Unlike the countries of West Africa, Zimbabwe did not suffer from the scourge of slavery. Instead, the British colonizer’s savage appropriation of land from those whose lives and culture depended upon it – and attempts to redress this horrendous injustice – provides the crucial historical fact for much of Zimbabwean culture. As the materials assembled by Andrew Morrison in Hyperland reveal, the question of land ownership relates essentially to a large number of culturally and politically defining questions including conceptions of property, nationhood, community, ethnicity, citizenship, and gender.
Many problems and issues arise in the fact that the area that is now Zimbabwe has changed a great deal since the last century and nothing can turn back the clock. Communal conceptions of self and property to some extent have been replaced by European notions of individual, corporate, and national property rights.
At the same time the way land is used has changed: Giving farmer non-arable lands that an agribusiness uses for grazing will neither provide food not restore a way of life. I strongly agree with the government’s efforts to redistribute land equitably in terms of the ratio between black and white and the land available.
At independence, Zimbabwe inherited a racially skewed agricultural land ownership pattern where the white large-scale commercial farmers, consisting of less than 1% of the population occupied 45% of agricultural land.
75% of this is in the high rainfall areas of Zimbabwe, where the potential for agricultural production is high. Equally significantly, 60% of this large-scale commercial land was not merely under-utilised but wholly unutilised.
Agrarian reform in Zimbabwe therefore revolves around land reform where the systematic dispossession and alienation of the land, from the black indigenous people during the period of colonial rule, are adequately addressed. The Zimbabwean Agrarian Reform involves restructuring of access to land, and an overall transformation of the existing farming system, institutions and structures. It includes access to markets, credit, training and access to social, developmental and economic amenities. It seeks to enhance agricultural productivity, leading to industrial and economic empowerment and macro-economic growth in the long term.
The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which set aside 51% of land for a few thousand white settlers, prohibited the indigenous people from owning and occupying lands in white commercial farming areas. The African Purchase Areas were created between the Indigenous reserve areas and the Commercial white settlers’ areas. The indigenous reserves became rechristened as Tribal Trust Lands following the gazetting of the Act in 1965, whose title was later changed to communal area in terms of the Communal Lands Act of 1981. This situation therefore witnessed the creation of three separate categories of land classification in Zimbabwe namely the Communal Areas Small Scale Commercial and Large Scale Commercial Areas.
The Land Reform Programme started in 1980 with the objective of addressing the imbalances in land access ownership and use, which existed in Zimbabwe before independence. Thank you President R.G.Mugabe.
Lastly, I am appealing to the Government through the Ministry of Youth, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment to put it into law that any person at attaining an agreed age (maybe 18-years-old) should own a piece of land in Zimbabwe. Land is life and also the youth is our tomorrow. – KUFAKUNESU MAWIRA, Hwange
Post published in: Letters to the Editor