‘Squatting’ in the communal areas of Zimbabwe has been largely ignored in the literature because it is assumed that it does not exist in a ‘communal’ land tenure system. This article argues that ‘squatting’ in Gokwe villages has become a common strategy by landless immigrants to access land. Gokwe has been a frontier region for many immigrants in search of land since the 1950s with intense pressure on land by the 1990s. As the frontier closed, the question of citizenship in Gokwe villages became more signi?cant than ever before. Those who are not formally registered as residents are de?ned by local government authorities and established villagers as ‘squatters’ who should be evicted. The article traces how local authorities and established villagers have responded to what they perceive as the ‘squatter menace’. It further examines the means used by ‘squatters’ to lay claims to land and to defend those claims in Gokwe villages.

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How do histories shape the way people map their present and envision the future, especially at a moment of rapid political, economic and social transformation like that associated with the shift from socialism to liberal market economy/polity in Tanzania? Is the past a`foreign land' (as Lowenthal argues) or are reproductions and traces of multiple temporalities constitutive of the present and the possibilities for the future? In this article I explore how different moments and aspects of the past in the sisal industry in Tanzania are helping shape definitions of the present and visions of the future by workers, managers/owners of sisal plantations, and government officials. Locating present socioeconomic realities within historical processes of economic and political transformation allows us to dispel some of the assumptions that underlie the unequivocal celebration of the`market' and the`private sector'. Further, it opens up the space to analyse the dynamics between knowledge and management as they operate at different levels within the social organisation of production/circulation of international commodities. This brings to the fore the intricate relationship between labour, capital and the state on the one hand and the interplay between local conditions and global markets on the other.Much of the debate about sisal's past and future is taking place within the context of liberalisation of the economy and polity of Tanzania. Within the sisal sector in particular, privatisation opened up the space for negotiating how to revive an industry once declared dead' by its participants. Diverse and contradictory productions of the past under the Mandate and independent socialist Tanzania mark how different groups of people (workers, managers, state officials) are negotiating their locations and claims to rights within a transformed social, political and economic order. The debates within/about the sisal industry are thus intimately linked with the production of the political geography of Tanganyika/Tanzania at large, while carrying the imprints of the reconfiguration of the politico-economic order internationally

In colonial Southern Rhodesia, administrative officials often couched the rhetoric of ‘modernization’ in ethnic terms. They regarded immigrant Madheruka master farmers as the embodiment of modernization because they had been exposed to forces of modernization in their areas of origin, while both officials and immigrants alike regarded indigenous Shangwe as backward and primitive. This article argues that the construction of Madheruka and Shangwe ethnic identities dates primarily to the early 1960s, with the coming of immigrants and the introduction of cotton. Shangwe defined the immigrants as madheruka, a term whose origins lay in the eviction of the immigrants from crown land by colonial officials in the 1950s, while Madheruka termed the indigenous peoples shangwe, or backward. Each group perceived itself differently, however, Shangwe claiming that the term Shangwe referred to a place rather than to their ethnic identity and Madheruka claiming to belong to authentic Shona groups. The guerrilla war of the 1970s witnessed an attack on modernity as the guerrillas and their sympathizers regarded immigrant farmers as colonial collaborators.

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