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Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Some Legal Aspects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Gino J. Naldi
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Extract

The Government of Zimbabwe has only recently begun to implement the commitment of the liberation movements to give land to poor ‘communal’ farmers, especially those dispossessed by the whiteminority régime after Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. It needs to be recalled that by virtue of the Land Tenure Act of 1969 almost half of the country's agricultural land was allocated to Europeans, who had ‘greater access to the regions considered suited to intensive crop and livestock production’, and that ‘On average, each of the nearly 7,000 European farms was roughly 100 times the size of any of the 700,000 or so holdings in the Tribal Trust Lands’. The fact that much of this land was under-utilised only served to increase African resentment.

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The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 585 - 600
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

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15 The Independent, 20 March 1992.

16 Section 42 (4) requires certain criteria to be satisfied before land is determined to be derelict: namely, whether the land is or has been occupied; whether the land is being worked or cultivated; whether the owner can be found; the control which the owner has exercised over the land; and the extent of compliance with laws regarding the payment of rates, levies, or taxes in respect of the land.

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