Suffering for Territory

Moore Donald S. Moore

Description

Since 2000, black squatters have forcibly occupied white farms across Zimbabwe, reigniting questions of racialized dispossession, land rights, and legacies of liberation. Donald S. Moore probes these contentious politics by analyzing fierce disputes over territory, sovereignty, and subjection in the country's eastern highlands. He focuses on poor farmers in Kaerezi who endured colonial evictions from their ancestral land and lived as refugees in Mozambique during Zimbabwe's guerrilla war. After independence in 1980, Kaerezians returned home to a changed landscape. Postcolonial bureaucrats had converted their land from a white ranch into a state resettlement scheme. Those who defied this new spatial order were threatened with eviction. Moore shows how Kaerezians' predicaments of place pivot on memories of "suffering for territory," at once an idiom of identity and entitlement. Combining fine-grained ethnography with innovative theoretical insights, this book illuminates the complex interconnections between local practices of power and the wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global discourses of development.Moore makes a significant contribution to postcolonial theory with his conceptualization of "entangled landscapes" by articulating racialized rule, situated sovereignties, and environmental resources. Fusing Gramscian cultural politics and Foucault's analytic of governmentality, he enlists ethnography to foreground the spatiality of power. Suffering for Territory demonstrates how emplaced micro-practices matter, how the outcomes of cultural struggles are contingent on the diverse ways land comes to be inhabited, labored upon, and suffered for.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Zimbabue
• Land law
• Zimbabwe

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 12 septembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387329
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Su√ering for Territory

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s ∞ Durham & London ∞ 2005

s u f f e r i n g f o r t e r r i t o r y

∞ ∞ ∞ Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe

∞ ∞ ∞ Donald S. Moore

∫2005 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by CH Westmoreland

Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

l i b r a ry o f c o n g r e s s c ata l o g i n g  i n  p u b l i c at i o n d ata

Moore, Donald S. Su√ering for territory : race, place, and power in Zimbabwe / Donald S. Moore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn0-8223-3582-4 (cloth : acid-free paper) isbn0-8223-3570-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Land use—Government policy—Zimbabwe. 2. Land settlement— Zimbabwe. 3. Land settlement—Government policy—Zimbabwe. 4. Land tenure—Zimbabwe. 5. Zimbabwe—Race relations.i. Title. hd992.z63m665 2005 333.3%16891—dc22 2005004618

For Ginger and for Chiratidzo’s family

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Abbreviations xix

introduction

Situated Struggles 1

part iGoverning Space 1 Lines of Dissent 35 2 Disciplining Development 68 3 Landscapes of Livelihood 96

part iiColonial Cartographies 4 Racialized Dispossession 129 5 The Ethnic Spatial Fix 153 6 Enduring Evictions 184

part iiiEntangled Landscapes 7 Selective Sovereignties 219 8 Spatial Subjection 250 9 The Traction of Rights and Rule 281

epilogueE√ective Articulations 310

Notes 323 References 365 Index 387

Preface

A specter is haunting Zimbabwe—the specter of racialized dispossession. In 1890, white settlers, recruited by Cecil Rhodes and promised gold claims and 3,000 acres each, ran up the Union Jack on Salisbury’s Harare Hill claiming ‘‘posses- ∞ sion’’ of Mashonaland in the name of Queen Victoria. One hundred and ten years later, speaking in the capital Harare, Robert Mugabe marked the twentieth anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence. He decried the ‘‘nominal sovereignty’’ of flags, anthems, and a black president. Mugabe blasted Britain for engineering the Lancaster House Constitution that enshrined legal protection for private ≤ property at independence. ‘‘Naturally,’’ Mugabe told the national television au- dience, legacies of imperial rule led to ‘‘the current spate of farm occupations by the war veterans.’’ Criticizing Britain’s defacto defense of white property and its failure to honor commitments to bankroll resettlement, Mugabe deemed land ≥ reform ‘‘the last colonial question heavily qualifying our sovereignty.’’ Post- colonial Zimbabwe remained haunted by entanglements of race, rule, and land rights. In 2000, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (zanu-pf) ruling party provided military muscle, police protection, and executive endorse- ment to enable the occupation of hundreds of white-owned farms by ‘‘war veterans.’’ Youth militias joined former guerrilla fighters from the 1970s, spilling onto private property. Amid the economic hardship of massive unemployment and spiraling inflation, many yoked their rights claims to those of actual war vet- erans. Cell-phone squatters, political opportunists, and violent thugs also took part. Thezanu-pfWeb site provided sober rationalization for the ‘‘land occu- pations,’’ while the Movement for Democratic Change (mdc), the major opposi- tion party, decried ‘‘land invasions’’ on a link next to ‘‘violence’’ on its Internet