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Title: | 'Here It is Our Land, the Two of Us': Women, Men and Land in a Zimbabwean Resettlement Area |
Author: | Goebel, Allison |
Year: | 1999 |
Periodical: | Journal of Contemporary African Studies |
Volume: | 17 |
Issue: | 1 |
Period: | January |
Pages: | 75-96 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Zimbabwe |
Subjects: | land reform land law women Ethnic and Race Relations Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Development and Technology Politics and Government Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Cultural Roles agriculture |
External links: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02589009908729639 http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=407B90B70FAFE398371D |
Abstract: | Zimbabwe's resettlement policy at the time of independence in 1980 favoured the landless, returning war refugees and the poorest people. In the 1990s ideas of efficiency and productivity have come to dominate land reform policies, favouring white farmers and indigenous commercial farmers. Focusing on the implications for women's access to resettlement land, the author examines the possibilities for unmarried women, widows, divorced women and married women to gain land rights. She shows that the situation for unmarried women and widows in resettlement areas has been improved. Married women, however, the vast majority, only have resettlement rights through their husbands. Since power and control do not only reside in who has the stated right to a piece of land, but also relate to who is said to control particular crops, the author digs deeper into the gender relations of crop production and finds that certain types of crops are respected as belonging to women. Finding ways to enhance the production of 'women's crops' may be an important strategy in light of the fact that primary access to land for married women and/or joint ownership is still far from politically acceptable. The author conducted fieldwork in Sengezi resettlement area, Wedza district, in the period 1995-1997. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |