Colonial agrarian history of Sanyati (Zimbabwe): Prelude, debates and innuendoes of Tribal Trust Land Development Corporation (TILCOR) Decentralised Development, 1948-1979.

Abstract

This article examines the colonial agrarian history of Gowe-Sanyati Communal Lands in Zimbabwe between 1948 and 1979 paying attention to the context, debates and innuendoes of Tribal Trust Land Development Corporation (TILCOR) decentralised development. TILCOR, renamed the Agricultural and Rural Development Authority (ARDA) after Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, is a parastatal agency formed in 1968. It was entrusted, inter alia, with identifying, initiating, promoting, evaluating, planning, co-ordinating, financing, developing, implementing and administering new industrial and agricultural development projects such as irrigation schemes, new settlement areas and growth-points (rural service-centres). After the Second World War the then settler colonial government had 'encouraged' urban employment of semi-skilled Africans in the manufacturing sector, but with the inception of TILCOR emphasis shifted to keeping Africans in the rural areas to discourage massive rural-urban migration. It was envisaged that hordes of people in search of employment opportunities would cause a "sociopolitical-human problem" or "inevitable flooding" of the urban centres. This fear or premonition gave rise to the pre-formulation of a decentralisation policy and later its full implementation under TILCOR. The initial stage entailed initiating a State- engineered rural development process designed to keep Africans on the land. The paper argues that such State-directed development was not without its own problems as it was achievable on the basis of settling and absorbing Africans white enclaves, but in semi-urban, rural and irrigation agricultural enterprises. Using the Gowe-Sanyati area as a case study, this paper, therefore, explores the implications o f the evolution of the decentralisation philosophy against the backdrop o f scholarly debates and development perspectives of the colonial State in order to understand the operations o f TILCOR and their impact on the African peasantry who were the intended beneficiaries of the policy.