Gore rino ndinoda kusadza GMB nechibage changu!

[This year I want to fill up the Grain Marketing Board with my own maize!]

(New farmer, 19/12/05, Masvingo District)²

But in terms of the broader vision, I have to stress that I think this land reform programme is one of the most wonderful programmes for a third world country to embark upon.

JF: So you are actually very optimistic?

Yes I am optimistic. I think it is a great thing for a third world country, it really is.

(Chief Lands Officer, 5/06/06, Masvingo Province)³

You asked me … what were the major...

This chapter has three purposes. First, I discuss contestations over autochthony and belonging taking place in the context of fast-track land reform around Mutirikwi in the 2000s, in order to contribute to a growing body of work² exploring how land reform is part of an ongoing remaking of the (postcolonial) state. Second, I consider this micro-politics of belonging in relation to recent, diverse (but often complementary) approaches to ‘materiality’, which have sought to decentre the agency of human subjects by exploring the agency, affordances and affective qualities of things, materials and landscapes (Miller 2005; Gell 1998; Latour 1999; Ingold 1992...

In November 2010 a senior government meteorologist revealed that for much of the previous decade Zimbabwe’s weather forecast had been censored on a daily basis by the President’s Office. The admission came in response to journalists’ questions about ‘why the meteorological service department (MET) had over the years denied possible droughts’ that were later experienced despite predictions that ‘the country was expecting above average rainfall every year’. Also blaming ‘obsolete weather equipment’ and the loss of experienced personnel for the ‘inaccurate weather forecasting’, Washington Zhakata ‘admitted that there is heavy political interference and censorship of the weather forecasts in Zimbabwe...

If the politics of rain discussed in the previous chapter illustrate how water can index the contested play of sovereignty and legitimacy in ongoing reconfigurations of traditionalist rule, then a similar argument can be made for other, more technocratic regimes related to water around Mutirikwi. Continuing official insistence upon the prevention of soil erosion and dam siltation is an example I have already discussed, which too involves performances of sovereignty alongside more productive mechanisms of power shaping political subjectivities and regimented landscapes amid appeals to developmentalism and governmental legitimacy. Such technocratic regimes exist in close proximity to and intertwine with...

After 2000, land occupations around Mutirikwi meant disputes between rival chiefs and clans over boundaries, people and ‘ancestral territories’ re-emerged with new immediacy. These related directly to re-imagined and re-membered pre-colonial landscapes, involving contested ‘history-scapes’ (Fontein 2006a:19) and what I shall call ‘genealogical geographies’. In 2005/06 such disputes were particularly prominent on occupied state lands bordering the lake’s southern shores, which had been subject to squatting, and in some places formal resettlement, in the 1980s. But they also took place on farms to the north being resettled for the first time, as well as to the east around Zano, which...

The building of the Mutirikwi or Kyle dam was completed in December 1960. It was formally opened in early 1961, culminating a period of increasingly ambitious irrigation and water planning across Southern Rhodesia. This chapter examines how dam building and irrigation planning, at Mutirikwi and elsewhere, between the late 1940s and 1960s – around the decade of the Central African Federation (1953–63) – was closely bound up with new contested, imagined futures for Southern Rhodesia, the Federation, and more generally European presence and belonging in the region, at a time of both ‘high-modernist’ optimism and growing momentum for decolonisation...

This chapter begins by focusing on the debates of the 1950s about which dams (Popotekwe, Kyle or Bangala) to build on the Mutirikwi river system. Engaging with Ingold’s efforts to close the gap between imagining and perceiving landscape – what I term the materialities of imagination – it explores how minute material engagements with the affordances of soil, topography and hydrology were caught up in the divergent demands of Victoria residents and the lowveld sugar industries. Although the grandiose imagined futures of irrigation planning were important for what happened – that the long-muted Popotekwe dam was never built and Mutirikwi’s...

This chapter and the next are about what happened after the dam and after the war that followed, taking us back to the remaking of Mutirikwi’s landscapes in the 2000s with which the book began. It is a story about the re-assertion of African pasts and presence that the dam and everything that came with it failed to obliterate. It is also about African futures frustrated in the wake of war, in which the perceived ruptures of history – the dam, war, independence, eviction and return – diminish in context of material and imaginative endurances, co-existences and proximities. Both the...

Although the residents of Victoria set about building their ‘playground’ with great gusto after the dam’s completion, and the lowveld sugar industries expanded rapidly once water became available, African nationalism and war had brought danger and insecurity to Mutirikwi. White futures looked more precarious as African futures were increasingly full of promise. While the dangers accompanying war threatened everyone in different ways, for many cultural nationalism anticipated new African futures offering diverse promises of ‘return’. African pasts had not been obliterated by the dam and its remaking of Mutirikwi’s landscapes. This chapter focuses on what happened around Mutirikwi after the...