Abstract
The chapter utilizes a desk approach that analyzes the competing ideas on the Fast Track Land Reform Program in Zimbabwe. Literature on the program was purposively sampled, guided by the need to understand how different scholars explain the social change in Zimbabwe’s agrarian sector. In this chapter, we thus focus on the competing narratives that explain the land revolution in Zimbabwe in 2000. We provide the various theoretical and empirical positions that emerged to explain the events that fundamentally changed Zimbabwe’s rural landscape. The chapter highlights two distinct schools of thought to explain the social change in Zimbabwe’s agrarian structure. It also highlights that within these schools of thought, there are contestations and disagreements to the point that explanations for Zimbabwe’s land revolution are instead on a continuum. This includes those who argue that war veterans instigated land reform as part of ZANU-PF’s official campaign strategy for the 2000 elections and in response to the dwindling support for the party, as shown by the results of the February 2000 referendum on the state-sponsored constitution. On the other hand, some view the land occupations in 2000 as part of a longer-term and identifiable land occupation movement in post-independent Zimbabwe. The chapter concludes that fundamental social transformation such as that witnessed in rural Zimbabwe under land reform lends itself to ideological contestations and debates around what the change means.
Loosely translated, jambanja means chaos. It was a term used to describe the events of later 1999 and early 2000 that were characterized by chaotic and violent land invasions, which led to the destruction of property, sabotage, beatings, and in some cases murder (Chaumba et al., 2003).
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Chiweshe, M.K., Sifile, J., Mutopo, P. (2023). Explaining Social Change in the Context of Zimbabwe’s Jambanja. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_75-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_75-1
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