Doctoral Degrees (History)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (History) by Subject "Agriculture and state -- Zimbabwe"

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    Environmental policing in the Tribal Trust Lands and African peasant responses in Zimbabwe, c.1960 – 2005
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Uledi, Peter; Swart, Sandra Scott; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of History.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study examines African peasant responses to environmental policing in the Tribal Trust Lands in Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) from c.1960, when rural administration and policy were changed, to 2005, when the government nationalised farms acquired through the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. It demonstrates how the colonial state, white settler state and post-colonial state used environmental policies to control, win over and ultimately marginalise peasants. This thesis shows how environmental policies were restrictive to the growth of peasant agriculture and how it impacted on their access to and use of water, forests, and fecund land. It analyses some of the key policies implemented under white-minority rule by Ian Smith and thereafter by the Robert Mugabe government. It demonstrates the varying ways in which these policies impacted in social, economic, environmental, and political mindsets of the African peasant and accounts for their subsequent and shifting attitudes towards the state and its policies. At times implemented to win the hearts and minds of peasants and their chiefs, often these policies were implemented in a coercive and authoritarian way, causing hostility between the state and peasants. This hostility led to a growing peasant consciousness and rural nationalism. Peasant resistance shaped environmental policy from below as the government responded by revising or abandoning certain policies. The study demonstrates that peasants were central in environmental policy changes and that conservation policies were not static but changed over time. These were influenced by key socio-economic and political events. The policies showed the colonial, settler, and post-colonial state’s unwillingness to lose rural control feeding off a state of undeveloped rural areas. Joining the enduring historiographical conversation on environmental and peasant studies, this study demonstrates how peasants navigated various environmental policies instituted (and sometimes forcefully imposed) by the two regimes for survival. Drawing on a global, regional, and Zimbabwean historiography on environmental policies the study explores rural development in relation to state intervention programs through conservation and agriculture. The study localises peasant resistance to conservation policies in Zimbabwe showing that peasants though different from one country to the other, all face similar challenges. Relying on archival, oral interviews and secondary sources, the thesis demonstrates how African peasants were over time able to influence the nature of policymaking as the governments reacted in response to African discontent and pushback.