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Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging
Sh 9,100.00Finalist for the African Studies Association 2016 Melville J. Herskovits Award
The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe’s second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi’s landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. But African landscapes were not obliterated by the dam. They remained active and affective. At independence in 1980, local clans reasserted ancestral land claims in a wave of squatting around Lake Mutirikwi. They were soon evicted as the new government asserted control over the remaking of Mutirikwi’s landscapes. Amid fast-track land reform in the 2000s, the same people returned again to reclaim the land. Many returned to the graves and ruins of past lives forged in the very substance of the soil, and even incoming war veterans and new farmers appealed to autochthonous knowledge to make safe theirresettlements. This book explores those reoccupations and the complex contests over landscape, water and belonging they provoked. The 2000s may have heralded a long-delayed re-Africanisation of Lake Mutirikwi, but just as African presence had survived the dam, so white presence remains active and affective through Rhodesian-era discourses, place-names and the materialities of ruined farms, contour ridging and old irrigation schemes. Through lenses focused on the political materialities of water and land, this book reveals how the remaking of Mutirikwi’s landscapes has always been deeply entangled with changing strategies of colonial and postcolonial statecraft. It highlights howthe traces of different pasts intertwine in contemporary politics through the active, enduring yet emergent, forms and substances of landscape.
Joost Fontein is Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
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The War Within: New perspective on the civil war on Mozambique (African Edition)
Sh 2,000.00The 1976-1992 civil war which opposed the Government of Frelimo and the Renamo guerrillas (among other actors) is a central event in the history of Mozambique. Aiming to open up a new era of studies of the war, this book re-evaluates this period from a number of different local perspectives in an attempt to better understand the history, complexity and multiple dynamics of the armed conflict. Focusing at local level on either a province or a single village, the authors analyse the conflict as a “total social phenomena” involving all elements of society and impacting on every aspect of life across the country. The chapters examine Frelimo and Renamo as well as private, popular and state militias, the Catholic Church, NGOs and traders. Drawing on previously unexamined sources such as local and provincial state archives, religious archives, the guerrilla’s own documentation and interviews, the authors uncoveralternative dimensions of the civil war. The book thus enables a deeper understanding of the conflict and its actors as well as offering an explanatory framework for understanding peacemaking, the nature of contemporary politics,and the current conflict in the country.
Eric Morier-Genoud is a Lecturer in African history at Queen’s University Belfast; Domingos Manuel do Rosário is Lecturer in electoral sociology and electoral governance at Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique; Michel Cahen is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Bordeaux Political Studies Institute and at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid.
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Women, Land and Justice in Tanzania (African Edition)
Sh 2,000.00Recent decades have seen a wave of land law reforms across Africa, in the context of a “land rush” and land-grabbing. But how has this been enacted on the ground and, in particular, how have women experienced this? This book seeksto re-orientate current debates on women’s land rights towards a focus on the law in action. Drawing on the author’s ethnographic research in the Arusha region of Tanzania, it explores how the country’s land law reforms have impacted on women’s legal claims to land. Centring on cases involving women litigants, the book considers the extent to which women are realising their interests in land through land courts and follows the progression of women’s claims to land – from their social origins through processes of dispute resolution to judgment.
Dancer’s work explores three central issues. First, it considers the nature of women’s claims to land in Tanzanian family contexts,the value of land in an era of land reform and the ‘land rush’ across Africa, and the extent to which the social issues raised are addressed by Tanzania’s current laws and legal system. Secondly, it examines how agency and power relations between social and legal actors engaged in legal processes affect women’s access to justice and the progression of claims. Thirdly, it explores Tanzanian concepts of justice and rights and how women’s claims have been judged by land courts in practice.Helen Dancer is a lecturer in Law at the University of Brighton. She practised as a barrister in England specialising in family legal aid cases prior to training as a legal anthropologist. She is also a consultant for Future Agricultures at IDS, University of Sussex. Her areas of research interest include law and development, gender and land, and human rights and legal pluralism.