A gendered analysis of land reforms in Zimbabwe

Between 1980, when Zimbabwe attained political independence, and 2003 the government has implemented two phases of land redistribution programmes, designed to transfer land from large-scale commercial white farmers to black farmers. However, the state has paid scant attention to rural women's access to land. Studies documenting women's exclusion from Phase I land reform have tended to rely on the operation of customary law to explain why women have missed out. I question these liberal accounts and argue that a comprehensive understanding of the way rural women access land, or fail to access land, can only be gained by examining gender and power relations that operate in the villages. Phase II land reform has seen a complex intersection of criteria based on gender and political affiliation used to deny potential beneficiaries access to land, as patronage politics became the dominant means of achieving access to land.