Every time Mike Maruvire looks out across the vast tracts of unutilized farmland along Zimbabwe’s highways, his heart sinks. For the past two years, the 29-year-old has been desperately seeking a piece of land to farm.
‘I could do with just three hectares of land, but I can’t get it,’ explains Maruvire, who ekes a living from a horticulture project on a small, rented plot on the outskirts of the capital, Harare. ‘All the land that you see lying fallow is not available for people who want to do real farming in this country.’
He is one of the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans searching for plots despite millions of hectares of land lying uncultivated for decades in the aftermath of the country’s controversial fast track land reform programme.
In 2000 the then President Robert Mugabe embarked on a violent seizure of white-owned farmland with the purported aim of undoing a historical injustice in which farmers of European ancestry had – after the colonial conquest of 1890 – driven local Black people to infertile, dry and unproductive land.
Under British colonial rule it was illegal for Black Africans to freely own land outside of established ‘native reserves.’ Meanwhile, the most
