Land Affairs

Nyerere, Operation Vijiji and Violent Land Administration

I am always cautious when I write about Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere. When you are dealing with people in the same league as saints - there are people in Tanzania working for Nyerere’s beatification - you better tread carefully. People are feeling strongly about him and you may easily be misunderstood. In that way Nyerere is a bit like Jesus. You are not supposed to criticise him. And, you can find quotes by him to support almost any point of view you can think off.

In this blog post, I do not aim at criticising Nyerere. But I would like to shed some light on an aspect of the big politicians’ oeuvre that most Tanzanians’ prefer to forget: Operation Vijiji. The ambivalence most Tanzanians feel towards this grand project of social engineering of his is reflected - involuntarily - in Professor Issa Shivji’s article The village in Mwalimu Nyerere's thought. In the article from 2009, Shivji manages, on the one hand, to praise the ruling party, the government and Nyerere for the ‘tremendous achievement’ in carrying out villagisation and, on the other, to blame an American, capitalist consultancy firm, MacKinsey, for villagisation’s failure. Tellingly, Shivji prefers discussing the vision behind Operation Vijiji and ignoring its fatal consequences.

Operation Vijiji has received surprisingly little academic attention. I have only found a few academic articles analysing aspects of these villagisation processes of the 1960s and 1970s, and, so far, no larger, authoritative account of the whole period. That is a shame. The project shaped the Tanzanian countryside in unforeseen ways. During my research in the rural areas, I have met people whose houses were burnt and who were forced to move during villagisation. Some people still have ‘sleeping’ claims on the land they, or their parents, lost back then. The effects of Operation Vijiji, in other words, are still felt today.

One of the articles I have come across is Tanzania’s Operation Vijiji and Local Ecological Consciousness by Yusufu Qwaray Lawi, who analyses its implementation in Iraqland in Northern Tanzania. Interestingly, he describes how villagisation met widespread resistance, often based on local knowledge about the ecology of the area. People knew that some places were unfit for settlement. But the bureaucrats did not listen and resorted to the use of force to make people comply. Sometimes people were even told to relocate to sacred places or ancient burial grounds.

A similar scathing critique is delivered by Leander Schneider in Freedom and Unfreedom in Rural Development. He focuses on the role of Nyerere. And whereas there has been a tendency to excuse Nyerere and blame the bureaucrats for the use of force, Schneider is unrelenting. He traces Nyerere as a driving force, increasingly impatient with the peasants’ lack of enthusiasm for his ideas about ‘participatory’ development in the Ujamaa Villages. In 1972-3, apparently, the President gave up voluntarism as a guiding principle when he declared that the stage of explaining and persuading…is really ending everywhere (p. 363). The same year, after a party conference he stated that The issue of living in Ujamaa villages is now an order (p. 371). Nyerere also put immense pressure on the bureaucracy and did not hesitate removing his local representatives, the Regional and Area Commissioners, if they did not deliver on villagisation (p. 367). Nyerere was a paradox, Schneider concludes: …villagisation reveals that the President was central in driving rural development into increasingly coercive directions, which, at other times, he so forcefully spoke out against (p. 347).

There is no doubt that Nyerere made priceless contributions to the peaceful development of Tanzania. People in neighbouring countries envy the Tanzanians for that. I am also convinced that his zeal for improving the livelihoods of the rural poor, who made up the majority of the population, was genuine. To acknowledge the more problematic sides of his presidency, outlined above, does not make Nyerere a less important president. All politicians make mistakes. But it may make him more human.

Photo from http://www.dsctanzania.org/images/Nyerere.jpg

Land and Sexual Violence (4). A Report from Cote d’Ivoire...

People on the run from the severe post-election fighting. March 2011. © Alexis Adélé/IRIN.

This week, a report appeared about the use of sexual violence as part of the post-election conflict in Cote d’Ivoire. Again, there seems to be some kind of relationship between political conflict, land, and rape as a weapon of war.

In Cote d’Ivoire, the atrocities started in November 2010 when the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down after having lost the national elections (read about the conflict here). Soon, what started off as a dispute over the election outcome activated ethnic and religious cleavages.

According to the report from the UN news agency, IRIN, there is a link between ethnicity, land and sexual violence:
Most refugees are reporting that the violence is ethnically and politically driven, say NGOs and rights groups. The political fault-lines in this region are largely along ethnic and religious grounds. Violence in the west has also been linked to longstanding clashes over land that have pitted local communities against outsiders. Waines, just back from talking to refugees in Nimba Country, said: “There is a large ethnic dynamic to this violence - targeted ethnic killings and attacks are driving the dynamic.”

The article only reports that these crimes have taken place. Unfortunately, it does not provide much insight into the behind lying ethnic conflicts and exactly how they relate to land issues.

Land and sexual violence (3)

In previous blog posts, I have written about rapes related to major conflicts over land and in land conflicts at the local, everyday level. I was reminded about the link between land and sexual violence again this week when reading about Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform.

According to the book Gender and Land Reform - the Zimbabwe Experience by Allison Goebel, election campaigns and the land seizures were accompanied by state-sanctioned rape:

...state-sanctioned violence that accompanied the 2003 pre-election campaign, the presidential elections, and the seizure of white-owned farms has taken an especially heavy toll on women and children. It is alleged that wives and daughters who sympathized with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) or who were connected to MDC supporters, as well as women farm workers were victimized by ZANU youth brigades. Although the youth brigades were particularly intent on silencing vocal opposition to the ruling party, who were disproportionately male, there was a clear gendered dimension to their violence. Women believed to be associated with the opposition were not beaten, but were instead often raped or gang raped by members of the youth brigades and state functionaries (Mary J. Osirim according to Goebel).

