Reconfigured Agrarian Relations in Zimbabwe

Reconfigured Agrarian Relations in Zimbabwe
Author: Shonhe, Toendepi
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2017-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9956764213

Radical land reform programmes generate changes in agrarian structures and capital accumulation trajectories in the countryside. This book examines how capital accumulation is being reshaped by changing financing and marketing of agricultural commodities and presents an emerging Quadi-PMMR-model agrarian structure composed of the poor, middle, middle-to-rich peasants and some rich capitalists with a growing middle scale farmer base constituting two thirds of the rural population in Zimbabwe. This evidence based assessment, 15 years after the FTLRP, sheds light on policy outcomes and impacts on communities, revealing the changing production, marketing, capital accumulation and class formation tendencies across Zimbabwe’s settlement models and agro-ecological settings. The book fuses the reliance on agrarian political economy lenses and factor component analysis to reveal the dynamics of agrarian change and to explore the dialectic between production and circulation and between the centre and periphery in exceptional fashion that expands our understanding of Zimbabwe’s agrarian transition.

Reconfigured Agrarian Relations in Zimbabwe

Reconfigured Agrarian Relations in Zimbabwe
Author: Toendepi Shonhe
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2017-12-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9956764108

Radical land reform programmes generate changes in agrarian structures and capital accumulation trajectories in the countryside. This book examines how capital accumulation is being reshaped by changing financing and marketing of agricultural commodities and presents an emerging Quadi-PMMR-model agrarian structure composed of the poor, middle, middle-to-rich peasants and some rich capitalists with a growing middle scale farmer base constituting two thirds of the rural population in Zimbabwe. This evidence based assessment, 15 years after the FTLRP, sheds light on policy outcomes and impacts on communities, revealing the changing production, marketing, capital accumulation and class formation tendencies across Zimbabwes settlement models and agro-ecological settings. The book fuses the reliance on agrarian political economy lenses and factor component analysis to reveal the dynamics of agrarian change and to explore the dialectic between production and circulation and between the centre and periphery in exceptional fashion that expands our understanding of Zimbabwes agrarian transition.

The Future of Zimbabwe’s Agrarian Sector

The Future of Zimbabwe’s Agrarian Sector
Author: Grasian Mkodzongi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2022-06-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000601870

This volume reflects on the recent political developments in Zimbabwe and their current and future impact on the agrarian sector. Utilising new empirical data gathered across Zimbabwe, the contributors shed light on the liberalisation of agricultural policy after Mugabe. Chapters examine how the adoption of neo-liberal orthodoxy in agrarian policy making will affect the new agrarian structure, looking at issues such as productivity, the impact on vulnerable groups, changing land tenure arrangements, joint ventures and land grabbing. Providing a new way of conceptualising Zimbabwe’s agrarian futures, this book will be of interest to researchers, NGOs and policymakers interested in the politics of land and agriculture in Zimbabwe and southern Africa.

Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe

Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe
Author: Sam Moyo
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 2869785534

The Fast Track Land Reform Programme implemented during the 2000s in Zimbabwe represents the only instance of radical redistributive land reforms since the end of the Cold War. It reversed the racially-skewed agrarian structure and discriminatory land tenures inherited from colonial rule. The land reform also radicalised the state towards a nationalist, introverted accumulation strategy, against a broad array of unilateral Western sanctions. Indeed, Zimbabwe's land reform, in its social and political dynamics, must be compared to the leading land reforms of the twentieth century, which include those of Mexico, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba and Mozambique. The fact that the Zimbabwe case has not been recognised as vanguard nationalism has much to do with the 'intellectual structural adjustment' which has accompanied neoliberalism and a hostile media campaign. This has entailed dubious theories of ëneopatrimonialismí, which reduce African politics and the state to endemic ëcorruptioní, ëpatronageí, and ëtribalismí while overstating the virtues of neoliberal good governance. Under this racist repertoire, it has been impossible to see class politics, mass mobilisation and resistance, let alone believe that something progressive can occur in Africa. This book comes to a conclusion that the Zimbabwe land reform represents a new form of resistance with distinct and innovative characteristics when compared to other cases of radicalisation, reform and resistance. The process of reform and resistance has entailed the deliberate creation of a tri-modal agrarian structure to accommodate and balance the interests of various domestic classes, the progressive restructuring of labour relations and agrarian markets, the continuing pressures for radical reforms (through the indigenisation of mining and other sectors), and the rise of extensive, albeit relatively weak, producer cooperative structures. The book also highlights some of the resonances between the Zimbabwean land struggles and those on the continent, as well as in the South in general, arguing that there are some convergences and divergences worthy of intellectual attention. The book thus calls for greater endogenous empirical research which overcomes the pre-occupation with failed interpretations of the nature of the state and agency in Africa.

