Achim Blume (1996): Land Tenure in Rural Zimbabwe

1.1 Historical Outline

As elsewhere in Southern Africa, Zimbabwe’s system of rural land tenure is heavily influenced by its colonial past which finally ended 1980 when the struggle for independence against the apartheid regime was completed.

The first white settlers who came to Zimbabwe at about the turn of the century, were initially interested in mining and the extraction of mineral resources. However, the focus of their interest changed relatively fast when their mining activities failed to produce the expected returns. Increasingly, white settlers came to the area with the aim of starting up farms, a trend which the British government quickly took into account.

The result was that the autochthonous population were increasingly forced out of their home areas and into specially allocated territories. African farmers were driven out of the best agricultural regions, which were then claimed by white farmers. Among the means used by the white colonial masters to secure cheap labour was a fiscal policy which forced the native population to give up their subsistence-oriented way of life and either to market their produce or to take up paid employment.

From 1931 the Land Apportionment Act formed the legal framework for this policy of displacement. The Act divided the land into what was defined as European (Crown) and African land. The "Crown" land accounted for about 50% of the total land area and was granted to white farmers in the form of freeholds, while the "Native Reserves" only represented 22% of the total area. Africans were prohibited from making any claims to Crown Lands, although the land area which had been allocated to them was recognised as being too small for the approximately one-million-strong population given the extensive fallow farming systems traditionally used.

A law was also passed to create a third category of land referred to as African Purchase Areas, which covered 8% of the total land area. In formal terms Africans had been granted the right to acquire their own private property in these areas. The irony of this was that Africans were supposed to buy back their own land which had been occupied by the whites. There are a number of different views on the exact intention behind the establishment of the African Purchase Areas, but there is agreement over their main function in practice. They served as a social buffer for the oppressed African farmers. The more enterprising Africans were given the opportunity to compete with the European settlers from their own private property. At the same time the colonial administration hoped that these privileged Africans would form a collaborative middle class.

In addition the three farming areas, the Land Apportionment Act also designated a forth category, which covered approx. 20% of the country:"unsigned land". This land was not intended for agricultural use, and served as an important basis for the national parks later.

These laws were extended, amended and adapted on a number of occasions over the years. In 1941, for example, access to the European Areas was made even more difficult for Africans. The sale, leasing and other forms of transfer of the land in the European Areas to native people were explicitly prohibited. This was supposed to prevent direct economic competition between the whites and the blacks, but also to prevent a black elite from forming and becoming established.

Using the argument that native Africans were allegedly farming the land in the Native Reserves in an ecologically inappropriate manner, the white administration secured additional powers of intervention and control over African agriculture in the form of the 1951 Native Land Husbandry Act (NLHA). Yet the administration’s actions were themselves the root cause of these farming methods, having allocated insufficient land to the black majority. In formal terms, the Act provided for direct intervention in a bid to increase the adoption of intensive farming methods to protect natural resources, to reduce the number of livestock to a sustainable level and to prevent the progressive fragmentation of the farmland. However, this approach failed because of the lack of acceptance among the African farmers. They resented the planned imposition of "white" ideas, and did what they could to resist this interference in their own system of values and standards. "The NLHA’s implementation collapsed in the face of widespread opposition in 1962..." (Bogedain 1993:40, World Bank 1991:71.)

Under the Tribal Trust Land Act (1965), which dealt principally with the internal management of the Native Reserves and which will be considered later, the Native Reserves were renamed the Tribal Trust Lands.

Finally in 1969 the Land Apportionment Act was revised by the administration once more and became the Land Tenure Act. Following the reallocation of land under the Act and the reclamation of new land, the European and Native Areas each now covered approximately 40% of the total land area. However, since the preferential treatment of white settlers in allocating agricultural land continued, their farms were still much larger on average, and were held under a freehold system. They were also located in the more favoured agro-ecological regions, whereas African farmers were only able to acquire small plots of fragmented land in the Tribal Trust Lands. This system of land classification remained largely intact until the Lancaster House Agreement of 1980 which marked Zimbabwe’s independence and the end of white supremacy.

Based on this historical background, the ZANU government inherited a three-tier agrarian structure in 1980, comprising the following subsectors:

• a market-oriented sector, formed by large-scale white farmers;
• a subsistence, or only partially market-oriented group of smallholders comprising African smallholders in the Native Areas (known as the Tribal Trust Lands after 1965);
• a partially market-oriented group of medium-sized farmers centred around the African Purchase Areas.

With Independence, the colonial terms of European Areas, Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs) and African Purchase Areas (APAs) were replaced by the more neutral terms of Large Scale Commercial Farming Areas (LSCFAs), Communal Areas (CAs) and Small Scale Commercial Farming Areas (SSCFAs).

The regional distribution of the three subsectors at the time of Independence is noteworthy from a historical perspective. Zimbabwe can be broadly divided into five agro-ecological regions based both on the amount and probability of rainfall and on soil properties. The land is graded for agricultural use on a declining scale from I-V (cf. Appendices 1.1-1.2). At the time of Independence the distribution of the land in the three subsectors among these agro-ecological regions was as shown in Appendices 1.3-1.4.

In order to highlight the gross inequality of this land distribution, the World Bank later published the following figures (World Bank 1991:8)

• 74% of the CAs were in regions IV and V
• 75% of the SSCAs were in regions III and IV
• 51% of the LSCAs were in regions I-III

In spite of the land reform under the Resettlement Program (cf. Section 3) this structure has essentially changed very little to the present day. Recent developments and problems in these areas will be briefly outlined in the following sections. After that, the Resettlement Program, which has dominated discussion on agricultural policy over the last decade, will be considered more closely.