COLONIAL LAND POLICY: ZIMBABWE

INTRODUCTION: The single most important political issue in the history of Zimbabwe is land. This was true when the BSA Co. colonized the country in 1890. It remained true throughout the early protest movements of the inter-war period and in the advent of mass nationalism. Indeed, most analyses agree that the land grievance was central to the anti-colonial struggle in Zimbabwe and that no single issue symbolized the struggle for democracy and social justice more than the land issue. Furthermore, that the armed struggle which culminated in independence was waged around, among other issues, the land grievance. It remains true for post-colonial Zimbabwe, especially with the Land Reform Program that has focused on redistributing land. Most writings on the land issue in Zimbabwe have focused on the colonial racial division of land and on the inequalities between White ‘commercial farmers’ and an increasingly marginalized ‘subsistence’ sector, i.e. the rural African population in what are now known as the Communal Areas.

COLONIAL LAND LEGISLATION: The key pieces of legislation that created the land problem in Zimbabwe were the following:

  1. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which institutionalized the racial division of all land in the country. The LAA 1930 divided the country into the Reserves [land exclusively for occupation by Africans]; Alienated Land [land exclusively for White occupation, on which Africans could live only as employees]; and Native Purchase Areas [land where African yeoman farmers could gain limited ownership of farms]. This Act was not implemented on a large scale during the 1930s. Under the LAA 1930 a large, exclusively European area was declared which consisted of 49 million acres and comprised over half the total farming land in the country. As a sort of compensation, Africans were given the right to freehold tenure on the newly created Native Purchase Areas, which were located adjacent to the Reserves. Under the LAA 1930, the NPAs covered 7,5 million acres, although some 4 million were of little use because they lay in remote areas of the country and were unsuitable for farming. The Reserves totaled 21,6 million acres. For a contextual history of land politics in colonial Zimbabwe and the various pieces of land legislation see: R.H. Palmer, Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia, London, 1977 and H.V. Moyana, The political Economy of Land in Zimbabwe, Mambo Press, 1984.
  2. Then there was legislation that was passed to benefit settler agriculture during the intensified Great Depression of the 1930s and this included the Maize Control Acts of 1931 and 1934; and the Cattle Levy Acts of 1931 and 1934. These steps were taken to reduce the competitiveness of African agriculture and were implemented through subsidies and encouragement given to settler farmers, e.g. through capturing the African grain market; discrimination against the marketing of African produce and in the allocation of funds to African farmers. All these measures effectively removed the potential competition of African farmers.
  3. Then there followed land legislation that has generally been termed the “Second Alienation”. This followed the agrarian boom that was experienced by Southern Rhodesia following the Second World War, which had increased European settlers’ ambitions to farm and their determination to enforce the Land Apportionment Act (LAA, 1930) by evicting Africans from the whole of the fertile plateau (reserving it for European exploitation) and resettling the Africans in the marginal lowlands. The aftermath of the war, with the return of European ex-servicemen, had brought with it a pressing demand for farmland. Added to this was an influx of immigrants accompanying the post-war boom. This period, which has been termed the “Second Alienation”, witnessed the division of the so-called Crown Land into farms for alienation to a new generation of White farmers and to ex-servicemen returning from the Second World War. Some of the key pieces of legislation that were used to implement the “Second Alienation” were: the Land Apportionment Ammendment Act of 1941; the Land Settlement Act of 1944; and the Land Settlement Board which was created by the Land Settlement Act of 1944. After 1940, new areas were opened up to European settlement within the framework of the Land Apportionment Ammendment Act of 1941, which had allocated 50 million acres of farmland for exclusive use by Europeans. The Land Settlement Act constituted the first attempt by the Southern Rhodesian government to implement the segregatory land policy in a systematic and coordinated fashion. The Land Settlement Board had as its main responsibility in the immediate post-war years, the implementation of the ex-servicemen’s schemes. As a result of this segregatory land policy, European agriculture in the first post-war decade experienced a phenomenal growth, which was largely due to the opening up of new areas to European settlement. Up until the 1940s, African squatters or tenants had merely been given notice as land became alienated. Now, however, the demand for land had grown so great that more sweeping action was found necessary, and in 1950 the decision was taken that all European Crown land should be cleared of Africans within a period of five years. The agrarian boom had made it more profitable for the Europeans to farm or ranch the land they had been allocated under the LAA, than to rent it out to African tenants Throughout the country, Africans were given notice to vacate the huge investment estates where they had lived for many years. The late 1940s and 1950s witnessed mass relocations of people from the plateau to the lowlands