Suffering for Territory

#44 - Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe, by Donald S. Moore
Finished 9/3/07
Rating: 3/5
Total Pages: 322
Reason for Reading: Ethnography
FROM BACK COVER: Since 2000, black squatters have forcibly occupied white farms across Zimbabwe, reigniting questions of racialized dispossession, land rights, and legacies of liberation. Donald S. Moore probes these contentious politics by analyzing fierce disputes over territory, sovereignty, and subjection in the country’s eastern highlands. He focuses on poor farmers in Kaerezi who endured colonial evictions from their ancestral land and lived as refugees in Mozambique during Zimbabwe’s guerrilla war. After independence in 1980, Kaerezians returned home to a changed landscape. Postcolonial bureaucrats had converted their land from a white ranch into a state resettlement scheme. Those who defied this new spatial order were threatened with eviction. Moore shows how Kaerezians’ predicaments of place pivot on memories of “suffering for territory,” at once an idiom of identity and entitlement. Combining fine-grained ethnography with innovative theoretical insights, this book illuminates the complex interconnections between local practices of power and the wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global discourses of development.

REVIEW: I found this a somewhat difficult read, but the overall message was clear. The Zimbabwean government has gone through numerous phases of how to distribute land, and very few of their strategies have taken into account the cultural and social views of the people who make their living from the land. An old story that continues to repeat itself in many areas of the world. In most regions across the globe, owning land is a source of power and security, and those who maintain control of how land is distributed need to be well-informed about how people use that land.

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This is the first of many books piled up in teetering stacks at my elbow.... all background or suggested readings for the major papers I will be writing over the next two to three years -- final-year BSc dissertation this year, hopefully followed by a Masters degree thesis in 2009 or 2010. Why am I reading so far ahead? Because I'm in the midst of writing proposals for my Masters research....proposals that will accompany grad school applications and scholarship submissions....and I have to make it sound like I know what I'm talking about. :P

Listening to: Sparkling (E.O.S.S.), on iTunes Space Station Soma.
Watching: First season of Firefly.