Law, expertise, and settler conflicts over land in early colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1923

Using archival sources, this paper examines the uses of law and expert knowledge in conflicts over land among officials and settlers in early colonial Zimbabwe. Land settlement laws, together with European colonists’ relations with Africans resident on their farms, became a focal point of the British South Africa Company’s (BSAC) engagements with settlers leading to conflicts over what constituted proper land utilization and the boundaries of authority. These conflicts emerged out of the Company’s position as private entity and a colonial governing authority. Seeking to meet the profit expectations of its shareholders, the BSAC inserted, in its land settlement laws, a “beneficial occupation clause,†which stipulated that farmers could only retain their land if they continuously occupied it and invested in farming. This conflicted with settler efforts to engage in other economic activities such as mining in order to eke out a living in the new colony. Company imperatives to make profits for its shareholders also led it to formulate policies that favored mining over agriculture, leading to conflicts between colonial mining and agrarian capital. Settler farmers fighting to exclude miners, other settler farmers and Africans from their lands appropriated experts’ arguments over environmental change evidenced by soil erosion and the spread of cattle diseases such as East Coast Fever. Conflicts among settlers and colonial officials not only reveal the contradictions of colonial rule and capitalist development but also contributed to the making of the land question in Zimbabwe. Settlers’ disaffection with the BSAC’s land policies, among other factors, led many of them to question its claims to ownership of the land and to campaign for the end of Company rule. The settler state that emerged out of this campaign was dominated by farming interests and went on to enact policies that favored settler farmers at the expense of Africans, sowing the seeds of discontent, which exploded with the post-2000 farm invasions and the country’s Fast Track Land Reform program.