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Based on extensive original fieldwork, this book examines the
complex and diverse livelihoods of Zimbabwe's Tonga people as they
have developed over time, including in the wake of the country's
post- 2000 political and economic crises. Despite being endowed
with natural resources, the northwest region of Zimbabwe inhabited
by the Tonga people is one of the most marginalised and
underdeveloped parts of the country, neglected by both colonial and
postcolonial governments. The Tonga- speaking people are a minority
ethnic group that settled on either side of the Zambezi River
around 1100 AD and remain deeply dependent on the river for their
socio- economic livelihoods. This book reflects on the challenges
faced by the Tonga people, from poor infrastructure, health and
education facilities, to the issues caused by soil infertility and
extremely low rainfall, which have been exacerbated by climate
change. Many Tonga people were displaced by the construction of the
Kariba Dam in the 1950s, and their access to the region's natural
resources has been restricted by successive governments. Showcasing
the research of Zimbabwean scholars in particular, this book not
only reflects on the vulnerabilities faced by the Tonga, but it
also looks beyond these, to the livelihood practices that are
thriving despite these challenges, and the ways in which
livelihoods intertwine with Tonga culture and society more broadly.
Overall, this book highlights the resilience of the Tonga people in
the face of years of politico- economic crisis and will be an
important contribution to research on livelihoods, ethnic
minorities and rural development in Africa.
Since the introduction of the fast track land reform programme in
2000, Zimbabwe has undergone major economic and political shifts
and these have had a profound impact on both urban and rural
livelihoods. This book provides rich empirical studies that examine
a range of multi-faceted and contested livelihoods within the
context of systemic crises. Taking a broad political economy
approach, the chapters advance a grounded and in-depth
understanding of emerging and shifting livelihood processes,
strategies and resilience that foregrounds agency at household
level. Highlighting an emergent scholarship amongst young black
scholars in Zimbabwe, and providing an understanding of how people
and communities respond to socio-economic challenges, this book is
an important read for scholars of African political economy,
southern African studies and livelihoods.
For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements
identified radical transformation with capturing state power. The
collapse of these statist projects from the 1970s led to a global
crisis of left and working class politics. But crisis has also
opened space for rediscovering alternative society-centred,
anti-capitalist modes of bottom-up change, operating at a distance
from the state. These have registered important successes in
practice, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, and Rojava in Syria.
They have been a key influence on movements from Occupy in United
States, to the landless in Latin America, to anti-austerity
struggles in Europe and Asia, to urban movements in Africa. Their
lineages include anarchism, syndicalism, autonomist Marxism,
philosophers like Alain Badiou, and radical popular praxis. This
path-breaking volume recovers this understanding of social
transformation, long side-lined but now resurgent, like a seed in
the soil that keeps breaking through and growing. It provides case
studies with reference to South Africa and Zimbabwe, and includes a
dossier of key texts from a century of anarchists, syndicalists,
insurgent unionists and anti-apartheid activists in South Africa.
Originating in an African summit of radical academics, struggle
veterans and social movements, the book includes a preface from
John Holloway. The chapters in this book were originally published
as a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies,
with the addition of a new dossier on the history and voices of a
century of politics at a distance from the state in South Africa.
Based on extensive original fieldwork, this book examines the
complex and diverse livelihoods of Zimbabwe's Tonga people as they
have developed over time, including in the wake of the country's
post- 2000 political and economic crises. Despite being endowed
with natural resources, the northwest region of Zimbabwe inhabited
by the Tonga people is one of the most marginalised and
underdeveloped parts of the country, neglected by both colonial and
postcolonial governments. The Tonga- speaking people are a minority
ethnic group that settled on either side of the Zambezi River
around 1100 AD and remain deeply dependent on the river for their
socio- economic livelihoods. This book reflects on the challenges
faced by the Tonga people, from poor infrastructure, health and
education facilities, to the issues caused by soil infertility and
extremely low rainfall, which have been exacerbated by climate
change. Many Tonga people were displaced by the construction of the
Kariba Dam in the 1950s, and their access to the region's natural
resources has been restricted by successive governments. Showcasing
the research of Zimbabwean scholars in particular, this book not
only reflects on the vulnerabilities faced by the Tonga, but it
also looks beyond these, to the livelihood practices that are
thriving despite these challenges, and the ways in which
livelihoods intertwine with Tonga culture and society more broadly.
Overall, this book highlights the resilience of the Tonga people in
the face of years of politico- economic crisis and will be an
important contribution to research on livelihoods, ethnic
minorities and rural development in Africa.
