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Introduction
The agrarian question and politically motivated violence are Zimbabwe.s most enduring colonial legacies more than two decades after independence. The two are intimately linked. For the some 90 years the country was a settler colony, the adoption of discriminatory agricultural policies and the alienation of most of the fertile, well-watered land to European settlers resulted in the oppression, marginalization and impoverishment of indigenous rural people. In an effort to redress these inequities, the
government of Zimbabwe swiftly introduced a series of agrarian reform measures after independence. The resettlement activities initiated under these measures peaked—well below targeted levels—just after the mid-1980s. Thereafter real progress slowed and commitment weakened to sporadic administrative and legislative efforts to modify the operating environment for resettlement.
Following the rejection of the proposed new constitution in the February 2000 referendum, a constitutional amendment and a modified Land Acquisition Act were promulgated in April 2000 to effect land designation and compulsory acquisition without compensation. The same bill also declared Britain "liable" to pay compensation. The British government — along with other donors — had indicated a willingness to fund land reform, but only if it benefits the poor.
Proponents of land reform have argued for an expansion of the resettlement program to help redress the unequal distribution of land resources, to rectify acute land scarcity in communal areas, and to provide economic opportunities in a shrinking economy. Opponents of far-reaching land reform have asserted the superior efficiency of the commercial farming sector and the adverse consequences that an expanded resettlement program would have on agricultural output, employment and the composition and volume of agricultural exports. A government-appointed commission of experts studied Zimbabwe.s systems of land tenure and detailed possible options in its 1994 report. Few of its recommendations have been acted upon.
It is generally acknowledged that the nature of international conflict has altered fundamentally, with intrastate civil conflicts replacing wars between states. More than 90% of the wars over the past decade have involved political violence between adversaries at the substate level fighting primarily within the boundaries of a single state (Jackson, 2001). In Africa, this has been the case for some 40 years. Indeed, as Addison (2001, p. 1) remarks: "Africa has become synonymous with conflict."
Recent work suggests that many current conflicts differ from a breakdown of normally peaceful political systems.2 Rather, current conflicts are often created civil disequilibria in which violence performs a variety of functions in parallel, alternative systems of power, punishment, profit and protection. In this view, the everyday politics of weak states provides the soil in which many contemporary conflicts grow. Biases in public spending, predatory taxation, and bad or shortsighted policy encourage conflict by reducing the real incomes — both absolute and relative — of groups in society that suffer this discrimination. In this way, weak state politics inflames ethnic, economic and regional tensions — thus helping demagogues recruit and retain their followers. Addressing conflict within rather than between states requires new conflict management strategies. The rapidly growing literature in this area suggests that new modalities of dealing with conflict need to be oriented toward the reconstruction and reformulation of weak state political practice and aimed not so much at the
management of conflict as at its transformation.
The foundation that underlies the papers in this collection is the role of land reform in transforming conflict in agrarian economies in southern Africa, specifically in the economy of Zimbabwe. Originally, the focus was the role of land reform in preventing conflict. When the analyses here were being formulated in late 1999, it seemed evident that the slow rate of
progress on land reform in Zimbabwe could not continue. Numerical targets for the numbers of households to be resettled had been
chiselled into political granite in the early 1980s. Almost two decades later, however, nothing like the target numbers had been resettled. Yet lip service was regularly paid to land reform in the period just before every parliamentary and presidential election after independence. But few of the promises made in these political campaigns were kept. After an auspicious beginning in the early 1980s, land reform moved at a snail.s pace for some 15 years. With another parliamentary election due in 2000, it seemed obvious that Zimbabwe's ruling party — ZANU-PF — would again herald its commitment to providing land to the people. What was less apparent this time was whether the people would accept another round of empty promises from a government that was rapidly losing its credibility and acceptance.
Multiple perspectives help explain why the papers in this section have been written. There will be those who will read it solely as a response to Robert Mugabe.s political megalomania, to his cynical manipulation of the land issue as an election-winning tool. There is validity in this perspective. The long history of broken promises over land posed a clear threat to civil order in a setting where economic conditions were deteriorating rapidly also. From this perspective, it seemed sensible to try to make a case for Zimbabwe's government to talk less and do more about land reform. But equally as valid is the view that the case for land reform needed to be reinforced because of the failure of Zimbabwe.s friends and sponsors—the multilateral
and bilateral agencies especially—to persuade Robert Mugabe that land reform was too important to be neglected.
Zimbabwe did have an agrarian reform program before 2000, but current debate is dominated by the nature of the multiple complex crises that face the country. The papers in this section therefore draw upon data spanning more than 20 years in a search for understanding about what took place during Zimbabwe's Golden Age of resettlement, before the government lost its conviction in the central role of land redistribution in alleviating poverty. The twin themes are "what was" and "what could be." We focus little on the history, underlying resentments and the trigger mechanisms that underlie the current conflict. Similarly, we avoid most aspects of the unfolding crisis except certain ones that tell us how the door to the past was closed. There is a growing body
of literature that is highly variable in both quality and the coverage of substantive issues, but the definitive account of land in Zimbabwe has yet to be written.3
This paper seeks specifically to do two things. First, in an attempt to test the intentions of the early program—and implicitly to allow a contrast with the present one, the paper identifies those who received land in earlier years. Second,
the paper seeks to answer questions about what happened to those resettled in the early 1980s. Before turning to these two empirical tasks, however, some background is presented to the broader issue of land reform and conflict in Zimbabwe.
Footnotes:
- Final version accepted: 15 June 2004.
- See Kaldor (1999), Reno (1998), Berdal and Malone (2000) and the papers in the 2-volume study edited by
Nafziger, Stewart, and Vayrynen (2000).
- Readers wishing more background to the current crisis are referred particularly to Addison and Laakso
(2003), Hammar and Raftopoulos (2003), Roth and Gonese (2003), and Bernstein (2004).
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