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The land issue: from enslavement to environmentalism
Review by RS Roberts, The Zimbabwe Independent
February 22, 2008

DM Hughes, From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier (Harare, Weaver Press, 2006), xvii, 285pp.

This book, co-published in the USA, again puts Zimbabwe's reading public in Weaver's debt. For it touches on many important problems facing this country, particularly land, and should be read by all.

It's actual subject is a narrow stretch of land in the southern part of the Chimanimani-Sitatonga mountain ranges on both sides of the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border. The focus is on the Vhimba area, Chief Ngorima's Communal Land, and Chief Gogoi's lands in Mossurize. Two areas but one people, speaking Ndau and with the same experience of Gaza rule in the nineteenth century; but divided not just by an international frontier but also by a very different trajectory of colonial history and development.

On the Mozambique side the Portuguese in effect perpetuated the basic pre-colonial socioeconomic structure based on the accumulation of and circulation of subordinate people. Chiefly patronage and clientage continued, but made to serve Portuguese needs in the form of corvees and forced labor for the more developed areas to its north. And Renamo's need for manpower in effect continued such a system from 1979 to 1992.

This is what the "Enslavement" in the book's title means - pre-colonial slavery that was ambulatory or circulatory but not chattel. The point of the author's argument here is that people and not land was the issue, and the consequence of this was that boundaries and mapping received little attention under the Portuguese. On the Zimbabwean side of the frontier, however, things were very different.

In the 1890s the Moodie Trekkers simply seized, and thereafter the British South Africa Company appropriated and alienated, land that seemed best or most convenient for commercial agriculture. Africans were pushed or hemmed into reserves like Ngorima, often and far-sightedly set aside by Native Commissioners before it was official policy. And so in Zimbabwe mapping and definition of boundaries became crucial to all concerned; and chiefs and headmen became not so much governors of people as allocators of land. Hence people, particularly the marginal, the latecomers and refugees from Mozambique in the 1980s, became cannon-fodder for turf wars; they would be allocated disputed land, like an infantry, "to go over the top" of disputed boundaries rather than of defensive trenches. Politics in Rhodesia became cadastral.

This was particularly so in the area under study because its almost unique environmental features had the potential for new and varied uses which could only increase the pressure on land. In the 1950s had come the development of modern commercial forestry - the exotic trees needing the high rainfall of the region. This pushed former labor tenants from farms into the reserves, as did the growing European interest in conservation. In 1965 the Chimanimani National Park was enlarged and eight years later the Rusitu and Haroni Botanical Reserves were created, all at the expense of Ngorima's traditional lands.

This is where the "Environmentalism" of the book's title comes in. For after Independence in Zimbabwe in 1980 and peace in Mozambique in 1992 the special features of the region attracted renewed and even more varied interest - from capitalist companies and individuals, from charitable agencies (both mainly of whites) and government planners and local councils (eager for development, almost at any price).

The capitalists ranged from insensitive and grasping South African logging companies in Mozambique to sensitive individuals on the Zimbabwean side trying to combine conservation with profit by catering for "eco-tourists". The charitable agencies are mainly external donors and NGOs concerned with "sustainable development" and protection of the environment. Under their aegis, aided by government officials and institutions hand in hand with capitalists from the tourist industry and academics as consultants, Campfire (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) soon put the communal lands under attack again. But now insidious infiltration, however laudable the intentions, into the core of black farmlands rather than the tinkering with external borders as under the former white government. And the effect in Mozambique was similar, anticipating the peasants' getting real entitlement to their lands.

This and many other provocative proportions enliven this intriguing work, which should be read with Moore's book on the Tangwena resettlement area (reviewed earlier, Zimbabwe Independent February 9 - 15, 2007). Much better written that Moore's (a student can teach a lecturer how to suck eggs!) Hughes' book challenges us to look at land, particularly communal land in Zimbabwe, in a new light, to cast old prejudices aside. Many neo-liberal commentators have long argued that the solution is to give title in the communal lands; but we all know the fate of such reforms by Stolypin in the pre-Revolutionary Russia and the fate of the peasantry thereafter. Thus the implication of this book is that amidst the ever-changing and multitudinous uncertainties of Africa - climatic, demographic and political - inviolable reserves are still the best security for the people, at least until an efficient land market is allowed to (re)develop in the former commercial farming areas.

The old Rhodesian Native Department, then, did a good job, one must conclude, until it was invaded in the 1940s by dirigiste economists and scientists - the forebears of today's government planners who, as Moore showed, threatened Tangwena's people with eviction in the 1990s. Their more academic successors behind today's environmentalism may not be as dirigiste as either; but they usually get their way by "workshopping it" and by going through government agencies. Hughes himself might not go that far but, although part of the system, he does sound a warning bell.

Missionary imperialism took land and left Africans with the Bible; academic environmentalism will, if we are not careful, take the land and leave the people with an eco-tourist brochure. In the communal lands from Nyanga to Chimanimani, and in the "Safari" areas in the drier north, west and south, new forms of colonialism now stalk the land - but that not as bad, I suppose, as the anarchy in the former commercial farming areas.

*Prof Roberts is a former head of the History department at UZ

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