Though she mentions it, the author does not elaborate much on the relationship between land and the use of sexual violence in Zimbabwe. This, again, brings me back to the curious fact that so little research has been carried out into the topic…

Zimbabwe’s land reform. Myths and Surprising Realities...

Land affairs can be intriguingly complicated. Land reform debates, on the other hand, are often remarkably predictable. Once you know a person’s view on formal titling, you know the rest. Sometimes, however, a new article or a new book appears that differs. Based on empirical research it challenges your preconceived opinions. It happened to me this week when I got hands on the book Zimbabwe’s Land Reform, Myths and Realities.

First, whereas most writings about land reform are based on predictions about reform outcomes, this book analyses a land reform post facto. Second, the book does not aim at debating pros and cons of titling. Instead, it asks which effects the Zimbabwean land reform has had on a number of parameters. Finally, the findings and the entire approach do not fit well with the accounts we receive in Europe about the Zimbabwe’s reform.

Zimbabwe’s land reform is in many ways an unusual reform. Whereas most current land reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa focus on streamlining land governance, for instance through decentralisation, facilitation of land markets and titling, the explicit aim of the Zimbabwean reform is to redistribute land to the poorer segments of the population (for an overview of different types of land reforms, see chapter 2 in Evolving Land Rights, Policy and Tenure in Africa). Land ownership in the country was highly uneven distributed prior to reform. 4500, mostly white, commercial large-scale farmers owning the major part of the productive land. Something had to happen.

Whereas we do know that some of the confiscated land was distributed to Mugabe’s cronies, it is often overlooked that around one million Zimbabweans, many of them dirt-poor, also settled on and farmed the land. Almost 50% of the resettled households are doing pretty well, producing a surplus they can invest in the future. So the book’s case studies show. There are several reasons why we have not heard about these more positive reform outcomes. A major explanation is the fact that the production parameters applied from observers outside the country were those of the past; large-scale production of wheat and tobacco. But the current small-scale farmers have diversified and the production of for instance small grains, which fulfil household needs, has soared.

That is all very surprising to me. It is likely to be troubling news to others. I wonder what all those Sub-Saharan African governments, who repeatedly claim that large-scale farming is the only way to economic growth, will do. And how will the population in for instance Kenya, with its highly skewed distribution of land, react when they learn about the potential advantages of small-scale farming?

Still I feel a bit uneasy about the book. It has to do with the questions the authors do not really answer. Could all the sufferings in Zimbabwe have been avoided if the government had been more proactive at an earlier stage? What happened to the 150000 farm workers (and their families, in total around one million people were affected) who lost their jobs? Does it make sense, analytically, to separate land redistribution from the Mugabe regime’s violent excesses? Can it, in other words, be justified that the authors focus on only one aspect of the last decade’s development, the land reform, while they largely ignore that the country is falling apart?

Land and sexual violence (2)

My last blog post was about the use of rape and sexual violence in major conflicts. During a meeting with some colleagues a couple of days ago, I realised that sexual violence may also be part of small-scale, everyday conflicts with neighbours, kins and family members. At the meeting I was asked if we know anything about it. I did not. So far, I have not come across any literature which deals with the topic.

I do know that violent marriages can be quite common in rural areas. In the book ‘Women Forget that Men are the Masters’ Margrete Silberschmidt describes how social change in a district in Kenya challenges men’s traditional identities. Often, women are better at small-scale business and managing the fields. Still many men, though they are loosing their traditional role as breadwinners, cling on to the traditional gender relations: ‘Regardless of the socio-economic circumstances in which they find themselves, men are constantly preoccupied with the fact that they are men, and that this condition differentiates them radically from women’ (Silberschmidt p. 17).  Sex and violence, then, may become parts of some men’s strategies to assert themselves and their masculinity.

Thinking back to my fieldwork, I remember the story of a woman, whose husband had died. Soon, the husband’s brother moved in and took over the role as the head of the family. But the two did not get on well, and the woman asked him to leave. The man turned violent, however, and, in the end, she was the one who had to flee the house and the land with her kids. I do not know whether sexual violence was a part of it. It was not my research topic and I did not inquire into it. I wish I had.

This brings me back to the fact, that I do not think that land and sexual violence at the local, everyday level has been thoroughly researched. Anybody out there who knows more about it?

Land and sexual violence

Survivors of sexual violence at the Hospital of Panzi, South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo from UN Multimedia.

An article in this week’s Economist, War’s overlooked victims, is about the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Most often women are targeted.

From newspaper reports I had noticed current conflicts’ large numbers of rapes during conflicts. Repeatedly, we read stories about rapes in the ongoing civil war in Congo. There were reports about sexual violence during the 2007-2008 political crisis in Kenya (read here). In Bosnia in the 1990s, rape was also widespread. I thought it was a new trend. It turns out, however, that it is not.

What is new is the realisation that rape is often used systematically as a weapon of war. Only in 2008 was it officially acknowledged as such by the UN Security Council.

Often, so it seems, the use of sexual violence during conflicts is related to land. The logic behind is abhorrent. Men are mobile. Sometimes they are engaged in militia activities themselves, sometimes they work in the cities. When conflicts break out, which involve different ethnic groups and control over land, women are easy targets. By raping women, militias can force them and their families to flee an area. According to a research paper by Elisabeth Wood, an American professor at Yale University, a UN Commission noticed the connection between land and sexual violence after the wars in the former Yugoslavia:

In both custodial and non-custodial settings, many victims report that the alleged perpetrators state that they were ordered to rape and sexually assault the victims, or that they were doing it so that the victims and their families would never want to return to the area. Also, every reported case occurred in conjunction with an effort to displace the civilian population of a targeted ethnic group from a given region…

Subsequently, the perpetrators can distribute the land among to members of their own ethnic grouping. Shocking.