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Offering
understanding of unfinished business
Reviewed by James Muzondidya, www.africanreviewofbooks.com
June 04, 2004
James Muzondidya
is a lecturer in the history department at the University of Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe's Unfinished
Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis
Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopoulos & Stig Jensen, eds.,
2003 Weaver
Press, Harare xi + 316 pages
The 'Zimbabwe
crisis' has become the subject of intense debate both inside and
outside Zimbabwe, and explanations for its origins, forms and outcomes
have been many and varied. What is, however, disappointing is that
despite their multiplicity, these explanations have done little
to improve our understanding of the complexity of the problems confronting
the country. The main problem being that many of these explanations
have not only been parochial and partisan but also imagined; seeking
to interpret the present problems out of history and context.
Moving away
from the tradition of narrow and partisan explanations which abound
on the topic, this study, bringing together expertise from various
scholars, policy analysts, development practitioners and activists
who have all researched and written on Zimbabwe for years, analytically
examines the crisis through its complexities and contradictions
while also trying to suggest solutions to it. Zimbabwe's Unfinished
Business's central thesis is that the "crisis is multi-layered,
and is rooted in the complex relationship between contestations
over land, processes of rule and state-making, and constructions
of nation and citizenship". It consists of nine chapters which
all address three interwoven themes in Zimbabwe's current history:
the question of justice and equity with regards to land and resource
ownership and redistribution; the restructuring and reconfiguration
of the state; and nationhood and citizenship in the postcolonial
state.
"A different
kind of imagination of farm workers and discourse of citizenship
and nationality is needed which allows for their full incorporation
into the postcolonial nation state" The opening chapter by
the two editors of the book, Amanda Hammar and Brian Raftopoulos,
introduces the main themes addressed by the study and lays out the
lead arguments of each chapter. It also provides a compact historical
overview of events and processes leading to the current crisis.
The second chapter by Eric Worby focuses on the current regime's
obsession with the twin questions of sovereignty and regime security
which has not only led to the sidelining of many other important
issues of national development but has also resulted in the exclusion
of other groups from their citizenship rights. Worby argues, essentially,
that President Robert Mugabe, by evoking memories of colonialism,
nationalism and the 1970s war, has successfully used the question
of national sovereignty to legitimise his authoritarian, unaccountable
and often violent exercise of power. Yet, this sovereignty, Worby
further informs us, is not much about protecting the Zimbabwean
people's security from the threat posed by "racially grounded
imperialism in the guise of Western, neo-liberal orthodoxy".
It is more about regime security and control of power and its exercise
by a much weakened and beleaguered state.
Jocelyn Alexander's
third chapter examines the changing relationships between contestations
over land and land use, processes of state-making, definitions of
nationalism and constructions of citizenship throughout the post-independence
period. She specifically compares and contrasts the current phase
of violent and forceful land occupation begun in 2000 with the earlier
occupations of the 1980s and 1990s. Apart from observing that the
earlier and current phases of land occupation differed, Alexander
correctly notes that there have been profound shifts in official
and public discourses over land and land occupations, in the nature
and scope of social movements seeking to claim land and the role
of the state in the management of land occupation. Such changes
are well documented in other important works on the land question
in Zimbabwe, especially those done by the Zimbabwean expert on land
and agrarian studies, Sam Moyo (Moyo 1995, 1998, 2001, 2003). Alexander
posits that the changes denote the "critical shifts in the
stakes, terms and alliances marking Zimbabwe's unfolding politics
of land", a proposition difficult to argue against given the
insurmountable evidence she presents to back up her argument.
Focusing on
local government and its continued violent disruption by supporters
of Zanu PF who include war veterans, youth militia, party politicians
and some government bureaucrats, the fourth chapter, by Amanda Hammar,
is yet again another rich contribution to the debate about the current
crisis. Noting that the sphere of local government has long been
characterised by contradictions, conflicts and contestations, Hammar
argues that the scale, terms and intensity of the present disruptions
aimed at asserting both the state and ruling party's control over
resources and populations is unprecedented and has radically altered
the formal practices of both politics and government. Reflecting
on consequences of the ongoing crisis and disorder Hammar argues
that it has produced specific forms of governance in which the use
of irregular and unregulated power by certain groups has come to
be regarded as normal and the system of local government itself
has been reconfigured in terms of the structures of power and the
modalities of its exercise.
The fifth and
sixth chapters of the book, by Blair Rutherford and Brian Raftopoulos,
respectively, discuss the issue of nationhood and citizenship and
the shape it has taken in Zimbabwe's current crisis. Rutherford's
chapter focuses on farm workers and shows how this group, comprising
mainly Malawian, Zambian and Mozambican immigrants and their descendants,
has been marginalised in the dominant politics of belonging and
citizenship in the postcolonial state. He argues that the moral
consciousness and political behaviour as well as civic and legal
rights of farm workers and their descendants has always been defined
through a process of historical imagination which anchored their
identity in their location on the farms and their presumed relationship
with white farmers. In terms of belonging, since independence farm
workers have not easily fitted into the postcolonial nation and
as such have been largely excluded from the national project of
development and its associated institutional arrangement. This has
had devastating consequences for farm workers in the context of
the present crisis, during which they have been, in large numbers
and often violently, displaced by and excluded from the land resettlement
process. Rutherford argues for a different kind of imagination of
farm workers and discourse of citizenship and nationality which
allows for their full incorporation into the postcolonial nation
state and increases their access to jobs, education, land and other
resources.