throughout the country, but especially in the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces. By 1954, some 64,000 had had to be removed from their accustomed areas throughout the country, and a further 47,627 still remained to be resettled, giving rise to a spirit of unrest and resentment. As far as Matabeleland was concerned, most of those who were evicted were resettled in the lower-lying lands to the north, particularly in the Gwaai and Shangani reserves, which had been set aside for Ndebele occupation as long ago as 1894, but were still thinly populated. The Gwaai and Shangani reserves had long been intensely unpopular with the Ndebele who had rejected them when they were originally created in 1894, regarding them as ‘cemeteries not homes’. [See G.T. Ncube, “Banished to the Wilderness: The Case of the Western Area of the Gwayi Reserve, Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, 1952-1980”, The Dyke, Vol.1, No.1, 2004.] Professor Ngwabi Bhebe in his book Benjamin Burombo: African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1947-1958 accurately shows the dismal conditions in the Reserves during the colonial period. He shows that by the 1940s many Reserves were showing signs of human and livestock overcrowding, leading to overgrazing, soil erosion and declining productivity. Then there was the problem of Africans who still lived on land that had been designated as European and were now required (in the 1940s) to move out of this land. This problem assumed urgent proportions in the post-World War II period when the rate of White immigration increased and many of these Whites were intent on becoming farmers. The major problem was that there was no space in the Reserves by the 1940s for the evicted African families. Because no provision was made for the vast African population that was being evicted from European areas in the 1940s and 1950s to find land for cultivation elsewhere, the Native Commissioners simply tries to squeeze them into the already overcrowded Reserves. By 1943 many of the Reserves were in a deplorable state. First, some parts of the Reserves could not support people because of the scarcity of water, others were already ruined by overpopulation, overstocking, and by destructive methods of cultivation. These destructive methods of cultivation actually came about during the colonial period. Before then, i.e. in the pre-colonial period, African land husbandry did not lead to the destruction of the environment. Pre-colonial agriculture was productive largely as a result of the indigenous Africans’ knowledge and perceptions about soils, issues of soil fertility and erosion etc. But big changes took place in the colonial period. Vast African populations were confined in relatively small Reserves, and these Reserve populations also increased rapidly as a result of natural expansion and the addition of people who were being evicted from the European areas, particularly in the post- World War II period. This resulted in very serious land shortages in the Reserves. The introduction of the plough and its improper use also contributed to irreparable damage of land resources in the Reserves. In 1938 4 million acres of land in the Reserves were said to have been seriously damaged by the improper use of the plough, and in 1941 the acreage damaged by improper plough-use rose to 8 million acres. In 1943 conservationists reported that African Reserves were deteriorating at an alarming rate and agricultural production per person per unit piece of land was dwindling, thereby exposing the Reserves’ population to frequent famines.
  4. Then there followed the enactment of the Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951, which aimed ‘to provide for the control of the utilization and allocation of land occupied by natives and to ensure its efficient use for agricultural producers and to require the natives to perform labour for conserving natural resources’. Essentially, the Act was an attempt to attack the problems of erosion, land fragmentation and tenure, migratory labour. It largely because of colonial misconceptions of communal land tenure that the Southern Rhodesian government introduced the NLHA of 1951, with the aim of abolishing what it perceived as the ‘destructive’ communal land tenure system in the rural areas, and replacing it with individual land rights. Under this Act, rights of ownership to small plots of land in the Reserves were to be allocated to registered residents and colonial agricultural rules were to enforced. It was hoped that once implemented, the traditional customs regarding land use and land transfer in African society would give way to market forces. As Yudelman pointed out, “The use of land was to regulated in accordance with the economic principles in practice elsewhere in the capitalist world”. The implementation of the NLHA was greatly accelerated in 1955 and aroused great African opposition between 1956 and 1961. The NLHA 1951 failed both because the African population in the Reserves was far too large for the economic utilization of the land to be possible, and also because there was never any serious attempt to provide permanent homes in the urban areas for those Africans who had left the Reserves as ‘migrants’, upon which the success of the NLHA had critically depended. [See attached article: Victor Machingaidze, “Land Reform in Colonial Zimbabwe: The Southern Rhodesia Land Husbandry Act and African Response”] Several scholars have documented the widespread resistance against the NLHA. Benjamin Burombo’s African Voice, among other nationalist groups, aggressively campaigned against the NLHA. Opposition to the Act took the form of physical attacks on agricultural demonstrators and threats