Shifting the debate on land reform,poverty and inequality in Zimbabwe,an engagement with Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities 1

Zimbabwe's land reform: myths and realities 2 2. Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities by Ian Scoones, Nelson Marongwe, Blasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Crispen Sukume, Woodbridge, Suffolk, James Currey, 2010, 304 pp., ISBN 9781847010247. purports to overturn the western media and academy's ‘myths’ of agrarian failure and cronyism in Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform with a study rooted in the ‘reality’ of its outcomes in the Masvingo area. Yet the positivist picture painted by Scoones, Marongwe, Mavedzenge, Mahenehene, Murimbarimba, and Sukume is another position in portrayals of a complex process entangling many local material struggles–including those seen as successful examples of the yeomanry admired by the authors–with the equally important processes of authoritarian nationalism they side-line. ‘Myth making’ is not counter to ‘reality’, but positions particular claims within it. By concentrating on the ‘local’ and celebrating what they see as non-technocratic successes, the authors ignore the context and politics of the state–which they later invoke to develop adequate supportive policy and stability for the new farmers. Their reality ignores as much as the myths they try to challenge, and thus fails to assist to develop the policies they would like.     

Foreign investment,black economic empowerment and militarised patronage politics in Zimbabwe

This paper seeks to analyse Zimbabwe's economic empowerment policy. It argues that while there is a felt need for Zimbabwe to redress colonially induced injustices and racial imbalances in the ownership of the means of production, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to the indigenisation of the economy is fundamentally flawed as it deters investors and may further damage the country's already extremely fragile economy. The implementation of the land reform programme contributed to the decline of Zimbabwe's economy: lessons learnt from the programme and related economic policies of the past 15 years highlight the problems of empowerment policies that are intertwined with patronage politics. The government's negation of basic economic principles and failure to open spaces for critical engagement with all relevant stakeholders epitomises an ill-advised indigenisation and economic empowerment strategy. The policy will not promote and retain foreign investment;nor are there sustainable prospects of internally oriented accumulation strategies on the horizon.     

Tobacco contract farming in Zimbabwe: power dynamics,accumulation trajectories,land use patterns and livelihoods

ABSTRACT

Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Programme resulted in a massive growth of the country's tobacco sector. Some authors have labelled this, the ‘tobacco boom’. The effects of this growth are variegated across space and time. This study explores the growth of tobacco contract farming in Goromonzi and Zvimba districts and the resultant effects on land use patterns, accumulation, power dynamics and livelihood outcomes. In illuminating on contract farming, the study also pays attention to non-contract farmers. The rise in the number of contract farmers is attributed to; better extension services, improved and guaranteed access to input and output markets. At the same time, tobacco contract farming is marked by several vicissitudes. Some farmers withdrew from the contracts due to low output prices and high input costs resulting in indebtedness. Similarly, some contracting firms dropped out from the contracting arrangements. Overall, many contracted growers accumulated more than non-contract farmers.     

Narratives of progress: Zimbabwean historiography and the end of history

This brief commentary takes its inspiration from the opening address delivered by John Hoffman, and printed in these pages; that is, progress is usefully understood as a contradictory, contested and ambiguous process. But rather than attempt a comprehensive survey of the past 40 or so years of academic analyses of Zimbabwe's pasts, what follows has as its focus the emergence of ‘patriotic history’ and particularly its nationalist antecedents. These are critically examined. Although not concerned with the generality of recent studies that are neither nationalist nor materialist in orientation, this paper sketches in outline the rise, fall and rise of radical accounts. It ends by suggesting how such analyses might be taken forward.     

Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe's ontological hopes,Sembene's machines,Mda's epistemological redness

In Chinua Achebe's book of essays Hopes and Impediments, he asserts that Nigeria's failure to ‘develop’ and ‘modernise’ like Japan is because of a ‘failure of imagination’. Yet for many Africans, modernity is a tainted ‘gift’ because it was introduced into the African continent along with European colonial capitalism which simultaneously caused an ontological crisis of self. Although many Africans want to ‘catch up’ with the West, how is it possible when Western technological superiority was equated with white racial superiority? Achebe declares that, as Africans ‘begin their journey into the strange, revolutionary world of modernization’, literature should function as guide. Hence, I examine Ousmane Sembene's novel God's Bits of Wood which depicts Africans laying claim to ‘race-less’, ‘language-less’ ‘machines’. But does (Western) technology change culture? Can African culture appropriate technology to form a dialectical African modernity? If so, what role does ‘tradition’ play? In Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness, we witness the emergence of a traditional modernity made possible by a dialectical epistemology.     