After Radical Land Reform

After Radical Land Reform
Author: Gavin Muchetu
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2021-03-11
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9956551589

Comparing the Zimbabwean and Japanese agrarian experience may sound impossible. Still, the similarities in the socio-economic and political realities of their respective radical land reforms and grain policies provide scope for such an endeavour. This book examines the aftermath of Japans radical land reform and the development of her cooperatives. It then compares it to the nature and character of the Zimbabwe post-land reform agrarian structure. The author collected and analysed data from three villages in Japan, and three in Zimbabwe to understand different types of cooperatives, their growths, and constraints. Three distinct types of cooperatives emerged from Japans 70-year experience in cooperative development. One of these three was identified as providing more relevant lessons necessary for restructuring the British-Indian type of cooperatives currently obtaining in Zimbabwe. The central argument is that the radical Fast-Track Land Reform Programme provided a rare platform (as it did in Japan) to develop robust, genuine grassroots cooperatives from below. Based on a global political economy reading of agricultural production, the book sieves the pros and cons of the Japanese agricultural cooperative system with knowledge systems from the Zimbabwe movement to advance a new agricultural cooperative development framework for Zimbabwe and other post-colonial states.

The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe

The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe
Author: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2020-10-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030477339

This book is the first to tackle the difficult and complex politics of transition in Zimbabwe, with deep historical analysis. Its focus is on a very problematic political culture that is proving very hard to transcend. At the center of this culture is an unstable but resilient ‘nationalist-military’ alliance crafted during the anti-colonial liberation struggle in the 1970s. Inevitably, violence, misogyny and masculinity are constitutive of the political culture. Economically speaking, the culture is that of a bureaucratic, parasitic, primitive accumulation and corruption, which include invasion and emptying of state coffers by a self-styled ‘Chimurenga aristocracy.’ However, this Chimurenga aristocracy is not cohesive, as the politics that led to Robert Mugabe’s ousting from power was preceded by dirty and protracted internal factionalism. At the center of the factional politics was the ‘first family’:Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grace Mugabe. This book offers a multidisciplinary examination of the complex contemporary politics in Zimbabwe, taking seriously such issues as gender, misogyny, militarism, violence, media, identity, modes of accumulation, the ethnicization of politics, attempts to open lines of credit and FDI, national healing, and the national question as key variables not only of a complete political culture but also of difficult transitional politics.

Fending for Ourselves

Fending for Ourselves
Author: Rory Pilossof
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1779224028

Zimbabwe celebrated its independence just over 40 years ago. While the nation is no longer young, its population certainly is: over 60% are under the age of 35. Understanding youth perspectives and experiences is therefore vitally important. Fending for Ourselves reviews the recent histories and realities of youths in Zimbabwe, offering a distinguished range of authors exploring issues of education, employment and work, the urban experience, involvement in the informal economy, mental health, and political activity. Importantly, the collection examines successive generations of youth in Zimbabwe to show how ideas, experiences and reactions to the social, political, and economic context have shifted over time. Many of the issues affecting youth over the past 40 years have been traumatic and distressing physical and mental abuse, declining employment and educational opportunities, poverty, ill-health and loss of hope but this collection underlines the agency and resilience of Zimbabwes young people, and how they have found ways to navigate the political, social, and economic terrains they occupy.

Breaking the Colonial "Contract"

Breaking the Colonial
Author: Everisto Benyera
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2020-05-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1793622744

The book exposes various mechanisms and methods by which covert colonial mechanisms are employed to perpetuate colonialism, especially in Africa. Less overt and more covert perpetuation of colonialism is done through the use of networks. The main achievement of the initial phase of colonialism was the establishment of networks that are nefarious and omnipresent; constituting “distributed presence,” which allows for “action at a distance.” As a result, colonial subjects became willing participants in these processes, unbeknownst to them, which perpetuated their own colonialism. The book exposes forms of colonialism where manufactured consent is used to perpetuate colonialism. Trapped in this capitalist, Western, Christian language and moral world order without sovereignty, African countries continuously sink deeper into the colonial quagmire.

Necroclimatism in a Spectral World (Dis)order?

Necroclimatism in a Spectral World (Dis)order?
Author: Nhemachena, Artwell
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9956550469

Highlighting the problematiques of working with a narrow version of greenhouse effects or global warming, this book posits the theory of necroclimatism that encompasses broader versions of greenhouse effects and global warming. Conceiving cultures, societies, moral sensibilities, epistemologies, polities, economies, legal systems and religions of the formerly colonised peoples as greenhoused and entrapped in the heat of global apartheid and neo-colonialism, the book refuses to be confined to the pufferies of physical conceptualisations of greenhousing and global warming. Underlining the supposed disposability and dispensability of colonised peoples, the notion of necroclimatism explicates ways in which some people suffer various forms of death, which have increasingly become a feature of global apartheid and neo-colonialism that are cast in spectral sacrificial logics. Deemed to constitute disposable bodies, disposable cultures, disposable polities, disposable societies, disposable epistemologies, disposable religions, disposable laws and disposable economies, the sacrificed are, in the age of climate catastrophism, once again reminded that they ‘have duties to die’, to become extinct in order to save the global spaceship that is sinking due to climate change and global warming. This book therefore argues that in a sacrificial world (dis)order, binaries between humans and animals, good and evil, moral and immoral, the dead and the living necessarily vanish in the nefarious logic of what marks the era of climate catastrophism and the attendant necroclimatism. The book further argues that a sacrificial world (dis)order is necessarily a posthumanist and postanthropocentric world (dis)order, which should be never granted space in African worlds and even beyond. The book thus, raises fundamental questions for African anticipatory regimes, and for this reason it is handy for scholars in political science, sociology, social anthropology, development studies, environmental studies, agricultural studies, legal studies, food science, geography, religious studies and decolonial fields of studies.