This is the second in a short series of blogs reviewing recent literature on Zimbabwe’s land reform. The theme of gender and generation is a crucial one. Land reform changed gender relations as women gained access to land, sometimes in their own right. Old patriarchal relations typical of the communal areas were in some instances overturned as women gained opportunities as a result of land reform. This is not to say that the new scenario was truly equitable, as men have dominated certain areas of production – notably cash crops and large livestock – and very often control marketing, and so income flows to a household.
With men increasingly at home due to the decline in off-farm employment opportunities that once saw men moving to jobs in towns, mines or large-scale farms for periods of their lives. This old pattern of circular migration saw women take charge of the rural home as well as agricultural production. While migration has not ceased, a different pattern is seen and husbands and sons are more frequently around at home on the resettlement farms engaging in farming. With larger land areas, this requires a different type of farming to that seen in the communal areas, and for many households a more collaborative style of farming has emerged, involving both men and women and across generations.
Gendered impacts of land reform
A study by Clement Chipenda published in Goromonzi and Zvimba districts looked at agrarian labour and social reproduction outcomes for both A1 and A2 farmers in land reform areas. The paper published in the International Journal of Community Well-Being shows how land reform “facilitated the creation of employment opportunities, enhanced the productive and reproductive capacities of land reform beneficiaries, enabled wealth distribution and improved rural livelihoods”. However, because of the lack of resolution of Zimbabwe’s agrarian challenges due to on-going sanctions and the persistence of neoliberal context, there remains what they call “super-exploitation of labour”, which is reminiscent of the settler colonial era, meaning that much has not changed, especially for women and the more marginalised settlers. However, the field data from interviews with around 200 households shows how overall, “redistributive land reform has contributed to socio-economic transformation and enhanced citizens’ welfare and wellbeing”.
This does not necessarily translate into indicators of improved nutrition, as Kingstone Mujeyi and Jackqeline Mutambara show in a paper in Social Science and Humanities Open. Despite expectations that land reform would deliver improved nutritional outcomes as a result of greater access to land, more production and so greater amounts and diversities of food, data from a large survey show that women beneficiaries of land reform do not show improved nutritional status compared to communal area counterparts, even if dietary diversity is slightly higher. The article argues that this is down to poor education, lack of extension and limited networking to share information.
I wonder though if this is the full story, as women – whether in communal or land reform settings – know perfectly well how to improve their nutrition. This pattern was seen in the 1980s resettlement areas studied by Bill Kinsey and colleagues, where they suggested that larger households in resettlement areas meant that even with more food and income, it had to be shared with more people result in no net gains per person, and sometimes declines as the ‘magnet effect’ of land reform operated. We have seen a similar dynamic in our study areas, and this may be reflected in the national data reported here. Another intriguing hypothesis is that outcomes are more to do with sanitation and the ’shit factor’ than available food, as poor sanitation results in food not being effectively assimilated, resulting in declines in nutritional indicators. With the lack of basic infrastructure support (notably the building of pit latrines and the supply of boreholes and piped water) in the resettlement areas due to government neglect and the absence of aid agency/NGO projects due to sanctions, those living in land reform areas often have poor water and sanitation conditions compared to communal areas, which benefited from the hey-day of rural development in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Outcomes of land reform are of course highly varied – across time, between places and in relation to different categories of people. Former farmworkers, now often living within land reform areas but without significant areas of land for farming and no stable work, are a group who have often lost out from land reform, despite impressive, innovative adaptation to the new context. As Tom Tom and Resina Banda show in a fascinating paper in Feminist Africa, how female former farm workers have often suffered following land reform. As they note, a focus on women in the former farm worker populations has been absent from the literature, but they very often rely on precarious livelihoods, resulting in poverty, inequality, and marginalisation. Based on on-going work in Zvimba district in Mashonaland West province, the study highlights the variegated impacts of land reform on social protection and social reproduction for women. Despite successfully following diverse livelihoods have more agency than in their previous roles as dependent workers on large-scale workers, many are materially worse off than before, with major challenges for social reproduction and the ability to survive shocks to livelihoods. This is because of lack of policy attention to this group and the persistent gender hierarchies in (former) farm worker communities.
Generational questions: how can young people benefit from land reform?
In a book chapter called The Youth and Land Access Challenges: Critical Reflections from Post-Fast Track Land Reform Zimbabwe, Clement Chipenda and Tom Tom offer a useful overview of the generational questions emerging following land reform. 24 years after land reform, there is a new generation of children of settlers demanding land and seeking livelihoods and, as our research has shown, this presents many challenges. How can young people be accommodated on the land allocated to their parents? What forms of investment are required to generate livelihoods for the next generation? What social, political and economic relations emerge that transform the land reform areas one generation on? Based on extensive research particularly in Goromonzi and Zvimba districts, the chapter explores many of these questions. Formal access to land for young people is highly constrained as new allocations usually rely on local patronage networks, which they are not part of. Access to ‘political capital’ was seen as essential by youth informants in focus groups. As a consequence, most sought land through informal means, either through subdivisions or land sharing with parents or via land lease arrangements with settlers or through gaining access to small patches of land near rivers or dams that could be irrigated. Without formal rights to land in either case, young people have limited security presenting problems for the longer term as land reform areas transform across generations.
Vusilizwe Thebe and Elizabeth Shawa-Mangani in a paper in the Journal of Asian and African Studies show how youth land occupiers in Lupane district navigate a new livelihood following land invasions that started in 2012. Based on research in three villages over 10 years, the study shows how over time the land claimed was not necessarily used for farming as the sole sources of accumulation but as a base for the development of ‘worker-peasant’ livelihoods as the (now older) youth engaged in employment and combined off-farm work with small scale farming. A series of in-depth cases are at the core of the paper, highlighting how livelihoods are composed in an area where migrant labour has been central to the economy for a century. The struggle for land is, as the paper argues, intimately tied up with struggles over the wider economy, and in many places access to jobs is the crucial factor, even if having a secure rural base to call home is important. Land invasions as protests and demonstrations (as in the long tradition of madiro ‘freedom farming’ in Zimbabwe) provide a signal to the wider authorities. Unlike some policy narratives that land and agriculture will be a saviour for youth unemployment and discontent, this article highlights that the story is more complex and complex on and off farm livelihoods, including migration, will always be part of young people’s livelihoods in places like Lupane.
Negotiating land reform opportunities
The themes of gender and generation are essential in understanding the changing patterns of social reproduction in land reform areas, as these articles and chapters show. While land reform opened up opportunities for some, others – such as young people or farm workers who were not allocated land during the fast-track reform phase – must negotiate the complex social and political landscape of land reform areas to gain access to land and make a livelihood.
This blog was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland