Written by Dr Dennis Masaka, Great Zimbabwe University and AfOx Fellow at the Uehiro Oxford Institute https://www.uehiro.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-dennis-masaka
In my proposed work as an AfOx Fellow at Oxford, I seek to initiate a conversation around the way land redistribution has so far taken place in Zimbabwe. I will use the frameworks of collective responsibility and collective meetings of needs as analytic tools, also in collaboration with my academic host Alberto Giubilini, who has worked extensively on the concept of collective responsibility.
The first thing of interest to this conversation pertains to whether land redistribution in Zimbabwe needs to take into account two issues: (1) what to do when the initially grabbed changed hands over time, especially among people of ‘colonial stock’ broadly understood along race lines; and (2) whether those whose forbearers were dispossessed of land will be the intended or major beneficiaries of the redistributive exercise.
The question that comes to mind then is whether these issues are useful in rethinking land redistribution in Zimbabwe, seen as part of the decolonial project. One might argue that these questions are not central to the redistributive exercise, opting instead for land repossession as the end itself, without paying attention to who gets the repossessed land. Yet, some might want to think that these issues matter to the land redistribution exercise because they would think that justice is due not only to those dispossessed of the land in the ‘post-colonial’ phase, but also to those whose forbearers initially suffered dispossessions. On such views, while justice in relation to the former might reside in fair (monetary) compensation, to the latter it might reside in repossession or return of lost land and compensation for use over the years.
Part of the reason why these issues need to be taken seriously is that neglecting them will possibly create new forms of injustices and thus render the redistributive exercise unfruitful. Ideally, a redistributive exercise to look forward to will be one that manages to thwart elite ownership of land and in its place implements a just and egalitarian land ownership scheme. Although this seems a distant expectation, it is all the same a worthy one to explore in search for a standard for a redistributive exercise that is fair to all parties concerned.
Two new forms of injustices might result from a land redistributive exercise that neglects the two issues highlighted above.
(a). The first one results from taking colonial land dispossession as a shared enterprise justifying laying blame to anyone thought to belong to groups complicit in inflicting this harm. Thinking of land dispossession in this manner will then lend justification to a land repossession exercise that targets members of this group. I take this approach to land redistribution as reflecting the notion of collective responsibility. An impressive array of research on collective responsibility exists (Corlett 2001; Isaacs 2006; Giubilini and Levy 2018; Truccone-Borgogno 2024). However, there has not been much academic interest in seeing land repossession in Zimbabwe from a collective responsibility perspective, let alone to reflect on whether the collective responsibility used to target land for repossession fits into any of the forms that existing literature on the concept has come to know. This research provides perspectives which I find useful in reflecting on some of the aspects of land repossession in Zimbabwe that have not been deeply discussed yet, including the question of justice to those dispossessed of land in the post-colonial phase. According to some, the share of collective responsibility that one carries stems from one’s belonging to a certain collective that is blamed for some historical injustice, thereby justifying the treatment of anyone deemed to be part of the collective in question as complicit in collective practice. However, apportioning collective responsibility merely on the basis of belonging to a category of people seems to give rise to some injustice itself, perhaps because one might belong to a certain category of people but might not share in their harmful thoughts and actions. One might think that apportioning blame to those who have not done wrong, save for merely belonging to a category of people, tends to lessen incentives or rewards for doing good or revolting against actions of the collective that one finds to be harmful and unjust, since one might in the end be judged simply as part of the collective anyway.
More specifically, forced repossession of land, say, from some people identified with the colonial collective, who might have acquired such land legally say, in the ‘post-colonial’ phase brings into question collective responsibility as a plausible justificatory reason for land repossession. It raises a significant question on the right of ownership, which is however overshadowed by the weight of collective blame or responsibility which might be favoured as a useful default position for those pushing for land repossession. The situation is perhaps different with regard to land repossessed from those who forcibly claimed title to it from indigenous populations during the period of colonial conquest and domination. The former scenario then provides ground upon which we can think of a new form of injustice that emerges in the course of overcoming another other form of injustice. This requires us to reflect more on why taking collective responsibility as a normative strategy to correct some historical injustice might unintentionally punish those who are innocent.
(b). Another form of injustice I will reflect on pertains to seeing ‘collective meetings of needs’ or ‘collective justice’ as a just outcome of a successful land redistribution exercise, regardless of how the meeting of needs is distributed within the collective. By collective meeting of needs or collective justice, I mean taking the benefits that accrue to a few from within a group of people that has historically suffered injustice of a kind, as reason enough to claim collective fulfilment or satisfaction of the needs of the whole collective. In other words, the benefit of a few members of a group that has suffered some historical injustice becomes a collective or group benefit. Understood thus, the repossession and redistribution of land to a few, say, political elites who are part of the collective group constituted of the aggrieved might be taken as justice attained for the collective. However, one might legitimately question whether this constitutes the justice that is ideally envisioned in the context of the historical injustice of land dispossession. A related question is whether communities whose forebears suffered land dispossession could be content that justice has been done when land has been returned to some within the aggrieved collective, but has not been returned specifically to those whose forebears suffered land dispossession. These questions remain unresolved, and they warrant scholarly focus with the aim of thinking seriously of what could be fairer and just to different stakeholders entangled in the land question in Zimbabwe. These questions are relevant to reflect on given the government’s theoretical commitment to a just land redistribution exercise.