In modern Zimbabwe, women have little protection under the law to inherit land, or even in the first place to be allocated land permits. Traditional indigenous social structural protection for African women has been eroded with the fusion of both Christian and British colonial legislature. Allison Goebel’s Gender and Land Reform: The Zimbabwe Experience examines in depth the Shona people of the Sengezi Resettlement, and the vulnerability of the women who work the land allotments.

A Canadian, Goebel says she has “self-consciously situated myself in the research process as a person of racial and economic privilege in comparison to the people of the Sengezi Resettlement …. My whiteness automatically elevated me in people’s eyes, as did the evidence of my long years of formal education” (49). Her position as a married woman with children also enabled Goebel to be accepted by the people in the region, ensuring she was not the subject of unwanted sexual interest from men.

Formerly Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe was freed from white rule in 1979 after almost a century of being a British colony originally partitioned by Cecil Rhodes. Much media scrutiny was made of the post-independence resettlement of white colonial farmers and the bloody conflicts both before and after the handover. Rhodesian governments regarded traditional African practices as backward and lazy and, as in many post-colonial countries (such as Australia), the introduction of foreign farming practices were destructive to the environment. Farms were frequently subject to soil erosion due to tree-clearing and intensive farming practices that were unsuitable to the climatic conditions.

Goebel looks at four of the original farming villages in the Sengezi Resettlement established in 1981. Here, “the large old farmhouse lies in ruins, a reminder of the bloody war and an enduring testament to the architectural dimensions black/white rural inequality” (53). All over Africa during the nineteenth century, both the land and the people living on it were frequently ‘annexed’ by the British; cattle and farms were taken from their indigenous owners, and the labour they could provide allocated to the white invaders. Initial settlement of the region was difficult as “many people feared they were being sent to do forced labour on the farms, as had occurred in the past” (58). While the original settled families were nuclear in structure, they are now extended groups ranging in size from four to nineteen members. Matriarchal households are now increasing, but the women tend to be widows who manage the land of their late husband's family. The majority are also Christian, and “the Shona people tend to see the Shona religion and Christianity as compatible …. [due to] a pre-existent concept of a high god [Mwari]” (110).

While the women are still responsible for the care of the children, men still control the money and often withhold it from the household, which means women “may be unable to meet their economic responsibilities, such as feeding their children” (62). Goebel offers an extreme example of this vulnerability, when in 1996 after a bumper harvest, there was “a rash of suicides by women farmers in Zimbabwe … [because] on receipt of a large lump sum of money from the sale of grain, many husbands disappeared for several weeks of debauchery, returning home penniless” (62). After this event, the government “encouraged women farmers to register their own marketing card … so that cheques could come in their names” (63). Prior to colonisation “women had been the backbone of peasant agricultural production … [but after colonisation] male absence left women with increasingly high farm burden, but not necessarily with decision-making authority over farm production” (35-6).

While the Shona of the Sengezi Resettlement have larger allocations of arable land, and generally earn more from farming than those in communal area farms, this comparison must take into account that “the major part of the communal area people’s income comes from waged work” (55). Shona households are each allocated five hectares, with at least half of the harvested crop sustaining the family, while the other half can be sold to the Grain Marketing Board; although, “settlers complain about transport problems, particularly the high cost of ferrying their maize … and about the lack of electricity [in the settlement] which was promised to them by the government, and the lack of other infrastructural developments, such as dams” (54-5).

Resettlement permits are issued in the name of the men, therefore women are “vulnerable to complete loss of land rights in the case of divorce” (60). The rights of widows to land is “largely vulnerable to the perspectives of district administrators, resettlement officers, VIDCOS (Village Development Committees) and councillors” (90). The status of these women greatly increases if the permit is issued to them; more often than not, however, the land will be taken over by a male relative of the deceased, or the widow “is expected to marry the brother of the deceased, especially if she is still of child-bearing age” (90). Goebel found in many of her interviews that the men of the area now acknowledged a widow’s right to the land. In communal areas more pressure was placed on women to remarry, while in the settlements widows could refuse to be ‘inherited’ by their deceased husband’s family, or to relinquish their land permits, thus “the dominant pattern in resettlement appears to allow widows to remain” (94). Unfortunately, this trend is not formally instituted and numerous cases of widows left homeless still occur.

Divorced women face even more difficult circumstance because “with no automatic access to a resettlement stand of their own, women are just a divorce away from landlessness” (99-100). In the traditional pre-colonisial Shona household, the status and rights of women increased when she bore children; she had “the option to return to her natal home if she is mistreated or sexually unsatisfied (65). Currently in Zimbabwe, however, government intervention places entitlement and economic power only in male names, meaning that women and their children now often “survive in spite of their membership to a household, not because of it” (64). In post-colonial Zimbabwe, the rights of women have been eroded because “marriage has become less of a contract between two families and more a transference of male control of women from father to husband” (65).

Women have been forced to form saving clubs to attain a measure of autonomy and lessen their economic dependence on the men, who in general have proven to be unreliable at re-distributing their profits back to their household. Another way women try to attain some power in the household is in the Shona tradition of “husband-taming herbs” (125). Goebel’s interviewees suggested these are used more frequently now than in the past due to several factors, the most prevalent being domestic violence and infidelity. Unfaithful husbands often bring HIV/AIDS to the household, and endangering the financial security of the family by squandering money on their girlfriends. Husband-taming herbs were often employed to not only to keep a man but also to “control the household budgeting, which makes male infidelity so problematic” (127). The woman’s control of the kitchen left the men vulnerable to poisoning or mind control with intoxicant herbs. However, the women were forced to take these measures because they lack primary rights to land and their relationship to their husband is the basis of their economic security.

To lessen the vulnerability of women to homelessness, the Women and Land Lobby Group want their names to be included in titles and land leases. However, marriage is often informal in rural contexts, making it even more difficult for state intervention into the protection of women’s assets.


Gender and Land Reform: The Zimbabwe Experience
(March 2005)
by Allison Goebel
McGill-Queen’s University Press
ISBN: 0-7735-2842-3
178pp