Rethinking the reserves: Southern Rhodesia's Land Husbandry Act reviewed

Labor Relations in Zimbabwe from 1900 to 2000: Sources, Interpretations, and Understandings

“…Far more people were employed in the booming commercial agricultural sector than in the factories of Salisbury and Bulawayo." 58 In line with this assessment, and as pointed out earlier, agriculture and mining were still the largest commercial employers in the colony (see Table 1 for employment per industry). 59 Most of the rural population and many of those who had formal employment would also have attempted to engage in some form of subsistence agriculture.…”

Communal Tenure and Rural Poverty: Land Transactions in Svosve Communal Area, Zimbabwe

“…This marks a break with earlier research (Cousins et al, 1992) that perceived ‘communal tenure’ as slowing down the growth in socio‐economic inequality among people on Zimbabwe's ‘communal areas’ recorded by many studies since independence. But it recalls earlier trajectories reaching back well over half a century, when, despite ‘thousands of people who attempted to return to the reserves when they lost their jobs during the economic recession precipitated by a slump in the price of copper after 1957’ (Phimister, 1993: 234), an elite of ‘ploughmen entrepreneurs’ increased their share of land on the African reserves, with 30 per cent of households farming 52 per cent of the reserves in the 1940s, rising to 63 per cent by 1960. The study in Svosve in 2005 suggests similarly that a large influx of people has resulted in a situation in which income poverty is closely associated with small landholdings, and all but a small minority (11 per cent) of households are unable to meet their subsistence needs.…”

“…The NLHA, in common with programmes undertaken by colonial administrations elsewhere in eastern and southern Africa, was intended to reform the migrant labour system through the creation of a resident workforce in urban areas and a class of small‐scale commercial farmers (with individual land titles transferable through a land market). However, the technical design for reorganizing agriculture on the reserves proved inadequate (Alexander, 2006: 46–8) and, despite being formally applied to only 42 per cent of the total area of African reserves (Phimister, 1993: 236), the programme was blamed for creating 102,000 landless African households in the then Southern Rhodesia by 1961, when it was abandoned, with additional land for cultivation being eventually created by ploughing up areas designated for grazing (Elliott, 1989: 74).…”

The geopolitics of dependent development in Central Africa: race, class and the reciprocal blockade

“…These laws sought to reduce soil erosion and build a black freehold farming sector but received a pitiful £17m in funding 1952 -60 amid chronic shortages of technical Weinrich (1973: 15), Zimbabwe (1986: 18) and Schaefer (1992: 312). support staff (Barber, 1961;Duggan, 1980;Machingaidze, 1991;Phimister, 1993). Disorder worsened as young black migrants abandoned increasingly overcrowded kraals, flooding into ill-prepared municipal Locations, falling through cracks in the system.…”