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.