This book examines the national borders and borderlands of Zimbabwe
through the presentation of empirically rich case studies. It
delves into the lived experiences, both past and present, of
populations residing along the borders between Zimbabwe and its
neighbours, i.e., Zambia, Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique. It
locates these lived experiences within the political economy of
Zimbabwe, and highlights a wide range of themes pertinent to
borders, including health, COVID-19, marginalisation, resource
access, conservation, human-wildlife conflicts, civil wars,
politico-economic crises, border jumping and cross border trade.
The borderland communities discussed also include ethnic minorities
such as the Tonga, San, Ndau, Shangane, and Kalanga. Overall, the
book demonstrates the centrality of borders to the Zimbabwean
nation-state and the importance of reading history, politics and
society from the borderlands. The book fits into the wider
prevailing literature of border and borderlands in Africa and
beyond and thus has appeal far beyond Zimbabwe. Its diverse themes
also relate to topics covered in multiple disciplines, including
history, anthropology, and sociology. Academics, development
specialists and policy makers will benefit in different ways from
the depth and breadth of the analysis in the book.
The book provides a fresh and innovative interpretation of the new
government of Zimbabwe led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, which emerged in
late 2017 after the downfall of Robert Mugabe. It demonstrates the
contradictory character of the Mnangagwa government, involving both
continuities and discontinuities in relation to
Mugabe’s regime . The temptation amongst Zimbabwean
scholars has been to focus on the continuities and to dismiss the
significance of any discontinuities, notably reform measures. This
book adopts an alternative approach by identifying and focusing
specifically on the existence of a formative project of the
Mnangagwa’s Second Republic, further analysing its political
significance, as well as risks and limitations.  While
doing so, the book covers topics such as reform measures,
reconciliation, transitional justice, corruption, the media,
agriculture, devolution,  and the debt crisis as well
as health and education. Discussing the limitations of these
different reform measures, the book highlights that any scholarly
failure to identify the risks of the project leads to an incomplete
understanding of what constitutes the Mnangagwa’s Second
Republic. The book appeals to students, scholars and researchers of
Zimbabwean and African studies, political science and international
relations, as well as policymakers interested in a better
understanding of political reform processes.
This book offers the first detailed scholarly examination of the
nation-wide land occupations which spread across the Zimbabwean
countryside from the year 2000, and led to the state's fast track
land reform programme. In an innovative way, it highlights the
decentralized character of the occupations by recognizing
significant spatial variation around a number of key themes,
including historical memory, modes of mobilization and gender. A
case study of the land occupations in Mashonaland Central Province,
based on original research, adds empirical weight to the argument.
In further identifying and understanding the specificities and
complexities of the land occupations, the book also frames them by
way of a nuanced comparative-historical analysis of the three
zvimurenga. It thus examines the land occupations (referred to,
likely controversially, as the 'third chimurenga') with reference
to the original anti-colonial revolt from the 1890s (the first
chimurenga) and the war of liberation in the 1970s (the second
chimurenga). Further, the book engages critically with the ruling
party's chimurenga narrative and the hegemonic understanding of the
land occupations within Zimbabwean studies. This book is a crucial
read for all scholars and students of post-2000 land and politics
in Zimbabwe, but also for those more broadly interested in
historical-comparative analyses of land struggles in Zimbabwe and
beyond.
This book examines the everyday lives of ordinary Zimbabweans in
the context of national crises in post-2000 Zimbabwe. Throughout
the literature of Zimbabwean studies, a consideration of everyday
lives has been limited to informal trading and rarely applied as an
analytical framework, despite the importance of understanding
crisis-living with reference to the specific character of national
crises across the African continent. This edited volume is one of
the first in its field to theorise everyday Zimbabwean lives within
the context of crisis, with three central themes addressed: urban
and rural lives; men, women and HIV; and along and beyond the
border. Chapters incorporate topics from child marriage and sexual
practices, to climate change and social accountability,
encompassing a shift in focus from macro-structures to how farm
labourers, students, child-brides and other ordinary people
negotiate gender, class and social dynamics within a dominant
order. The introductory chapter offers an innovative analytical
framing for the empirical chapters which follow, each providing
micro-studies based on original qualitative fieldwork by
early-career Zimbabwean scholars. Everyday Crisis-Living in
Contemporary Zimbabwe will appeal to students and scholars of
sociology, anthropology and African Studies more broadly.
Since the introduction of the fast track land reform programme in
2000, Zimbabwe has undergone major economic and political shifts
and these have had a profound impact on both urban and rural
livelihoods. This book provides rich empirical studies that examine
a range of multi-faceted and contested livelihoods within the
context of systemic crises. Taking a broad political economy
approach, the chapters advance a grounded and in-depth
understanding of emerging and shifting livelihood processes,
strategies and resilience that foregrounds agency at household
level. Highlighting an emergent scholarship amongst young black
scholars in Zimbabwe, and providing an understanding of how people
and communities respond to socio-economic challenges, this book is
an important read for scholars of African political economy,
southern African studies and livelihoods.
