The Making of a System of Partisan Authority on Commercial Farmlands in Post-2000 Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Chamunogwa
Keyword(s):  
Land Reform ◽  
Fast Track ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Strong State ◽  
Commercial Farming ◽  
Reform Programme ◽  
Commercial Farms ◽  
New System

This chapter illustrates how powerful ruling parties can sidestep strong state institutions by pursuing and enforcing their political and developmental agendas through ‘twilight institutions’ operating on the state’s margins. It discusses the rapid displacement and remaking of power and authority on white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe, following the spectacular upheavals of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000. The chapter specifically explains how local ZANU-PF structures together with their allies—war veterans, youth militias, and others—constructed and established a new system of partisan authority that became the dominant mode of governing commercial farming areas from 2000 to 2002. These actors sought to use the system of partisan authority to recreate the terms of existence on occupied farms, to govern and regulate political conduct, and to control access to land and related resources.The chapter also brings into consideration farm occupiers’ experiences, responses, and adaptations of the system of partisan authority, an aspect neglected in the wider literature on FTLRP, which presents farm occupiers as accomplices and allies of ZANU-PF. Specifically, it illustrates how social categorizations and hierarchical ordering on occupied farms enabled ordinary occupiers to contest claims to authority and resources by local ZANU-PF structures, war veterans, and youth militias under the system of partisan authority.

Spirits and Land Reforms: Conflicts About Land in Dande, Northern Zimbabwe

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marja Spierenburg
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Fast Track ◽  
The State ◽  
Land Reforms ◽  
Reform Programme ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Commercial Farms ◽  
Communal Areas ◽  
Land Use Practices

AbstractDespite its present support for the invasion of (mainly white-owned) commercial farms and emphasis on 'fast-track resettlement', most interventions by the post-Independence government of Zimbabwe in agriculture aimed to confine African farmers to the Communal Areas. In Dande, northern Zimbabwe, a land reform programme was introduced in 1987 that sought to 'rationalise' local land use practices and render them more efficient. Such reforms were deemed necessary to reduce the pressure on commercial farms. This article describes how the reforms caused Mhondoro mediums in Dande to challenge the authority of the state over land, thereby referring to the role they and their spirits played in the struggle for Independence. Pressure on the mediums to revoke their criticism resulted in a complex process in which adherents challenged the reputation of mediums who were not steadfast in their resistance to the reforms.

Socio-Economic Characterisation of Resettled Smallholder Farmers in Rural Zimbabwe

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110588
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Ndhlovu
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Fast Track ◽  
Smallholder Farmers ◽  
Exploratory Research ◽  
Reform Programme ◽  
Small Holder Farmers ◽  
Small Holder ◽  
Blind Spots

The socio-economic characterisation of resettled small-holder farmers under the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in Zimbabwe has blind spots in relation to the emergent transformative social policy features such as ‘social cohesion’, ‘cooperation’, ‘protection’ and ‘accumulation’ which are equally important among land beneficiaries. Using the Sangwe farm, this article departs from the conventional use of the political economy, sustainable livelihoods, human rights-based and neo-patrimonial approaches to experiment with the transformative social policy approach. Using both quantitative and qualitative data in an exploratory research design, the article shows that viewed from the transformative social policy approach, the FTLRP was neither a resounding success nor a complete disaster. The programme actually produced mixed results. The article thus, recommends the use of in-depth, ideologically free and neutral approaches in its analysis so as to reveal its detailed outcomes. Additional studies in which existing land reform policies can be considered in the collective efforts of improving the transformative agenda of the FTLRP across the country are needed.

scholarly journals Shared Legacies of the War: Spirit Mediums and War Veterans in Southern Zimbabwe

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joost Fontein
Keyword(s):  
Land Reform ◽  
Fast Track ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
Great Zimbabwe ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
Reform Project ◽  
War Dead ◽  
Postcolonial States

AbstractThis paper explores the nature of ongoing relationships between war veterans and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, as well as the continuing salience of a shared chimurenga legacy of co-operation by these two groups, and how it has been put to use, and acted out by both in the context of Zimbabwe's recent fast track land reform project. In emphasising this continuity, the paper also considers whether a corresponding disparity between the ideology of the ruling political elite and the practices, experiences and performances of guerrillas, spirit mediums and others acting on the ground, which materialised during the liberation struggle, has re-emerged, despite or alongside the recent collaboration of some war veterans with the ruling party's rhetoric of 'patriotic history'. Engaging with Lambek's work on moral subjectivity and Mbembe's 'logic of conviviality' of postcolonial states and their subjects, it argues that war veterans and spirit mediums sometimes share a 'moral conviviality' which appears during bira possession ceremonies, in the shared demands for the return and reburial of the war dead from foreign countries, or for 'national' ceremonies held at Great Zimbabwe and elsewhere to thank the ancestors, as well as in the similar way in which spirit mediums and war veterans subject their agency to that of the ancestors in their narrative performances. It concludes by suggesting that although many war veterans have undeniably been closely complicit in the violent 'authoritarian nationalism' of the state, in this shared war legacy of spirit mediums and war veterans lies the opportunity for radical alternative imaginations of the state.

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