| reviews Zimbabwe’s
Unfinished Business Oxfam GB Writing books which seek seriously to explain Zimbabwe’s current terrifying travail is both difficult and very necessary. Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business succeeds triumphantly in this and it is therefore scandalous that it has failed to secure a British or American co-publisher alongside the courageous and enterprising Weaver Press of Zimbabwe. The book is however available in the UK through African Books Collective and in North America through Michigan State University Press. Unfinished Business is based on a conference held in Copenhagen in 2001, which sought with some success to find neutral terrain for the exchange of highly conflicting views. The introduction by Amanda Hammar and Brian Raftopoulos is the most useful single source I have come across in terms of helping readers to understand the manifold complexities of Zimbabwean society today, while the individual chapters are almost uniformly strong. Eric Worby writes on the end of modernity, Jocelyn Alexander on squatters, war veterans and the state, Amanda Hammar on local government, Nelson Marongwe on farm occupations and occupiers, Blair Rutherford on farm workers and farmers, Brian Raftopoulos on authoritarian nationalism, Mandivamba Rukuni and Stig Jensen on tenure reform and, lastly, Ben Cousins on the Zimbabwean crisis in the context of Southern Africa. Virtually all the chapters engage with fast moving issues and seek both to illustrate their complexity and to demonstrate the ways in which the Mugabe regime has sought to simplify and polarise them. Editing collections of this nature is often a thankless and frustrating task, but Hammar, Raftopoulos and Jensen have created a volume which is well integrated, coherent and innovative. The book focuses on three interlocked themes: the politics of land and resource distribution, reconstructions of nation and citizenship, and the remaking of state and modes of rule. The editors commendably ‘wish to open out the space in which the crisis can be told or read so as to facilitate greater transparency and nurture critical intellectual and political debate.’ (p.17). One early response, from Sam Moyo, was hostile and dismissive, perhaps illustrating the theme described here of the Mugabe regime’s ‘strategic narrowing of national identity and belonging’ and constructing ‘literal enemies out of so-called strangers and intruders’ (p.28). It seems impossible now for the country’s organic intellectuals to debate issues in the ways they once did. One of the bleakest comments in the book is Nelson Marongwe’s undoubtedly correct assertion that ‘since independence in 1980, there has been no democratic participation of communities in public land reform processes, whether in overall decision-making, the choice of farms for acquisition, or the selection of beneficiaries.’ (p.187). Given the obvious difficulties of research access, Marongwe’s chapter (and his other work) on farm occupations is particularly valuable. He represents a younger generation of scholars than most of the other, more academically established, authors represented here, and one that is in real danger of extinction. Unfinished Business as a whole effectively illustrates what Jocelyn Alexander calls the ‘profound shifts in official and popular discourses over land, in the nature of social movements seeking to claim land, and in the consequences for and role of the state.’ (p.83). Brian Raftopoulos stresses the ‘devastating rupture’ which has developed in Zimbabwean political discourse between redistribution and rights issues as a result of a particular articulation of ‘the land question’. (p.218). The editors are at pains to unpick ‘the’ land question and to reveal ‘the persistence and intensification of complex struggles over land and natural resources in a variety if contexts’ (p.20). Their assertion that ‘there are increasingly complex layers of differentiation and combinations of social classes with competing interests in ‘land’ per se’ (p.21) is amply born out by the current situation in the former white-owned commercial farms, now referred to as the new resettlement areas. Even a relatively casual reading of the pro-regime Herald and Sunday Mirror reveals a significant number of conflicts now raging between large and small farmers, with the richer generally managing to evict the poorer, and between leading politicians over land grabbing, multiple ownership and who should be the main beneficiaries of Fast Track. There are also conflicts over control of labour and the rights (if any) of the former farm workers; over ownership and tenure and who should pay for services such as water, electricity and telephones; and over management of common property resources, with reports of massive stripping of assets and environmental degradation, including tree cutting, gold panning, the killing of wild life, the pollution of water resources and silting up of rivers. History will doubtless judge the success or otherwise of Mugabe’s controversial Fast Track land reform programme. In the meantime, anyone interested in contemporary Zimbabwe is strongly urged to read Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business. © The author/publisher
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