This book examines the impact of neoliberalism on peasant
agriculture as a key livelihood strategy in Southern and Eastern
Africa, against the background of the current development crisis
and the crossroads that Southern and Eastern Africa faces. It
systematically analyses how the neoliberal architecture has
deepened extroverted production for capitalist accumulation and how
this has been to the detriment of the rural labour force and small
scale and communal landowners. Apart from examining how
neoliberalism has triggered land alienations, the book further
argues that such policies have also impacted negatively on food
security in a number of ways. The book presents empirical evidence
through twelve case studies, emerging from in-depth original
fieldwork carried out in seven countries in the Southern and
Eastern African region. This book is a must-read for scholars of
economics,sociology, anthropology, history, agrarian studies and
political science, as well as practitioners and policy-makers,
interested in a better understanding of the impact of the agrarian
neoliberal restructuring on the peasantry in Southern Africa.
For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements
identified radical transformation with capturing state power. The
collapse of these statist projects from the 1970s led to a global
crisis of left and working class politics. But crisis has also
opened space for rediscovering alternative society-centred,
anti-capitalist modes of bottom-up change, operating at a distance
from the state. These have registered important successes in
practice, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, and Rojava in Syria.
They have been a key influence on movements from Occupy in United
States, to the landless in Latin America, to anti-austerity
struggles in Europe and Asia, to urban movements in Africa. Their
lineages include anarchism, syndicalism, autonomist Marxism,
philosophers like Alain Badiou, and radical popular praxis. This
path-breaking volume recovers this understanding of social
transformation, long side-lined but now resurgent, like a seed in
the soil that keeps breaking through and growing. It provides case
studies with reference to South Africa and Zimbabwe, and includes a
dossier of key texts from a century of anarchists, syndicalists,
insurgent unionists and anti-apartheid activists in South Africa.
Originating in an African summit of radical academics, struggle
veterans and social movements, the book includes a preface from
John Holloway. The chapters in this book were originally published
as a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies,
with the addition of a new dossier on the history and voices of a
century of politics at a distance from the state in South Africa.
A century after the 1913 Natives' Land Act, there remains a land
crisis in South Africa. How are we to understand the many
dimensions of this crisis so that we can realistically move beyond
the current inertia? The starting point for this book is that the
current land reform policies in the country fail to take this
colonial context of division and exclusion into account. As a
result, there is an abiding land crisis in South Africa. The book
examines the many dimensions of this crisis in urban areas,
commercial farming areas and communal areas. It argues for a
fundamental change in approach to move beyond the impasse in both
policy and thinking about land. Of particular importance is that
social movements have a critical role to play in charting a new
course, both in respect of access to land and in influencing
broader policy options. Struggles from below are crucial for
rethinking purely statistic efforts at land reform and the book
grapples with the interplay between oppositional campaigns of
social movements and the state's policies and responses.
Essentially, the book argues that in South Africa the 1994
transition from apartheid to democracy has not translated into a
process of decolonisation. In fact, the very bases of colonialism
and apartheid remain intact, since racial inequalities in both
access to and ownership of land continue today. With state-driven
attempts at land reform having failed to meet even their own
targets, a fundamental change in approach is necessary for South
Africa to move beyond the deadlock that prevails between the
objectives of the policy, and the means for realising them. It is
also necessary to question the targets set for land redistribution:
Will these really assist in changes for the majority?
The book provides empirically-rich case studies of the lives and
livelihoods of marginalised ethnic minorities in colonial and
post-colonial Zimbabwe, with a specific focus on diverse rural
areas. It demonstrates the dynamic and complex relationships
existing between ethnic minorities and livelihoods, and analyses
the ways in which projects of belonging (and identity-formation)
amongst these ethnic minorities are entangled in their respective
livelihood construction projects, and vice versa. The ethnic
minorities include those considered indigenous to Zimbabwe, and
those often defined as 'aliens', including ethnicities with a
transnational presence in southern Africa. The ethnicities studied
in the book include the following: Chewa, Doma, Tonga, Tshwa San,
Shangane, Basotho, Ndau, Hlengwe and Nambya. By studying their
livelihoods in particular, this book offers the first full
manuscript about ethnic minorities in Zimbabwe. In doing so, it
highlights the significance of these ethnic minorities to
Zimbabwean history, politics and society.
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