Suffering for Territory

Race, Place and Power in Zimbabwe

Donald S. Moore

 

Synopsis

Since 2000, black squatters have forcibly occupied white farms across Zimbabwe, reigniting questions of racialized dispossession, land rights, and legacies of liberation. Donald S. Moore probes these contentious politics by analyzing fierce disputes over territory, sovereignty, and subjection in the country’s eastern highlands. He focuses on poor farmers in Kaerezi who endured colonial evictions from their ancestral land and lived as refugees in Mozambique during Zimbabwe’s guerrilla war. After independence in 1980, Kaerezians returned home to a changed landscape.

Review

[This] study has so much to offer in terms of historical insights as well as grounded methodology, serving as a model of the type of scholarship required to understand the complex relationships between local practices of power, and the broader forces of colonial and postcolonial rule. - Pius S. Nyambara, International Journal of African Historical Studies

Author

Donald S. Moore is an Associate professor at UC Berkeley. His work focuses on power, spatiality, and race. He has conducted over 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork on agrarian micro-politics in Eastern Zimbabwe.