A Critical Realist Exploration of Intergenerational Relations to Land in Small Scale Commercial Farming Families, Mushawasha Masvingo, Zimbabwe, 1953-2014

Abstract

The land reform process in Zimbabwe has raised critical questions about land with regard to ownership and access, productivity of land and the most suitable size of land (small scale or large scale). Over a decade after the most recent phase of land reform in Zimbabwe, critical questions about land are continually debated in an ever-growing literature on land. These questions span a wide margin, from ownership, access, and productivity to who exactly should benefit from land reform processes. One important debate has centred on the question of whether the primary consideration of land reform processes should be aimed at addressing the more ideational aspects of land (return to ancestral land, land as central to personal identities and the subsequent political and social processes of determining who belongs and who is a stranger) or material concerns (relating to questions of food security, livelihood making and the concerns with environmental change). Subsequently, literature dealing with land is often organised around a particular theme such as identity, tenure, politics, political economy, livelihoods and questions relating to environmental change. Using the case of small scale commercial farming families of Mushawasha in Masvingo Zimbabwe who came to own the land as purchase area farmers as a result of the 1930 Land Apportionment Act, this thesis constitutes an attempt to integrate multiple approaches to the question of land, using a critical realist framework. I argue that the link between people and land, which is explored generationally and in the context of broader economic, political, historical and social change in Zimbabwe, is ever changing and is influenced by a number of factors. For that reason, viewing the question of land in a reductionist fashion from either an ideational or a material paradigm is unsatisfactory. What this research reveals is that the links between people and land are tempered numerous factors including generation, gender and residential status.