneficiaries, enabled wealth distribution and improved rural livelihoods. The article shows that despite the emergent capitalist trajectories and the continued super exploitation of labour reminiscent of the settler colonial era, empirical field-based evidence suggests that redistributive land reform has contributed to socio-economic transformation and enhanced citizens welfare and wellbeing. This is shown as having been evident in the realm of agrarian labour and social reproduction.

Violence, Patronage Politics and Farm Ownership in Zimbabwean Land Reform

Abstract This article explores the “violence–politics of patronage” nexus of land redistribution and ownership after land reform in Zimbabwe. Foregrounding an analysis of the violence on farms, which has been explored by many scholars in other dimensions, the article presents hard evidence of what happened on these farms post the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. Deploying Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this article interrogates the sociocultural and political linkages of violence, patronage and farm ownership to illuminate the dark realities of land distribution after “jambanja” (farm invasions). The violent behaviour around resettled lands is a manifestation of a well-entrenched patronage system in which those whose political views diverge from the “hegemonic power” lose their land through unscrupulous acts. The violence of the jambanja era, initially targeted at white farmers within the context of a “nativist land revolution”, continues to manifest itself in communities, albeit differently. It is, as the French thinker, Jacques Mallet du Pan, said of the French Revolution, “the revolution devouring its own children”.

The Social and Cultural Impact of Post-War Measures on the Zimunya and Bvumba Communities, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1940s–1970s

Abstract This study investigates the social and cultural effects of post-war measures on Zimunya and Bvumba communities of colonial Zimbabwe (then known as Southern Rhodesia). Guided by a combination of primary and secondary sources, the article argues that dispossession and forced relocations of Africans who had continued staying on the so-called European land after the passing of the Land Apportionment Act (LAA) of 1930 became acute in the immediate years after the Second World War. The granting of vast tracts of land in the Zimunya community to veterans of World War II by the colonial government under the Ex-Servicemen Land Resettlement Scheme and the purchasing of land for a timber estate in Bvumba by the Rhodesian Wattle Company (RWC) in the immediate post-Second World War period dispossessed rural residents of their land and curtailed the growth and development of peasant agriculture. People affected were forcibly displaced to “native” reserves where they responded to challenges they faced by resorting to various coping mechanisms such as hunting, foraging, and, attending to riverine gardens.

The Diversification of Rural Livelihoods After the Year 2000 in Zimbabwe

The article explores rural livelihood diversification patterns after the year 2000 using the Zimbabwean case. It relied on 30 households’ life history accounts alongside document analysis by examining the processes, determinants, and outcomes of these livelihood configurations. While rural households’ livelihoods had come to entirely rely on either agriculture or wage employment or both before the 2000s, evidence has demonstrated that after the year 2000, the means of survival have been diversified into a number of a complicated archaeology of occupational testing through the streamlining of land and labour away from agriculture, and the consequent following of such occupations like hair-cutting, vending, migration among others. These livelihood patterns have been due to a complicated archaeology of events ranging from rural households’ socio-economic changes, the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, the unemployment effects of the fourth Industrial revolution and ecological destabilisation. Policy interventions, thus, need to acknowledge rural livelihoods diversification and help citizens by incorporating and helping these rural households into rural development projects and programmes to better their livelihoods.

The Political Economy of Farmland Taxation in Colonial and Postcolonial Zimbabwe, 1914–32 and 1980–c. 2018

This article contributes to the existing literature on the political economy of Zimbabwe by focusing on a hitherto understudied area, land taxation. While scholars have written extensively on the political economy of land in general, not much is available on debates around its taxation. Those that have written on the land question have paid less attention to its taxation. Similarly, recent works on the colony’s fiscal system lack the scope for a detailed examination of the land taxation question. By analysing how different governments of the country operating within distinct historical contexts approached the question of land taxation reinserts land taxation in conversations around the political economy of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, particularly how politics and economics intersected in shaping policy formulation and implementation. During the colonial period, the main idea behind the imposition of land tax was to force absentee landowners and those who occupied land for speculative purposes to sell their land or develop it; however, the situation changed following the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in 2000. At that stage, the main objective for land taxation shifted from encouraging the selling of land for redistributive purposes to making resettled farmers utilise their land. In either case, land taxation and contestations around it provide another way of looking at the dynamics of state making in settler colonial and post-settler colonial contexts. The article relies on a wide range of sources that include parliamentary debates, newspapers, archival sources, and other political pamphlets and documents. A close analysis of archival sources shows how arguments for and against land taxation changed or persisted across the colonial and postcolonial historical epochs.