to White Land Development officers, as well as those who cooperated with the implementation of the NLHA. More often it took the form of derision of the chiefs and members of the Native Affairs Department; refusal to dip cattle; the practice of “freedom ploughing” i.e. ploughing in disregard to NLHA allocations and regulations, locally referred to in Shona as “MADIRO”; and refusal to communicate with the regimes field officers. In the end, the widespread rural opposition to the NLHA led to its abandonment in 1962. it is important to note that colonization not only involved the alienation of the land of indigenous producers but also the restructuring of their title to land and their land tenure systems. Colonial values that associated private property regimes with better management of arable land, played a consistent role in colonial policy and practice in the Reserves. As we saw in the case of the NLHA of 1951, colonial efforts to improve African farming productivity and land management were underpinned by efforts to institute private land tenure relations in order to replace ‘communal’ land tenure. Most notably, the creation of Native Purchase Areas (NPAs) under the provisions of the LAA 1930, and the NLHA 1951, both had private property relations at their centers. The philosophy behind the NLHA was that ‘communal’ tenure led to misuse of land and that the security of individual land tenure would give Africans the incentive s to adopt good land husbandry and to maximize production. Under the NLHA, peasants were required to obtain a permit to cultivate land called a ‘farming right’, and a permit to graze livestock, called a ‘grazing right’. The NLHA made it illegal for anyone to grow crops or to graze livestock without a permit. Native Commissioners were given power to allocate to each peasant an area equal to the standard area established in terms of the Act. The size of a cultivable unit could not be reduced below the standard area. Subject to the consent of the Native Commissioner, holders of permits could transfer them to other holders. The size of the land that a permit holder was entitled to hold was limited to twice the size of the standard allocation. Farming and grazing rights expired on the death of the holder and they could not be disposed of by will. At the time of the suspension of the NLHA in 1962 due to African opposition, it had only been implemented in 42% of the Reserves.
  5. Then there followed the Tribal Trust Land Act of 1967 through which the colonial state, under nationalist pressure, sought to invent tradition by investing traditional chiefs with formal authority to administer and allocate land in the Reserves (now renamed Tribal Trust Lands). The Tribal Trust Lands Act of 1967, which replaced the NLHA 1951, transferred authority over land allocation from the District Commissioners to Traditional Leaders. From the onset of colonial rule in the 1890s, the Native Department had sought to replace the traditional system of rule by chiefs with the direct rule of central government. Under the Native Regulations, the chiefs had become minor state functionaries appointed by, and answerable to, the Native Administration, with their tenure contingent upon good behaviour ( as defined by the colonial state), and with no formal authority to allocate land. It was the Native Commissioner (later District Commissioner) who was empowered by the regulations to allocate land for huts, gardens and grazing. The fusion of political, economic and legal powers in the Native Commissioner was designed to facilitate state control over the land and its indigenous producers. The power of the colonial state could thus be used to interfere and reorganize the manner in which Africans occupied and used land. In this way the colonial state exercised administrative control over the production process of indigenous people, whose farming methods were considered not only as primitive and therefore less productive, but also as destructive to the land. That is why the NLHA had been introduced in 1951, to regulate land use and land allocation in the African areas, and to abolish what had the colonial state perceived as the destructive ‘communal’ land tenure system in the rural areas, and replace it with individual land rights. However, after the failure of the NLHA 1951, and its replacement by the TTLA of 1967, the colonial state began to stress the power of ‘communal’ land tenure, in part, in order to shift the responsibility for land shortages in rural areas from the state to traditional leaders, but also to ward off the rising tide of African nationalism. In terms of the TTL Act, the occupation and use of land in the tribal areas vested in tribal land authorities comprising the chief of the area and other ‘tribesmen’ nominated by him in accordance with ‘tribal custom’. The tribal customs referred to were actually a colonial invention of tradition/custom because the idea of ‘traditional’ land tenure was largely a colonial construction aimed at bolstering the powers of chiefs in order to construct an effective basis for indirect rule and the control of land resources through chiefs. The idea that ‘customary’ land law in general was created under colonial rule has gained wide currency: both historians and anthropologists have demonstrated how colonial authorities sought to enforce ‘custom’ rather than current practice, thereby freezing what had been dynamic agrarian systems. The TTLA also gave chiefs the right to supervise cultivation, and the Tribal Courts Act (TCA) of 1969 took the policy of reviving ‘traditional’ authorities in the TTLs a step further in the invention of tradition by investing chiefs with legal powers.

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