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Abstract:This article examines what urban displacement and resettlement can reveal about the nature of, and co-constitutive relationships among, property, authority, and citizenship. It focuses on an unusual case in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where long-term illegal squatters living under constant threat of violent displacement by various local and national authorities were formally resettled by the Bulawayo City Council on peri-urban plots with houses. What surfaces are some of the paradoxes of propertied citizenship and of attaining seemingly “proper” lives in conditions of sustained marginality, a result that is not entirely unexpected when impoverished squatters are resettled far outside the frame of the city and its possibilities.

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A violent eviction in a remote northwestern corner of Zimbabwe in late 1997 provides a prism through which to explore the changing dynamics of competition over space, power and production in Zimbabwe's agrarian margins, where conflict over wildlife and agriculture has intensified and the state has become a key player. The article argues that in its quest to (re)gain control over one such location, the state has had to construct it as space of violence in order to de-civilize it and reinvent it as a wilderness zone. The 'day of burning' is taken not only as a signifier of the violent potential of such competition, but also as a metaphor for the state's increasing loss of legitimacy in the margins: that is, the 'burning away' of any residue of illusion about the state as either the democratic embodiment of the people's will or compassionate provider of services and security.