6. Post-independence Land Reform, War Veterans and Sporadic Rural Struggles

This chapter discusses the intervening period between the second and third zvimurenga by focusing on developments central to the rise of the fast track land occupations in the year 2000. A central consideration for this period is the Zimbabwean state’s failure to shift fundamentally the colonial land and agrarian structure, with the land reform programme failing to de-racialise the countryside in terms of landholdings. Alongside this stalled land reform programme were two further developments which facilitated the emergence of the third chimurenga. On the one hand, large numbers of ex-guerrillas from the war of liberation were marginalised in the post-1980 period and they began to mobilise and organise in a manner which led to the eventual formation of a national war veterans’ association which expressed discontent with the Zimbabwean state and ruling party. On the other hand, because of minimal land reform, as well as ongoing land pressures and livelihood challenges in the communal areas, villagers often in alliance with war veterans increasingly began to occupy land in the 1990s in a deeply localised way. By the late 1990s, the stage was set for another large-scale episode of land struggles.