Description
In early 2000, a process of land occupation started in Zimbabwe. It involved the movement of hundreds of thousands of black farmers onto most commonly white-owned farms, regularly under the leadership of veterans of Zimbabwe’s 1970s liberation war. The Zanu (PF) government cast this moment as the tip of colonialism. Others saw it as mere electioneering, the desperate machinations of an illegitimate government.
This poorly understood crisis had deep roots. Within the settler period the federal government of Rhodesia divided the land along racial lines, leaving the black population in poor and overcrowded reserves. Independent Zimbabwe inherited now not only this profoundly unequal division of land but in addition a potent institutional and ideological legacy of contested claims to authority over the land. This combustible mix shaped political desires and discourses in addition to state and African institutions, setting the stage for the dramatic upheavals of 2000 and beyond.