Teachers’ and bank workers’ responses to Zimbabwe's crisis: uneven effects,different strategies

While other studies have examined worker experiences in the informal sector during the crisis, this study is the first to focus on the formal sector, comparing the experiences of teachers and banking sector workers. The study shows that the Zimbabwean crisis (2000–2008) had uneven effects which elicited differential responses from workers. During the peak of the crisis in 2008, the teaching sector almost collapsed as most of the primary and secondary school teachers responded to hyper-inflation that had eroded their incomes by joining the diaspora or Zimbabwe's burgeoning speculative informal economy. The establishment of the Government of National Unity (GNU) saw the dollarisation of the Zimbabwean economy and the shelving of the Zimbabwean dollar in April 2009. These changes saw the teaching sector showing signs of revival, as some of the teachers who had left the profession re-joined the sector. This was largely because the dollarisation of the Zimbabwean economy ‘killed off’ the speculative activities that were sustaining a large proportion of the teachers in the informal economy during the crisis. In stark contrast, the banking sector thrived during the peak of the crisis, as most banks became key players in highly speculative activities such as Zimbabwe's bullish stock exchange and real estate. The profits realised in the banking sector trickled down to its workers who became the best remunerated amongst all the sectors in Zimbabwe. In a twist of irony, the banking sector was adversely affected by the dollarisation of the economy, as the speculative activities that were reaping huge rewards for the banks were wiped out overnight by the adoption of currencies more stable than the precarious Zimbabwean dollar. This spelt disaster for the banking fraternity. Most banks in the first few months of dollarisation struggled to pay their workers in hard currency; many were forced to downsize their operations and lay-off some employees.     

Everyday forms of state decomposition: Quetzaltenango,Guatemala, 1954⋆

This essay explores how Guatemala's 1952 agrarian reform played out among Quetzalteco K'iche's. Much of the academic writing on the revolution is concerned with the way the agrarian reform affected indigenous communities. These studies either view the reform as creating bitter political conflicts within the community, thereby weakening or destroying local institutions of communal politics and identification, or else they understand the reform as deepening incipient class divisions. In all of these studies,‘conflict’is understood to be something antithetical to‘community’. Yet conflict is as essential to communal formation as are more visible identity markers, suggesting an intriguing correlation: the greater the degree of communal conflict, the greater the level of communal identification.     

Israel: ethnocracy or multicracy?

Much of the recent academic literature that assesses democracy in Israel labels it either as incomplete or flawed, yet such literature employs minimal systematic analysis of how the state is actually governed. Since the 1990s, there has been a tendency to describe the Israeli political regime as an ethnocracy. This article argues that the term ‘ethnocracy’, when applied to Israel, has certain weaknesses and instead proposes the concept of ‘multicracy’ (multiformocracy) as a more appropriate term by which to describe Israel's political organization. It will demonstrate that existing Israeli democratic institutions do not control the state's policymaking in full and that several politically important processes are controlled or at least influenced by various other politically active forces. Whilst these forces can influence, stimulate, inhibit, and otherwise change governmental decisions and actions, they can be labeled as kratiae. While the capacity of Israel's democracy to govern is weak, these other kratiae can intervene in policymaking and the state's regime acts as democracy-dominated multicracy.     

Secularizing Islamism and Islamizing Democracy: The Political and Ideational Evolution of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers 1984–2012

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) emerged in Egypt in the early twentieth century to resist secularism and political pluralism in favour of religious revival and a unitary Islamic state. After three decades of political participation culminating in its formation of a government in Egypt, the MB has prioritized electoral paths to power, while claiming to defend individual rights, popular majorities and a civil state. Nevertheless, the MB's discourse continues to straddle religious and secular terrain: in recent election campaigns, MB leaders promised to build an ‘Islamic state’ and a ‘caliphate’, all the while insisting that the people, not God are the source of all power. What explains these contradictions, and what do they tell us about the Brotherhood's apparent adoption of political and ideational pluralism and democratic values? The article contends that the MB's ambivalence about democracy is not a sign of dissimulation or lack of ideological evolution. Instead, it has its roots in a 30-year process of partially adapting to democratic and ‘secular’ political ideas by reframing them in religious terms which, however, resulted in creating what the article discusses as a hybrid ‘secularized’ Islamism. This hybridization has both enabled and constrained the Brothers' adaptation to democracy in the post-Mubarak period.     

