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TITLE: The Unsettled Land State-making and the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe 1893-2003
AUTHOR: Jocelyn Alexander 
EDITOR:
PUBLISHER: James Currey Ltd
CO-PUBLISHER:
SERIES:
FORMAT: Hardback (pp: 240) 234 x 156mm
ISBN-10: 0852558937
ISBN-13: 9780852558935
PUB DATE: 19 Oct 2006
AVAILABILITY: Available
PRICE: �50.00

DESCRIPTION:
This book engages with current debates on land and politics in Africa and provides a much needed historical narrative of the Zimbabwean case. In early 2000, a process of land occupation began in Zimbabwe. It involved the movement of hundreds of thousands of black farmers onto mostly white-owned farms, often under the leadership of veterans of Zimbabwe's 1970s liberation war. The ZANU(PF) government cast this moment as the end of colonialism. Others saw it as mere electioneering, the desperate machinations of an illegitimate government. This poorly understood crisis has deep roots. In the settler period the government of Rhodesia divided the land along racial lines leaving the black population in poor and overcrowded reserves. Independent Zimbabwe not only inherited this profoundly unequal division of land but also a potent institutional and ideological legacy of contested claims to authority over the land. This combustible mix shaped political desires and discourses, as well as state and African institutions, setting the stage for the dramatic upheavals of 2000 and beyond.
 

REVIEW:
"'...will undoubtedly make a valuable contribution to the literature on Zimbabwean politics. Its strengths are the author's ability to take the longue duree in understanding the land question, revealing the issue in all its complexities and the trajectory from one policy perspective to another, all contributing to a changing configuration of the status of the powerful and the dispossessed in that troubled country.' - Chris Alden, London School of Economics & Political Science"

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Jocelyn Alexander is Lecturer in Commonwealth Studies in the University of Oxford

CONTENTS:
Introduction
- Making the settler state
- authority & the land
- Remaking the reserves
- The Native Land Husbandry Act
- Remaking rural administration
- knowing African society
- Chiefs, nationalism & the land
- knowing the colonial state
- Governing the land in independent Zimbabwe
- Political conflict, authority & the land in Insiza
- Nationalism, 'squatters' & chiefs in Chimanimani
- The new politics of an unsettled land.

SUBJECT LINK:
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African history: from c 1900 - 		 
Additional Information:
Illustrations: maps Dewey: 968.9102
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