The Dynamics of Rural Capitalist Accumulation in Post-Land Reform Zimbabwe

Gregory Elich interviews George T. Mudimu, a Zimbabwe-based agrarian specialist, about present-day land struggles in Zimbabwe, two decades after the institution of the Fast Track Land Reform Program.

Belonging and Agrarian Labour Exchanges in Zimbabwe: Navigating Between Communal Areas and Fast Track Villagised Settlements

This article examines the nature of labour exchange between A1 farmers with people in communal areas of origin based on kinship and friendship relations. While agrarian labour in Zimbabwe has attracted considerable interest in land reform debates, limited attention has been paid to agrarian labour exchange and livelihoods based on belonging to communal areas of origin under the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). Using a qualitative case study from Mashonaland West, Zimbabwe, I argue that belonging plays an important role in labour exchange and enabling livelihoods. This article illustrates that labour exchange in farm households still matter despite changes in land distribution and the economy. The article concludes that belonging-based labour exchange enhances agricultural production and livelihoods in a new land ownership and economic circumstances.

Emerging Dynamics in Mkwasine Sugar Estate After the Land Reform in Zimbabwe

Using secondary as well as descriptive data collected from a sample of 45 farmers in Mkwasine Sugar Estate in Chiredzi District in Zimbabwe’s south eastern lowveld, this study examined the dynamics that have emerged in Mkwasine Sugar Estate in the aftermath of land reform. The estate, formerly owned by the multinational-between Tongaat Hullet Group (THG) of South Africa was compulsorily acquired for the resettlement of black farmers in an attempt to redress the colonial imbalance of land ownership between whites and blacks. The study highlights reconfigured land ownership structures, tenure regimes, tensions and conflicts between the THG and the farmers as well as amongst the farmers themselves. Findings from the study established the reconfiguration of the once centrally managed estate into individually run farms of 10-20 hectares by over 400 black sugarcane farmers. The study recommends the resolution of contestations by all the stakeholders for the sustenance of the sugar industry

The fast track land reform of Zimbabwe read through the lens of Ubuntu

ABSTRACT The Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) of Zimbabwe (2000–2002) has been studied from economic perspectives that emphasise inequalities between landowners and the black majority. Other studies have focused on the violence engendered in the process of reclaiming land. Critical questions have not been raised about the sense of justice, and sensitivity to human lives lost, during the process of land takeovers. Hardened ideological positions of both white landowners and the nationalists over land can be considered to have led to extra-judicial killings, corruption, and loss of livelihoods for land owners and their farm labourers. This article applies the concept of Ubuntu to measure what was lost in terms of humaneness, prospects for true reconciliation, and compensatory and distributive justice from a process that emphasised violence over dialogue. Secondary, internet sources and limited interviews were used to gauge people’s perceptions of the manner of the FTLRP due to land restorative processes that to violate the very idea of dialogue to resolve conflicts encouraged in the philosophy of Ubuntu. The article provides recommendations of what could have been done to preserve the essential elements of Ubuntuism that put value on the otherness of the other persons in any situation.

Land-Based Livelihoods and the Covid-19 Challenge: Navigating the Social Capital-Social Distancing Tension on A1 Villages in Zimbabwe

This article examines the effect of social distancing on the social capital of beneficiaries of the A1 villagised model of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). In the A1 model beneficiaries were allocated individual arable and residential plots, but shared grazing land, social infrastructure, and services. A1 model beneficiaries rely on social capital to access resources, support agricultural production and other livelihood activities. In this setting, social capital is central to the normal functioning of these communities. When social distancing as a measure to contain the spread of the Covid-19 virus was introduced, this presented many challenges in A1 communities. This article looks at the challenges of observing social distancing in A1 beneficiary communities, which rely on interpersonal interaction to sustain livelihoods and life in general. Drawing from interviews with key informants in these communities, the article shows that social distancing is difficult to implement in communities that are built around strong social capital. The article illustrates that when confronted by challenges which come with practicing social distancing, beneficiaries of A1 communities opted to unite and protect their social capital and livelihoods.

