Land and Agrarian Reform in Former Settler Colonial Zimbabwe.Indd
3 A Decade of Zimbabwe’s Land Revolution: The Politics of the War Veteran Vanguard Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba Introduction The Zimbabwe state, governed since 1980 by a nationalist elite with origins in the liberation movement, has experienced complex dynamics and changes regarding class relations and power in a post-colonial settler economy. The state reached a climax of political polarisation during this last decade, from 2000 to 2010. In the first two decades of independence, the ruling nationalist class had enjoyed an alliance with settler capital forged during peace negotiations in 1979 at Lancaster House (see Horne 20011 and Selby 2006). The alliance antagonised and negated the aspirations of the liberation struggle expressed symbolically and concretely in terms of reversing a century old grievance over unequal colonial land ownership structures. War veterans were an ‘embodiment’ of this anti-colonial demand (Kriger 1995), although a scattered peasant movement had dominated land struggles until 1996 (see Moyo 2001). These war veterans, as a social category, were constituted by a movement of former military youth and so-called former refugees, whose nucleus were fighters of the Zimbabwe’s liberation war2. The conflict between the neocolonial state on the one hand and peasants and war veterans, on the other, intensified during the 1990s. The state had successfully managed to suppress the organisation of war veterans during the 1980s. However, in 1997, it conceded to provide for their welfare and financial demands and, LLandand aandnd AAgrariangrarian RReformeform iinn FFormerormer SSettlerettler CColonialolonial ZZimbabwe.inddimbabwe.indd 7799 228/03/20138/03/2013 112:40:392:40:39 80 Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe: Beyond White-Settler Capitalism as part of the conditions of a truce entered between war veterans and President Robert Mugabe, promised to redistribute land.
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