7. The Third Chimurenga: Party-State and War Veterans

This is the first of three chapters on the third chimurenga. This chapter focuses on the crucial question of the ruling party and state and their supposed involvement in the fast track land occupations (third chimurenga), raising the centrality of war veterans to the occupations. In showing that the ruling party and state were in large part peripheral to the occupations, the following chapter is then able to focus on the complex localised dynamics of the occupations as they unfolded across the Zimbabwean countryside. The chapter discusses the acrimonious debate which emerged soon after the occupations began, a debate about the very form of the third chimurenga occupations. This sets the stage for a detailed scrutiny of war veterans and the party-state vis-à-vis the occupations. The war veterans, even if articulating a nationalist agenda seemingly consistent with the ruling party, were neither acting at the behest of the ruling party nor acting in alliance with it. The chapter ends by indicating briefly the sheer diversity of the occupations nation-wide in order to demonstrate the decentralised character of the occupations, which becomes the central theme for the following chapter.