Redistributive land reform policy and women nutritional status in Zimbabwe

Based on a nationally representative sample of 12,119 households surveyed in 2018, the study sought to analyse the impact of Zimbabwe's redistributive land reform policy on women's nutritional status. It focused on the minimum dietary diversity for women (MDD-W) in rural smallholder farming households and tested the hypothesis that improving access to adequate and better-quality agricultural land enhances the diversity and increases the availability of food, which in turn ensures better nutritional outcomes for the household. Using Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) modelling, the study found that diets consumed by women in rural smallholder farming households in Zimbabwe lack adequate diversity (MDD-W = 0.35); with MDD-W being marginally higher for land reform beneficiaries (MDD-W = 0.38) compared to non-beneficiaries (MDD-W = 0.35). However, average treatment estimation suggested that the implementation of the FTLRP has not positively impacted MDD-W as anticipated. This implies that land reform beneficiaries did not exhibit any superior nutritional outcomes compared to non-beneficiaries. Female members of the household need to be empowered with relevant nutritional education on the importance of consuming nutrient-rich foods and diversified diets. It is not enough for public policy to just emphasise on poverty reduction and attainment of food security; it is imperative that appropriate agrarian reform policy strategies are put in place to enhance the delivery of critical support services such as agricultural extension, credit and social protection, which have proven to have significant impact on the nutritional status of women of reproductive age in land reform areas. The land reform beneficiaries should be encouraged to build strong social capital through engaging in social networking activities, which enhance sharing of nutrition-sensitive information.

‘I Was Here Before You’: Politics of Belonging in A1 Villagised Farms of Zimbabwe

The Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) of 2000 redistributed land previously owned by White farmers to the majority Black Zimbabweans. In understanding the dynamics of land ownership, various studies have been conducted, and these highlight autochthonous claims to land based on attachment to graves and ancestral sites and contestations around them. However, non-ancestral claims to belonging have received limited attention. This article examines tensions between two groups of A1 villagised farms using empirical qualitative data from a case study in Bubi District. The article presents new forms of claims and contestations to autochthony and belonging in fast-track farms.

Social Differentiation and ‘Accumulation from Above’ in Zimbabwe’s Politicised Agrarian Landscape

The fast-track land reform programme in Zimbabwe radically transformed the country’s agrarian structure from one dominated by white-owned, large-scale farms to one dominated by a large group of black family farmers. Since 2017, a set of explanations has emerged that attempts to explain processes of social differentiation in the countryside. These explanations are predominantly informed by a materialist approach and conceptualise this process as accumulation from below, whereby the resettled farmers become internally differentiated through their own agricultural production resulting in different ‘class formations’. This materialist approach focuses on relations of production on the farm but does not pay close attention to the role of wider state practices and political processes involved in shaping accumulation dynamics in highly politicised agrarian landscapes. This paper argues that processes of social differentiation in Zimbabwe cannot be adequately studied in isolation from the political developments of the post-2000 period, when the state increasingly became reconfigured as a site of violence and patronage legitimated by patriotic history narratives. Based on new evidence on the 2007–08 state-led farm mechanisation scheme that was intended to distribute farm equipment to resettled farmers, I argue that the processes of differentiation largely took the form of preferential access to farming equipment both at the national and local levels. I term this ‘accumulation from above’ by patronage clients of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU[PF]). These clients include grassroots and senior party members or those linked to it, cabinet ministers, judges, members of the security sector, civil servants, national election administrators and traditional leaders who in turn sustain ZANU(PF)’s political hegemony in an unstable political agrarian landscape.

‘Social Relations and Agrarian Labour’: Exploring the Dynamics of Relations Between Former Farm Workers and A1 Beneficiaries in Zimbabwe’s A1 Settlements

This article examines the evolving nature of social and agrarian relations between A1 villagised beneficiaries of the Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe (FTLRP) and former farm workers. Using a case study from Zvimba District, Mashonaland West, I investigate how after FTLRP farm workers are accessing land and a host of livelihoods through social relations with the A1 beneficiaries. The article argues that after FTLRP, farm workers have established social relations with beneficiaries of FTLRP, which have enabled them to access land, agricultural inputs, and other socioeconomic benefits.