Agrarian Change
2004
Reviewer: Ian Phimister,University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN

The crisis that has gripped Zimbabwe for the past four years or so has hugely intensified poverty, driven as it has been by political violence and widespread human rights abuses. With inflation surging out of control at 600 per cent p.a., real wages are now well below the low levels characteristic of the last years of colonial rule. An estimated 7.2 million people are dependent on international food aid, and some two million Zimbabweans are infected with HIV. Intertwined with this unfolding disaster is the Harare government’s ‘fast track’ land reform programme which has seen thousands of white commercial farmers and almost a million black farm workers brutally displaced. Unemployment is rife in an economy that is thought to have contracted by 30 per cent or more over the same period.

Not surprisingly, these turbulent times have attracted considerable attention. But while journalistic coverage has been extensive, it has also been uneven. This has been particularly true of Britain, the former colonial power, where the tribulations of white farmers have received a disproportionate number of column inches. Nor did the first wave of books, some academic, some rather less so, do much to redress the balance. All of them were partial, in the sense that they examined some elements of the crisis to the exclusion of others, or attributed everything that had gone wrong to corruption and megalomania on the part of Zimbabwe’s political elite. Even the growing number of excellent scholarly articles and special journal issues (not least Agrarian Change itself in 2001) have all been concerned with aspects of the current situation rather than any attempt at an overview. Only the recent special edition of African Studies Quarterly came close to providing a comprehensive account of Zimbabwe’s descent into chaos, but that has now largely been superceded with the publication a few months ago of Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis. Here at last is a study that takes due account of the historical roots of the crisis, even as it focuses on the complex interplay of developments since the watershed constitutional referendum result in February 2000 when the electorate inflicted an unprecedented defeat on the ruling ZANU-PF party.

The product initially of a conference held in Copenhagen in September 2001 under the auspices of the Centre for Development Research (now the Danish Institute for International Studies), Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business actually brings its analysis right up to July of last year in explicit recognition of the ‘simultaneous, incomplete and competing projects of transformation, legitimation and resistance currently underway’. Five of the book’s nine chapters are likely to be of special interest to readers of this journal. These range from a particularly valuable chapter on ‘Squatters’, Veterans and the State’, by Jocelyn Alexander, which nicely specifies the qualitative difference between earlier and current struggles over land; through those on farm occupations, farm workers, and land tenure, respectively by Nelson Marongwe, Blair Rutherford, and Mandivamba Rukuni and Stig Jensen; to Ben Cousins’ analysis of politics of land in the context of the Southern African region as a whole. All of them are very good and some are absolutely first-rate. To take only two examples; Rutherford’s chapter succeeds in bringing the tragedy that has enveloped farm labourers to vivid life even as he analyses their wider plight, while Rukuni and Jensen’s work examines not only the obvious disruption caused to the project of agricultural modernisation by the ‘fast-track’ programme, but also the need for land tenure reform and the restoration of trust.

Yet it would be a pity if these were the only chapters that were read. This is one of those rare collections where chapters build on one another. As individual contributors recognise, and as two of the editors explain with great subtlety in the introductory overview, the Zimbabwe crisis is by no means simply a land crisis. It is best understood as ‘a complex set of historically specific, inter-related and mutually reinforcing crises that need to be unpacked and analysed in relation to one another’. They argue in short for the ‘analytic inseparability of questions of land, state, nation and citizenship…[in a context where]… new configurations of alliance and animosity are emerging that simultaneously disrupt old essentialisms and construct new ones’. It is in this sense that the chapters on land raise wider questions, and the chapters on broader issues inform debates on land. Notably fine essays by Amanda Hammar, and by Brian Raftopoulos exemplify this point. For both authors, the pervasive violence of the state underpins an authoritarian nationalism whose self-serving answers to the land question are designed to reward some and punish others. ‘ZANU(PF)’s current vision of redistribution and authentic African government’, Hammar concludes, ‘is radically partisan and partial, and rests on dramatically altered and narrowing boundaries of national citizenship and belonging’.

But for all this stimulating book’s hard-headed understanding of the ruthless dynamics of struggle in the countryside and in the urban areas of present-day Zimbabwe, it displays a marked reluctance to see the Second Chimurenga, that is, the Shona term for the liberation war of the 1970s, so called after the first chimurenga/umvukela or risings against the settlers in 1896-7, in anything but the most positive light. Few contributors are prepared let go of the brave new world which the liberation war appeared to herald at the start of 1980, and some cling very tightly indeed to this founding myth. The possibility that present politics are deeply rooted in past practices is not entertained as seriously as it might be. One route to a democratic future not explored by the authors may lie in reassessing the content and trajectory of the hegemonic nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. More than 20 years ago, Lionel Cliffe identified what he termed ‘a simultaneity of struggle’ in the last phase of the liberation war during which ordinary men and women advanced their own interests independently of a leadership issuing instructions from Maputo and Lusaka. Much of what was progressive and has since been lost may well be found beyond purview of mainstream nationalism. Nonetheless, when all is criticised and done, this remains by far the best book on the current crisis. Excellently produced inside Zimbabwe itself by Murray McCartney and Irene Staunton’s splendid Weaver Press, a publishing house which has done more in its short life to nurture critical debate within the sub-continent than most of its long-established rivals, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business deserves the widest possible audience in Africa and elsewhere.

© The author/publisher

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