| reviews The Unsettled Land: State-making & the Politics of Land
in Zimbabwe, 1893-2003 Reviewer: Alois S. Mlambo, University of Pretoria, South Africa Since the beginning of the controversial farm invasions in Zimbabwe in 2000 by some veterans of the Zimbabwe liberation war, the country has been in the throes of a severe economic, political and social crisis. Zimbabwe has experienced a veritable meltdown, the result of a combination of factors, including capital flight, the collapse of the country’s agricultural economy, international ostracism because of mounting human rights abuses, a debilitating brain drain, as hundreds of professionals leave for greener pasture abroad, and an inflation rate that is, currently the highest in the world. The country is also reeling from the effects of an HIV/AIDS pandemic at the very time that its health delivery system is collapsing due to lack of resources and manpower. While the current crisis is of recent origin, its roots go back to the establishment of European colonization in the early 1890s, as the books under review eloquently shows. It was then that the colonial policies of alienating African land and confining Africans to marginal Reserves began. Subsequent colonial policies engendered the resentment that was to fuel the anti-colonial struggle of the 1960s and beyond and, ultimately, burst into mayhem of the new millennium. It is this background that Jocelyn Alexander’s The Unsettled Land explores by examining how state-making on the land evolved over time and what contestations accompanied the process. This book documents how, under the banner of “development”, after conquest, Africans were subjected to land dispossession, forced evictions and segregation, as well as policy experimentation, when administrators and policy makers tried different strategies. The book challenges the view that the state was a monolithic entity that always knew what it wanted to achieve with regard to governance of the colonized. The book also challenges the view that the colonial state always spoke with one voice; it becomes apparent that they were many divisions and competing interests within the state over the broad policy goals and the instruments with which to achieve them. In addition, colonial policy change over time, as the state responded to changes in the intellectual climate and the state’s perceived objectives also shifted with time. Alexander also argues for a more nuanced appreciation of the African chiefs and their role in the colonial period, showing that they were neither always hapless tools of the colonial state, as implied in Mamdani’s ‘citizens and subjects’ thesis, nor were the chiefs consistently staunch opponents of colonial rule. The opponents and attitudes of the traditional leaders differed with the circumstances and over time, as is shown by the example of Chief Maduna of Insiza. He moved from antagonism to colonial policies to full collaboration with them before reverting to hostility again as he took up the African nationalist cause in the late colonial period. Alexander also maintains that, while the liberation war had main been fought over the land question and the liberation movements had promised to restore land to the people, the independence state changed little from the policies of the colonial state that it replaced; maintaining a top-down approach to land and championing modernity, central planning and science at the expense of the communities themselves wanted and, therefore provoking new forms of resistance and challenges. The book concludes with a brief look at the land invasions of the new millennium and how the latest version of land reform is a complete departure from earlier colonial and post-colonial policies on land. … In conclusion, Jocelyn Alexander’s The Unsettled
Land is a well-researched book which makes a significant contribution
to scholarship and complements existing literature on the history of
the colonial state and the land question in Zimbabwe. It makes good
use of a wide range of archival and other sources and is particularly
enriched by evidence from numerous interviews in Insiza and Chimanimani.
This book will be of very great interest to scholars on Zimbabwe’s
history in general and in the history of the country’s vexed
land question in particular, as well as to anyone interested in understanding
the dynamics 20th century European colonialism in Southern Africa.
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