Land reform in Zimbabwe

Land reform in Zimbabwe began in 1980 under the Lancaster House Agreement following internationally recognised independence, aiming to redistribute land from white commercial farmers to black subsistence farmers. White farmers dominated the commercial agricultural sector, which accounted for a large share of exports and formal employment. Land hunger was a key issue during the Rhodesian Bush War. The Lancaster House framework, which ended the war, allowed land acquisition on a “willing buyer, willing seller” basis, with the United Kingdom funding half of the cost. In the late 1990s, when British funding ended, the Zimbabwean government led by Robert Mugabe launched a “fast-track” land reform programme, involving the forcible seizure of white-owned farms. The programme was criticised for violence, contested boundaries, inadequate resettlement and compensation, and was followed by a sharp decline in agricultural production and exports. Land reform had a serious negative effect on the Zimbabwean economy during the 2000s. By 2013, almost all white-owned farms had been expropriated. Compulsory acquisition without compensation was formally discontinued in 2018 following the ousting of Mugabe, and later efforts focused on compensating dispossessed farmers.

Background The foundation for the controversial land dispute in Zimbabwean society was laid at the beginning of European settlement of the region, which had long been the scene of mass movements by various Bantu peoples. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese explorers had successfully attempted to open up Zimbabwe for trading purposes, but the country was not permanently settled by European immigrants until three hundred years later. The Changamire Dynasty forcibly removed many Portuguese traders from their stations in Rozvi in 1693 to 1695 during a campaign against Mutapa. The Rozvi Empire remained in power until 1850 until they were destroyed by the Ngoni Kingdom and Ndebele tribes during Mfecane. Most Shona cultures had a theoretically communal attitude towards land ownership; the later European concept of officiating individual property ownership was unheard of. Land was considered the collective property of all the residents in a given chiefdom, with the chief mediating disagreements and issues pertaining to its use. Nevertheless, male household heads frequently reserved personal tracts for their own cultivation, and allocated smaller tracts to each of their wives. Population growth frequently resulted in the over-utilisation of the existing land, which became greatly diminished both in terms of cultivation and grazing due to the larger number of people attempting to share the same acreage. During the early nineteenth century, the Shona were conquered by the Northern Ndebele (also known as the Matabele), which began the process of commodifying Zimbabwe's land. Although the Ndebele elite were uninterested in cultivation, land ownership was considered one major source of an individual's wealth and power—the others being cattle and slaves. Ndebele monarchs acquired large swaths of land for themselves accordingly.

Legal situation in Southern Rhodesia

European settlement patterns

The first white colonists to settle in modern-day Zimbabwe arrived during the 19th century, primarily from the Cape Colony (modern-day South Africa), less than a century after the Ndebele invasions. This reflected a larger trend of permanent European settlement in the milder, drier regions of Southern Africa as opposed to the tropical and sub-tropical climates further north. In 1889 Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company (BSAC) introduced the earliest white settlers to Zimbabwe as prospectors, seeking concessions from the Ndebele for mineral rights. Collectively known as the Pioneer Column, the settlers established the city of Salisbury, now Harare. Rhodes hoped to discover gold and establish a mining colony, but the original intention had to be modified as neither the costs nor the returns on the overhead capital matched the original projections. Local gold deposits failed to yield the massive returns which the BSAC had promised its investors, and the military costs of the expedition had caused a deficit. An interim solution was the granting of land to the settlers in the hopes that they would develop productive farms and generate enough income to justify the colony's continued administrative costs. The region was demarcated as Southern Rhodesia after 1898. Between 1890 and 1896, the BSAC granted an area encompassing 16 million acres—about one sixth the area of Southern Rhodesia—to European immigrants. By 1913 this had been extended to 21.5 million acres. However, these concessions were strictly regulated, and land was only offered to those individuals able to prove they had the necessary capital to develop it. Exceptions were made during the Ndebele and Shona insurrections against the BSAC in the mid-1890s, when land was promised to any European men willing to take up arms in defence of the colony, irrespective of their financial status. The settlers of the Pioneer Column were granted tracts of 3,150 acres apiece, with an option to purchase more land from the BSAC's holdings at relatively low prices (up to fifteen times cheaper than comparable land on the market in South Africa).

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