Even honey may become bitter when there is too much of it: Islam and the struggle for a balanced existence in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

In Kyrgyzstan, as in the rest of Central Asia, recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Islam. What is perceived as a growing ‘religiosity’ is often seen as a symptom of post-Soviet chaos and excess, but people equally tend to see Islam as an important source of well-being, for themselves and for society as such. It is argued that a general feature of the Islam many Muslims strive for – and occasionally experience glimpses of – is one that expresses, embodies and enables a balanced existence: a balance between well-being in this world and in the afterlife; a balance between the acceptance of one's fate and the attempt to improve one's situation; or a balance between adherence to abstract dogmas and respect for local moralities.     

Whiteness and shades of grey: erasure,amnesia and the ethnography of Zimbabwe's whites

A growing number of scholarly studies have been published about Zimbabwe's white population, especially since the highly publicised state-driven land takeovers which began in 2000. Much as these studies have produced useful insights into the histories, attitudes, experiences and lives of white Zimbabweans, aspects of these representations also raise important questions and concerns. Looking critically, particularly at recent ethnographic works on white Zimbabweans by anthropologists, this review essay discusses some of the social and historical amnesia and certain erasures apparent in these works. These have often produced homogenised and essentialised, or unfair, representations of white Zimbabweans. This essay suggests that an uncritical use and perpetuation of certain myths and discourses that have powerfully come to the fore in the political, social and economic crisis of the last 15 years has led to the problems evident with these ethnographies.     

Salafi pluralism in national contexts: the secular state,nation and militant Islamism in Kosovo,Albania, and Macedonia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the question of how Albanian Salafi Muslims have engaged with and provided religious interpretations to issues peculiar to Albanians’ historical and sociopolitical context, as well as considering the ethnic group’s recent engagement in Middle Eastern conflicts. Utilizing Salafism’s doctrinal concepts of takfir (excommunication of another Muslim) and al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ (loyalty and disavowal) as guiding analytical tools, the article investigates Albanian Salafi Muslims’ position and discourse on the following three Albanian-specific issues: (i) engagement with the secular state by voting for their representatives (leaders); (ii) the question of nation and nationalism; and (iii) the question of militant Islamism related more recently to the Syrian conflict. Though there are different nuances among Albanian Salafi Muslims, the article shows the sharper distinctions and divergences that exist between the mainstream and rejectionist Salafis when considering the ways they have engaged with the three issues under analysis. Also, despite the general agreement in literature about Salafism’s globalized acculturalization impact on localized Islam(s), the analysis deduces Salafism’s ‘re-culturalized’ and ‘re-nationalized’ face in the Albanian-specific context, something prevalent among the mainstream Salafi Muslims of this ethnic group in the Balkans.     

From Bandung to Brasilia: IBSA and the political lineage of South–South cooperation

This article aims to trace South–South cooperation political lineages connecting the Non-Aligned Movement and the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) Forum. In order to determine whether IBSA could be considered the ‘heir’ to Bandung's principles, we analyse the concepts of ‘Third World’ and ‘Global South’ as well as their current applicability, the interpretations provided by existing literature on the IBSA grouping, and its member countries' shared views on different issues of the international agenda. The article also considers the historical evolution of ‘Southern’ diplomatic thought and actions. IBSA's actions and history, as well as its members, are studied to grasp how they are related to the Third World movement in the Cold War.     

Childhood,Movement and Play: An Analysis of Child Agency and Heterotopia in Linha de Passe (2008) and Los colores de la montaña (2010)

This paper draws on contemporary theoretical debates surrounding the significance of cinematic children in order to examine two recent Latin American films. The Foucauldian concept of ‘heterotopia’ is used to explore the abilities of child protagonists to produce spaces with which they interact both imaginatively and in the films' diegetic realities. Despite distinct urban and rural settings, these productions' staging of playful heterospaces and heterotemporalities permit brief moments of relief within otherwise harsh environments. Such spaces enable child characters to demonstrate an ‘agency’ that is denied their elders, whilst somewhat evading the symbolic ‘futurity’ with which children are often burdened.     

Inscriptions of Violence in Northern Yemen: Haunting Histories,Unstable Moral Spaces

The article investigates the so-called ‘Huthi crisis’ in northern Yemen, centering on the recent confrontation between Zaydi Shi‘is and the government. The crisis is analysed in the context of local contestations over moral authority and regional developments since the late 1970s. The article shows how regional and global dynamics, notably Cold War strategic alliances, Saudi Arabia's aspirations to contain Shi‘ism on the Arabian Peninsula and American security concerns since 2001, have impacted local politics and configurations of power. The article argues that anxieties over the past remain, against the backdrop of the politicisation and repression of the Zaydi revivalist movement, depicted by the government as aiming to restore the imamate. The government was open to accusations of ambivalence towards Sunni militants, by using them alongside the army and giving them positions of power while at the same time claiming to counter their influence. Action against the Zaydis established its credentials in the ‘war on terror.’     

