Admos Chimhowu

Extending the Grain Basket to the Margins: Spontaneous Land Resettlement and Changing Livelihoods in the Hurungwe District, Zimbabwe

Spontaneous resettlement in frontier regions of Zimbabwe has been a useful way of getting land on which to begin building a livelihood. Through this process, sparsely populated rural districts skirting the mid-Zambezi Valley have undergone long-term socio-economic change. In a case study of Rengwe in Hurungwe District, the paper shows that households that migrated and spontaneously resettled in Rengwe were able to double arable land-holding while gaining membership of a growing frontier community. In the absence of adequate institutional support from the state, however, resettled households were unable to secure key socio-economic services and infrastructure. The study shows that, once resettled, households pursued diversified livelihoods although the levels of diversity varied between households. Poor households showed the least diversity. Although more land provided immediate relief to livelihoods under stress and allowed some households to accumulate assets, a majority of households still had inadequate incomes to stay out of poverty. The study shows that spontaneous resettlement may provide land but, in the absence of public policy intervention to provide social services and infrastructure, it is not a viable alternative to planned settlements.

Vernacular Land Markets and the Changing Face of Customary Land Tenure in Africa

Abstract Contemporary discourse on land in Africa suggest that customary or ‘communal’ tenure is the only check against freehold market-induced landlessness among the poor in the African countryside, and that ‘pro-poor’ land policy should therefore strengthen customary rights to land. This article draws on a growing body of evidence on the emergence of vernacular rural land sales and rental markets to question assumptions that underlie the non-market ‘ideal type’ communal tenure model that has historically dominated policy thinking in Africa. It argues that recognition of the specific characteristics of ‘vernacular land markets’—market-based transfers of land under customary tenure—is essential if state land policies are to succeed in promoting the interests of the poor.

Communal Tenure and Rural Poverty: Reflections on Land Transactions in Svosve Communal Area, Zimbabwe

The idea of communal tenure has formed a key plank in the rural governance of Zimbabwe since independence, but its retention following the Fast Track land reforms of 2000-2002 perpetuates a distinction between ‘commercial’ land governed by a land market and ‘communal’ land on which market transactions are illegal. This paper draws on recent research in Svosve Communal Area to examine the dynamics of land access and their implications for rural poverty in Zimbabwe. The paper argues that, as in many other parts of Africa, access to land governed by customary authority in Svosve is increasingly commoditised via informal, or ‘vernacular’, sales or rental markets. In failing to acknowledge and address this commoditisation of land, the ‘communitarian’ discourse of customary land rights that dominates the politics of land in Zimbabwe – as elsewhere in much of Africa – undermines, rather than protects, the livelihoods of the rural poor.