Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Program has attracted a lot of scholarly attention. While some scholars have argued that the process through which landless peasants reclaimed land was chaotic and violent, others have praised it for having been one of the most radical redistributive land reform programs in Africa. While these debates have dominated scholarship on land reform program in Zimbabwe since 2000, what has been lacking has been a historical analysis of the entanglement between land resettlement and struggles over restitution. Land restitution has been at the center of the land redistribution in Zimbabwe. In spite of the successes that the government has made in redistributing land, land restitution is the last frontier in the struggle over land. Ruins, ancestral graves, and sacred sites are important landscape features whose emotive presence and materiality enable communities to make land claims and counterclaims.
Land restitution processes have been initiated in a variety of regional and country contexts. In former settler societies such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Canada, and Australia, indigenous populations have laid claims over land dispossessed under colonial rule. In post-conflict societies internally displaced people have also attempted to lay claims over land that they had to leave behind fleeing from violence. Further, where large-scale land deals have been unsuccessful or revoked through resistance land reclamation has also been instigated. Land restitution is concerned with restoring landed property to former owners. As compared to land redistribution, restitution is not concerned with ironing out of inequitable distribution of land to create a just future but with reestablishment of former rights based on principles of justice rather than equality. Restitution is therefore based on returning land to former owners who can prove claims. Land restitution is an elastic concept covering a range of processes designed to appease what are perceived as historical injustices around loss of land rights.
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Land Resettlement and Restitution in Zimbabwe
Joseph Mujere
Article
Addis Ababa
Getahun Benti
Addis Ababa was founded as a military garrison in 1887 by the Amhara king and later Emperor Menilek II of Ethiopia. Its foundation was the result of a long historical process in which Christian Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia) expanded southward, culminating in large-scale conquest and the creation of the largest empire in the region in the last decade of the 19th century. Located at the center of Menilek’s empire, Addis Ababa quickly grew into a vibrant political, economic, and administrative center. Its closeness to the resources of the conquered regions, the diplomatic recognition the country earned after the Battle of Adwa in 1896, and the city’s connection to the sea by railway in 1917 turned Addis Ababa into the largest city in the Horn of Africa. Addis Ababa brought people of different ethnic groups together, the Amhara as conquerors and the rest as subjects of that conquest. Having removed the Indigenous Oromo people, Menilek allotted their land to his fellow-Amhara followers, who created segregated settlements, which the Italians dismantled during their occupation, 1936–1941. The Italians conducted the first project of modern urban planning and erected new buildings, built new roads, created separate urban quarters, and changed the physical structure of the city. The city grew beyond its capacity, and subsequent postwar plans (1956, 1986, and 2014), which attempted to strictly control the city’s growth, were of little effect in this regard. Addis Ababa continued to be where all national activities and services—economic, social, administrative, health, educational—were concentrated, which led to inward migration. Several international organizations and agencies, including the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, opened their headquarters in Addis Ababa, which enhanced the city’s status. As a result of all these historical developments, Ethiopians have mixed feelings about Addis Ababa; some see it as a symbol of victory and power, others as a symbol of subjugation and deprivation, while yet others see it as a symbol of modernity and as a melting pot.
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Nationalism, Decolonization, and Development in Kenya
Kara Moskowitz
In colonial Kenya, the British administration appropriated fertile lands for European settlers. The resulting land shortage, alongside coercive policies such as taxation, forced many African families to become laborers on white farms or in cities. As land scarcity heightened and labor conditions worsened, African communities in Kenya engaged in various forms of anticolonial resistance, ranging from strikes to protests to violent conflicts like Mau Mau. In the 1940s, the colonial state began responding to African resistance with development and welfare. Development not only failed to improve standards of living, but it also allowed the state to intervene more aggressively into African lives. The imposition of misguided and unwanted programs, which also relied on communal forced labor, produced only greater discontentment. In cities especially, workers appropriated the language of development as a new basis to make claims. Building on mounting protests and shifting global politics, nationalist politics intensified, and as a result, processes of decolonization formally started in 1960.
During independence negotiations, contestations for land shaped political alliances and drove heated debates over the structure of the postcolonial government. Prior to the resolution of these issues, the colonial administration began enacting land resettlement. These programs—based on the principle of willing buyer–willing seller at market value—protected white settlers and further entrenched class, ethnic, and gender inequalities. Kenya gained independence with a federal constitution, but Jomo Kenyatta and the KANU (Kenya African National Union) party that came into power opposed regionalism. Within a year, Kenya had become a de facto one-party state, and the federal constitution was abolished. Though Kenyatta adeptly strengthened and preserved his power, postcolonial Kenya witnessed the rise of populist, ethnonationalist, and separatist movements. While none have been wholly successful, Kenya’s economic and political inequalities, its unmet promises of decolonization, and its ethnic antagonisms have ensured continual protest and a fractured nation.
