By Terrence Chitapi
It is now exactly two decades since Zimbabwe embarked on the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) which started with the animated land occupations (locally known as
jambanja) involving contested land expropriation (Cliffe et al. 2011) from approximately 4,500 large-scale white farmers to about 150,000 ‘new settlers on small plots’ (Moore 2015).
One objective was to redress the land ownership pattern then skewed to favour the white minority. ‘Fast track’ entails two strands of ‘new settlement’ – the A1 (or small farm) and the A2 (or large farm) models. The latter’s logic was the creation of a ‘new’ black commercial (read agrarian capitalist) farmer, rivalling or replacing the outgoing white commercial farmer. These (mostly white) commercial farmers had been the bedrock of Zimbabwe’s capitalist economy. It was hoped that the new (black) commercial farms would continue to underpin it.