The Enduring Appeal of ‘Technical Development’ in Zimbabwe’s Agrarian Reform

This chapter seeks to ask why technical development has had such an enduring appeal. It considers not only how economic and political forces have influenced agrarian reform, but also how institutional and ideological factors have come into play. Highly intrusive state intervention into the ways in which Africans live and farm has long been a defining feature of agrarian reform in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. The &s;technical development&s; policies of the 1950s marked the consolidation and extension of earlier reforms and cast them into a much broader programme of transformation. These interventions are remembered perhaps all for the violent resistance they sparked, and the boost they gave to nationalist mobilisation. Technical development is a less obvious legacy of the Rhodesian era than the unequal division of land between black and white. Technical development assumes that communal area residents lack the necessary expertise to live and farm in a productive, conservation-conscious, modern way without state regulation.