This is the third in a short blog series on Zimbabwe research published recently. The theme of belonging and identity in the post-land reform setting has attracted a lot of research attention recently. As a whole suite of papers published in 2022 showed, negotiating belonging in a complex, fast-changing political landscape is not straightforward.
In 2000 or thereabouts people moved onto land from communal areas and towns to land that they often had no previous association with. Farm workers who joined the land invasions may have worked on the land and lived there sometimes for generations, but it was definitively not theirs. Many claimed ancestral connections to the land, given the existence of grave sites and chiefs and headmen competed with different narratives about who ‘owned’ the land. As resettlement farms became ‘home’ – where people lived and died and were often buried – then associations with the land changed, but the mix of people who came on land reform to the A1 resettlement farms meant that the process of creating communities and a sense of belonging was a process, one that continues to this day.
This article is from Zimbabweland, a blog written by IDS Research Fellow Ian Scoones. Zimbabweland focuses on issues related to rural livelihoods and land reform in Zimbabwe.