The Unsettled Land: State-Making & the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe, 1893–2003

Gender, caring work, and the embodiment of kufungisisa: Findings from a global health intervention in Shurugwi District, Zimbabwe

“…Similarly, the participants we interviewed referred in some way to the pressure placed upon them by the multiple roles that they are, as women, required to perform, especially as these related to providing for the economic needs of the household and the often-conflicting demands of their children, husbands, and other kin relations. As we suggest in the opening to this paper, it is important to acknowledge that such gender-based norms are not only a reflection of hegemonic cultural values associated with a patriarchal society but also of their adaptation and change to economic and social relations instituted during and since settler colonial rule (Alexander 2006). Indeed, as Kesby (1999) argues, gendered identities have been made and remade since this period and, yet, despite the role they played in the country's Independence, the lives of many women are "fundamentally and unequally" structured by patriarchy.…”

“…In a bid to orchestrate African mobility to suit its labour needs, scholars concur that there was a tacit agreement between racial capital and patriarchal interests. Thus, while the migration of African men was increasingly enforced to provide cheap labour for a booming mining and commercial agriculture economy, the immobility of African women was demanded by 'native' leaders in the interests of the subsistence agricultural economy where they bore primary responsibility for food production and preparation (Alexander 2006). Here, we see the past in the present.…”

“…This sense of a lingering, malevolent presence is also apparent in our study. As we note, the areas where the intervention was undertaken has been shaped by processes associated with settler colonial rule and by the reinforcing of patriarchal social relations that continue to shape the women's lives (Alexander 2006;Kesby 1999).…”

Institutions as Images of Political Authority and Power Hierarchies: Understanding Land Tenure Dynamics of State-making in Zimbabwe and Uganda

“…In their election campaign of 2000, which they went on to win by a very narrow majority, the ruling party's campaign slogan was 'land is the economy and the economy is land'. Alexander notes that the land occupations were not just about making a case for land redistribution, but they were also for creating the conditions of a particular kind of political campaign which was intended to appeal to the party's most numerous constituencies, the communal areas and at the same time punish constituencies supporting the opposition in those areas (Alexander, 2006b).…”

“…Daniel Appiah (2012) in his study of the evolution of tenurial systems in Ghana attests that land administration is embedded with the larger political processes of state-formation and political processes of conflict, cooperation and negotiations between rulers, and other interests in the concentration of coercion over land shape the nature of the rules that govern land administration across states (Appiah, 2013). Jocelyn Alexander (2006c) traces the construction and reconstruction of the agrarian landscape as well as the making and unmaking of political authority in the rural spaces. Alexander illuminates on the dialectical relationship between land and authority and the politics of land in the process of state making during the colonial and postcolonial periods.…”