https://hdl.handle.net/10646/57 2026-04-09T20:50:25Z https://hdl.handle.net/10646/4078 Title: Water and the environment in southern Africa: A review of the literature since 1990. Authors: Nyandoro, Mark Abstract: This article is a review of the dominant literature on water issues, water rights and the environment in southern Africa. Being the first in a series of reviews of different regions, it is framed through a survey of national literature that has emerged since the 1990s, with a particular focus on South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Its central objective and/or purpose is to review select publications in which I foreground significant historiographical tendencies as they relate to my topic on water and the environment. The major tendencies or trends define the content of the article about these countries that form an important part of the SADC region. It traces how water history (a subdivision of environmental history) in southern Africa has developed and evolved, and outlines how scholarly debates have changed over time. To achieve this, I track the major themes of water-history focusing on who produced the works cited, when were they produced, and critically surveying their tenors, themes or intention. What motivated this write-up and assessment of the source material is that several works on this topic have been produced by multiple scholars from diverse academic disciplines: water experts and/or practitioners, ecologists and/or environmentalists, historians, economists, social scientists, hydrologists and policy makers. But not much work has been conducted in the social sciences domain to highlight major water rights and environmental benchmarks from an economic history perspective – a perspective that combines the social and economic analysis of events without disregarding the impact of politics on life and society. Description: Post-print article 2019-11-13T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10646/4077 Title: Colonial agrarian history of Sanyati (Zimbabwe): Prelude, debates and innuendoes of Tribal Trust Land Development Corporation (TILCOR) Decentralised Development, 1948-1979. Authors: Nyandoro, Mark; Nyandoro, Lucy 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. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10646/4076 Title: TILCOR-Sanyati Irrigation: A case of development within the decentralisation policy context in colonial Zimbabwe, 1956-1980. Authors: Nyandoro, Mark Abstract: Extensive global and African scholarship exists on how decentralisation has been implemented to achieve rural growth. Pre-eminent scholars like Liihring, Mutizwa- Mangiza, Fortmann and Hankla contend that decentralisation is good for governance and that its merits for development are indisputable. This article interrogates the dynamics o f development within the decentralisation policy context in colonial Zimbabwe between 1956 and 1980, using TILCOR-Sanyati as a case study. It is motivated by the challenges of promoting irrigation development in a decentralisation context. Although the observed upsides o f decentralisation are well-founded, the article challenges the 'advantaging' notion o f the policy in Gowe-Sanyati irrigation. Data gathering combined documentary, case study and archival research. The study's major findings firstly are that TILCOR, operating on the 'modernising’ pedestal provided by the colonial government, did not employ the decentralisation strategy to achieve economic growth for rural Africans. TILCOR failed to achieve decentralised development because it was pro-white and anti-African as illustrated by its support for the former and not the latter. Devolution o f power to irrigation plot-holders remained a pipedream, as instructions were issued from above. The limits of decentralisation led to peasant disillusionment with the policy as there was a gap between people's expectations and what the state was willing to offer. Secondly, the politically-driven growth dynamics o f Gowe-Sanyati during the decentralisation debate (1956-1980) were responsible for bringing 'modernisation' without real development, as colonial-type decentralisation had a 'big centralisation focus'. Thirdly, leveraging community-development planning on the assumption that remarkable agricultural results were to be based on the training o f a 'unicjue' individual to transplant new techniques onto the whole society was difficult. 128 M. Nyandoro 129 Development had to be society (people), not individually-driven. Fourthly, while in the period up to 1975 decentralisation was the favoured policy-priority among Rhodesian policy-makers, the state frequently determined the extent and level of application o f the strategy. As part o f the colonial government's import substitution programme, African agricultural production (for instance, wheat) was merely 'to fill the gap' but not to surpass European production. Hence, the years after 1975 marked a quiescent phase in the decentralisation debate in Sanyati. The article concludes that whilst the post-1980s experienced huge improvement in agricultural production, some o f the colonial practices and frameworks like the lease agreement o f 1967 remained in force, providing a major source o f social resistance. While initiatives were taken to expand the size o f land under T1LCOR, this did not directly benefit individual irrigation farmers whose holdings remained the same in size, a problem its successor (ARDA) had to grapple with. 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10646/3415 Title: “Resettled and Yet Unsettled?” Land Conflicts and Food (in) security in Insiza North, Zimbabwe, 2005-2013 Authors: Kufakurinani, Ushehwedu Abstract: The Land resettlement programme in Zimbabwe beginning around 2000 has been hotly contested within and outside the country. The land occupations had far reaching effects on the social, political and economic landscape of the country in general and Insiza district in particular. The state-led resettlement programme has brought to the district and country unanticipated and incessant conflict. In the Insiza district, this conflict has been between and amongst the following: national political parties; the Shona and Ndebele in the area; the only remaining white rancher and the resettled farmers who violated boundaries, among other things; the local government administration and the resettled farmers. These conflicts were heightened by the return of one Chief Jahana to Insiza with many of his subjects in 2006 to reclaim ‘his motherland’ having been displaced by the colonial regime in the 1960s. Having the support of some of the locals and influential politicians, Jahana’s movement has seen tension heightening by the day. This paper uses the case of Insiza District to evaluate the post-colonial state’s land resettlement exercise. It demonstrates how the conflicts are intricately woven with the food security situation in the region. By and large, we argue, the resettled farmers in Insiza are ‘unsettled’. The paper uses interviews, newspapers and District Council minutes to arrive at a number of conclusions. We note that, in a number of ways, the land conflicts have a potential to derail the success of the resettlement exercise. Description: Book chapter in Dialoguing Land and Indigenisation in Zimbabwe and Other Developing Countries 2015-11-01T00:00:00Z