Brian Raftopoulos'
chapter, on the other hand, focuses on the ways in which the ruling
Zanu PF government has sought to define nationhood and citizenship
in the current crisis. He argues that the party has resorted to
an increasingly authoritarian nationalism and selective interpretation
of the past to define nationhood in a way that not only shuts down
the space for alternative perspectives, but also marginalises other
groups. In this grand Zanu PF strategy aimed at re-asserting the
party's political dominance, nationalism has been redefined from
the top down and all those with alternative views and not subscribing
to government political discourse have been subjected to violence
and oppression. Raftopoulos' chapter also suggests that a central
part of this process and politics has been a growing exclusivity
around the concept of citizenship, reformulated not only around
essentialised categories of race and ethnicity but also through
the ruling party's increasing attacks on foreign residents and their
descendants, mainly farm workers. Raftopoulos concludes that the
Zanu PF strategy, formulated against the backdrop of mounting pressure
from impoverished workers and peasants, protesting students and
a disgruntled bourgeoisie, is being adopted at a time when there
is a serious breakdown of national consensus on the discourse and
politics of the liberation struggle: the discourse of political
rights on the one hand and economic redistribution on the other.
This is a poignant observation which to a larger extent explains
the current impasse.
The seventh
chapter by Nelson Marongwe, focusing on conflicts over land and
natural resources across state lands, communal and resettlement
areas, and large-scale commercial farms, provides a solid analysis
of the land occupations that illustrate their historical, social,
political and economic contexts. It bases its analysis on fieldwork
conducted on the post-February 2000 land occupations of white commercial
farms. The chapter highlights an important dimension to the occupations,
including the motives of the occupiers, the influence of outside
interests, forms of mobilisation and types and scales of occupations.
Of particular interest in this chapter is its analysis of the complexity
of the occupations, especially with regard to the respective roles
and influences of the war veterans, the ruling party and local factors
in the occupations. Marongwe's analysis in this section presents
a complex picture of the occupations which shows that while the
state encouraged and supported the occupations for its own political
project the process had its own internal dynamics over which both
the state and its war veteran allies sometimes had no control.
Mandivamba Rukuni
and Stig Jensen's chapter addresses the long-term effects of the
land occupations and the 'fast-track' resettlement programme and
tries to suggest measures needed to redress the problems. They argue
that the current "fast-track" programme has not only been
chaotic but also destructive to the economy and that a successful
land reform programme is dependent on establishing political stability,
a sound economic base, relations of trust and sufficient institutional
capacity to undertake the reforms. Contending that tenure security,
in terms of individual and group rights to land, is the very basis
of political and social power, the chapter also suggests fundamental
changes in land tenure needed to guide the process of land reform.
The final chapter
of the book, by Ben Cousins, examines the significance and effects
of Zimbabwe's crisis in the broader context of post-colonial reform
and social transformation in the region. The central thesis of the
chapter is that the post-liberation governments of Southern Africa
have dismally failed to address the structural, social and political
legacies of colonial and apartheid rule, especially when it comes
to introducing meaningful social transformation and addressing the
imbalances in the distribution and ownership of land, a deeply contested
economic and political resource in the region.
Drawing on the
experiences of both land reform and democratisation in the region,
he argues that the process has been stalled largely because of the
shortcomings in current approaches and the polarisation of positions
on the subject. This polarisation has seen, on the one hand, the
emphasising of the "protection of private property under the
rubric of good governance and effective neo-liberal economic management",
and on the other, the invocation of identity politics and authoritarian
nationalism to call for radical land redistribution, but often masking
corrupt and exclusionary practices. Neither of these polarised positions,
Cousins further argues, has the capacity to provide solutions to
the current crisis in "developmental democracy" facing
the region, thus making imperative the search for alternative approaches
which focus on reducing poverty and undermining the foundations
of structural inequality while simultaneously deepening democracy.
This is a well
researched and excellently written book that provides a nuanced
and balanced analysis on the contemporary crisis in Zimbabwe. Unlike
most texts on the crisis which are mainly informed by, and also
reflect, the deep polarisation that exists in the country today,
this book neither reproduces the narrowly nationalist rhetoric of
Zanu PF nor adopts uncritically the liberalist counter-position.
It rather provides some provocative insights on the major issues
and forces at play and argues for the analytic inseparability of
questions of land, state, nation and citizenship. Zimbabwe's Unfinished
Business is a good recommendation to anyone interested in understanding
the complexities of the crisis in Zimbabwe.
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