By Jocelyn Alexander. Oxford, Harare and Athens: James Currey, Weaver Press and Ohio University Press, 2006; pp. 230. £18.95 (pb); ISBN 0852558929. Reviewed by Admos Osmund Chimhowu, University of Manchester. ©Admos Osmund Chimhowu, 2008.
This book is about colonial and postcolonial statecraft and the rural resource governance issues at the centre of a still unfolding socio-economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe. Divided into eight well researched, detailed and analytically sound chapters, the book deals with the complexities of statecraft played out in the contentious land question. The first four chapters talk to pre-1980 settler colonial dynamics with the next four looking at the post-colonial state after 1980 and into the post-February 2000 crisis.
Writing about colonial Zimbabwe and the histories of dispossession is always a challenge as this is now a well trodden path. Any new book tackling this area has the challenge of bringing something new to the story. The first four chapters of this book manage to do this by talking to the broader discourses of colonial statecraft viewed from the local social histories in Insiza and Chimanimani, the case study areas. Through detailed and well sourced narratives Chapter 1 takes us through the unsettled politics of precolonial Zimbabwe showing in both case study areas how shifting allegiances, contested loyalties and the fluid politics of rural governance find local expression. Above all else this section highlights an often overlooked fact which is that in spite of the settler colonial state being united in its conquest of land and desire to dominate, there was internal dissonance within the settler state and colonial administrators on the ground often faced a reality removed from the ideals of the settler colonial project. In each of the case study areas we are also introduced to the nascent local social movements and their local efforts to resist the settler colonial project. For example by giving local expression to the ‘Native Self Conscious Society’ in Chimanimani, not only do we get a sense of the role of these local movements in mobilising against the local reach of the settler state but also their varied methods to suit circumstances.
Chapters two, three and four take us through the main ground level expressions of settler colonial policy and practice on land and local governance. Through detailed local social histories, local expressions of development interventions like the NLHA and Community Development are used to show case the complexity of conquest and resistance. By focusing on the relationship between chiefs and land Chapter five draws into focus the extent to which the local social and political outcomes in these encounters depended on the characters and relationship of the two main actors at the local level- the district commissioner and the local chief. The book characterises the outcomes as one of or a combination of collaboration, co-option and falling out. All three outcomes are given currency in the two case study areas but more crucially characterise some of the learned behaviours that helped shape and define post-colonial relationship between the state and traditional authority. In a way the first five chapters showcase why the complete history of the settler colonial statecraft, especially its impact on local people and their responses, can only be fully understood from the bottom up and attempts to draw generalisations or national patterns often fail to capture the variegated responses that this book highlights.
Two key issues feature prominently as defining post-colonial statecraft are articulated in Chapters five and six. First is the state's strategic ambivalence toward traditional institutions. On one hand these are seen as ‘compromised’ and unsuitable for the new democratic dispensation due to their perceived collusion with the settler colonial state. On the other hand they play a hugely symbolic role of identity and autochthony that both the settler state and the post-colo-nial state find useful in rural local governance. It is clear from contemporary discourses featured in Chapters seven and eight that the rehabilitation of the role of chiefs in rural local governance is complete. Traditional chiefs became in essence bureaucratised while some politicised their role. From the book one gets a sense here of continuity rather than change in the ab(use) of the traditional chiefs. What the book does not say however is that post-colonial statecraft was to an extent influenced by the institutional inertia of the settler state it succeeded.
Second, and related to the above is what the book correctly observes as the persistence of a technocentric streak to rural policy making. A typical example of this is the attempts to re-organise the communal areas through the CLDP and the land resettlement programme both of which bore striking resemblance to some of the programmes that the settler state attempted to implement. Because of this link and other local factors CLDP was moribund right from inception while the resettlement scheme was fraught with implementation bottlenecks. For example top down technocentric approaches in a context of the muddied politics of the early post-colonial period in Matabeleland affected resettlement in Insiza. Similarly in Chimanimani difficulties of implementing state programmes is put down to a ‘rejection of state claims to technocratic authority over land in favour of local versions of nationalism, histories of eviction, chiefly claims and need’ (p. 153), and sums up the aversion that locals had to developmental populism that paid little heed to local realities.
Through the first seven chapters we clearly see the unresolved nature rural local governance through the land question and can almost understand why by the time of the farm invasions in February 2000 there was a sense of waning statecraft. This is followed through in Chapter eight which shows the systematic build up of issues leading to the Jambanja drawing on broader national economic and political discourses and practices. There is no attempt to give them local expression in the case study areas, and for this reason this chapter reads differently from the first seven. This book's strength lies in showing variable responses to statecraft from locality to locality yet there is almost a sense in which this chapter suggests there was one set of conditions that led to the invasions across the country. We do not get to know about the specific experiences of Chimanimani and Insiza. One can guess that invasions where given local traction by existing local relations and these varied from place to place. Questions that come to mind as one reads this section include: Was there an underlying local logic to the invasions apart from the national contextual issues? Why where some farms invaded and others not? To be fair to the book logistical and political conditions on the ground are not conducive for such detailed work and this may well be a challenge for the future.
Overall this is an excellent addition to the discourses on rural local governance and land in Zimbabwe, and more specifically to our local knowledge on the variability of responses to statecraft in both colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. It is a good resource for students of history as much as it is for development studies and, because it is very clearly written it appeals broadly to those interested in Zimbabwe.