State Response to Transnational Asset Accumulation: The Case of Argentina

Using the asset accumulation framework, and relying on interviews with civil servants working in the department of migrations for the Argentine government, this article addresses the response of the Argentine state to the accumulation and transfer of capital among Argentine emigrants. Contextualising the situation of Argentina in the ‘Latin American context', our primary focus is on four asset categories: financial, human, social and political. This inquiry identifies recent initiatives developed to approach Argentines residing abroad as well as some of the challenges faced by the Argentine state to ‘reconnect’ with emigrants.     

Power elites,war and postwar reconstruction in Africa: Continuities,discontinuities and paradoxes

This article interrogates the manner in which the composition, character, regeneration, and accumulation strategies of power elites and the organisation of their hegemony is being affected or unaffected by recent developments, most especially, civil wars and their corollary, postwar reconstruction, in Africa. By seeking to understand how conflicts and post-conflict reconstruction alter or transform the character, recruitment and role of power elites, and the operational context (the nature of the state) in Africa, this article draws attention to the prospects of transforming the nature of leadership in Africa. I contend that the capacity for violence and terror by individuals (especially young combatants who were previously marginalised) and armed groups has become a new marker of elitism and a leverage on peace agreements. Moreover, post-Cold War conflicts in Africa have accentuated the emergence of war-making power elites as ‘executors’ and ‘trustees’ of peace treaties, or ‘peace celebrities’ with considerable leverage on the course and outcomes of postwar reconstruction. The instability in post-1989 Liberia is used as a case study to reflect this claim. I also cite examples of members and leaders of armed groups in countries such as Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo where the capacity for violence translated into political rewards and gains in peace agreements.     

Book Reviews

This article examines East European migrants’ relationships with other communities in the context of waged work through in-depth interviews with recent Polish and Lithuanian migrants to London. These migrants found themselves newly surrounded by greater racial and ethnic diversity. By distinguishing themselves from other workers on the basis of skin color and legal status, they present themselves as members of the host country's ‘white’ majority, which places them in a position of power in relation to other migrant groups in London.     

Süleyman Nazif's ‘Open Letter to Jesus’: An Anti-Christian Polemic in the Early Turkish Republic

The recent ‘cartoon crisis’ caused by European newspapers that published disrespectful caricatures of the prophet Muhammad and offended Muslims all over the world, intensified the discussions on ‘the clash of civilizations’. The present religious quarrels, as distressing as they are, remind us of the uproar Süleyman Nazif (1870–1927), a Muslim Turkish nationalist caused in Turkey in 1924. At that time the bone of contention was not a cartoon but the ‘Open Letter to Jesus’ Nazif published followed by his ‘The Reply of Jesus’ and in both of which he condemned the ‘crusader mentality’ of the Christian world. Being political satires, these letters reflect the views of Süleyman Nazif on the imperialist European powers, show his attempt to defend the newly founded Turkish Republic and illustrate how relations between Turkey and Europe had been deepening the prejudices of Muslims and Christians toward each other. This contribution presents translations of Nazif's two letters, preceded by an overview of Muslim–Christian polemics in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic.     

The Neglected Nation: The CSU and the Territorial Cleavage in Bavarian Party Politics

This article examines the continuing salience of the territorial cleavage in Bavarian party politics. It does so through an exploration of the Christian Social Union's (CSU) mobilisation of Bavarian identity as part of its political project, which has forced other parties in Bavaria to strengthen their territorial goals and identities. Parties have articulated different constructions of ‘Bavaria’ to rival the CSU's dominant nation-building project. However, they have been unable to portray themselves as ‘standing up for Bavarian interests’ due to the constraints of the state-wide parties to which they belong. As an exclusively Bavarian party, the CSU has no such constraints. Indeed, the CSU's core aim of strengthening Bavaria's position vis-à-vis the German federation may be viewed as akin to that of the Convergència i Unió in Catalonia, Spirit in Flanders or Plaid Cymru in Wales. Like these parties, the case of the CSU in Bavaria demonstrates that sub-state territorial mobilisation has as much to do with negotiating autonomy within the state as seceding from it. To that end, the CSU provides a valuable case of how a regionalist party operating within a multi-level political system has sought to influence the regional, state and European levels to obtain a comparative territorial advantage.