In The Land Reform Deception, Charles Laurie debates the impact and authenticity of the Zimbabwean land seizures that took place between 2000 and 2008. Laurie argues that Mugabe was a reluctant champion of the seizures, that his hand was forced by the war veterans (Chapter 2), and that he had to respond to the emergence and rising support for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) (Chapter 3). In this respect, Laurie argues that rhetoric around the redress of historical land imbalances was a deceptive red herring, which the ruling party (ZANU-PF) was forced to embrace on a scale it had not anticipated.
Laurie concludes that the Mugabe government did not premeditate Zimbabwe's land seizures, and initially allowed them on only a small scale (five farms per district) to placate the wishes of the liberation war veterans, before eventually capitulating to them. According to Laurie, ZANU-PF's intentions had been: to disrupt the MDC's organization in rural areas; to sanction farmers and their workers, signalling the consequences of supporting the opposition (p. 284); and to make the international community aware of the consequences of not financing land reform. Laurie argues that Mugabe foresaw the debilitating economic effects of disorganized land reform on a large scale and initially opposed the seizures, but had to jump on board to politicize the process after losing control of the limited land grabs meant to placate the war veterans.
The book supports these core arguments through analysis based on 111 interviews, secondary literature, and former white farmer survey evidence. Laurie adds to this already strong evidence base an impressive mapping of 21,491 observations relating to the preponderance of violence across Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2008. The result is a detailed analysis of motivating factors, including land demands from liberation war veterans, which, the book argues, were not a major concern among even rural Zimbabweans. The book outlines the central role of mobilized war veterans in the land seizures, showing how they were able to ‘stand up to the president’ on the strength of support from other war veterans located in the state's security sectors (Chapter 2). Also, Laurie argues that war veterans could drag a reluctant Mugabe along because they constituted a critical component of ZANU-PF's traditional rural support base, and were the custodians of ZANU-PF's and Mugabe's claim to legitimacy.
Laurie also exposes the extent, type, spread and logics behind the deployment of violence and coercion during the land seizure period. He finds that, while aggression was prevalent, the tipping point was often not the result of acute violence. The decision made by white farmers to abandon farms, despite emotional and financial ties, Laurie argues, was the cumulative effect of intimidation (jambanja), which caused chronic vulnerability (Chapters 6 and 7), and financial calculations informed by this vulnerability (Chapter 8).
The book outlines the effects of bonds of fear (from violence) and the seizures (in general) on two levels. Firstly, it analyses the local and personal political economies of white farmers (loss of investment and property), of farm workers (loss of work and often shelter), and of rural livelihoods (disruption of value chains). Secondly, it looks at the macro-level, showing how the seizures exacerbated the economic crisis of the 2000s, leading to a downturn in agricultural production and GDP, and also to a transition from professional commercial farming to agricultural patronage.
Laurie's primary thesis – that ZANU-PF operated first and foremost in its own interests and railroaded the economy towards this end – is not new in the literature on Zimbabwe's land reform, state and electoral politics post-2000. Nonetheless, Laurie, through his mixed-methods approach, brings to bear on these arguments rich empirical evidence on an impressive – possibly unprecedented – scale in the literature on the contentious politics of land reform in Zimbabwe. The book is a thick analytic description of Zimbabwe's land reform. Its downside is that, despite the enormous volume of evidence, the narrative is seldom theoretically grounded. Laurie argues that no model informed the seizures; therefore the seizures were happenstance based on contingent factors. This limits the book's explanatory power to this one case – Zimbabwe – which, he argues correctly, should not be lauded as a model for other case study countries.
Other challenges stem from the book's holistic national outlook; while giving the reader a good overview, this is likely to subsume significant variation at the local level, which has been revealed by other in-depth work focusing on smaller subnational units. Also, the use of national aggregate economic indicators for the period from 2000 to 2008 does not sufficiently support the argument that Zimbabwe's economic downturn was caused solely by land seizures, as the downturn had begun before the seizures. The slump in agro-production could also be a natural corollary of such shocks and fundamental transitions in land ownership, with the real effects becoming visible only after a much longer time than the book covers.
However, the book adds empirical value to extant literature on Zimbabwe's land reform, and places politics back at the centre, at a time when other scholars are focusing on production levels, new class formation, and the changed social base. Its unravelling of the relations and co-dependencies between ZANU-PF and war veterans, and how these have assisted ZANU-PF's hold on power, makes the book a useful resource for readers grappling with Zimbabwe's politics today – especially given ongoing antagonisms within ZANU-PF, which are testing ties between ZANU-PF, Mugabe and war veterans, who, once again, are ‘standing up to the president’.
