Pat Made

Africa Director
Inter Press News Agency, Harare, Zimbabwe

Perspective

President Mugabe's agenda for confiscating some 800 largely white-owned farms without compensation has received wide publicity. He has called on Britain as the ex-colonial power to fund any compensation, on the basis that the land was taken from the native people and should be returned to them, paying for any infrastructure improvements but not the land itself. What has not made the news headlines is that any redistribution of this land will largely, if not solely, benefit favoured middle class male supporters of the President. Reports about land in Zimbabwe also fail to address the anomalous and inequitable situation prevailing where, although 70 per cent of the agricultural labour force are women, women cannot own land in their own right and are clearly not going to be beneficiaries of any land re-distribution.

Land is a political issue in Zimbabwe, as in many other countries, and for some of the same reasons, but women lobbyists and other civic organisations are banding together to "put gender on the land agenda" according to Shereen Essof, Programme Co-ordinator at the Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre Network (ZWRCN). This follows the decision in 1998 by the Minister in charge of resettlement, Joseph Msika, to reject women's demands that land permits be automatically registered in the name of both spouses, and for the land earmarked for redistribution to be offered to women heads of households and to single, unmarried women. The Minister's reason was revealing: he said that such a move would lead to the break-up of homes. The view is shared by many men in Zimbabwe, who fear that such a degree of independence would encourage women to be more assertive financially and to walk out of abusive or violent marriages. Meanwhile, a woman who is divorced or widowed is usually left with no property or land rights and therefore has a struggle to maintain herself and her children.

In 1996 the Harare-based Musasa Project was the first Zimbabwean NGO to investigate violence against women. Its survey of 966 women of representative ethnic backgrounds in the rural Midlands Province revealed that one in three had been sexually abused, sexually harassed or forced to have sex against their will, and one in 12 had been assaulted (beaten or kicked) while pregnant. At the heart of women's low status in Zimbabwe is the traditional lobola system of bridewealth where a husband acquires rights, including sexual rights, over his wife. This leaves women unable to take decisions on family size or contraceptive use and leaves them vulnerable to HIV infection. The continued marginalisation of women in land access issues reinforces the old stereotyping of women.

The plight of most rural women in Zimbabwe is typified by a 30 year-old mother of three and her sister-in-law living on the Jompani Government Resettlement Area (RSA), 250 km west of Harare, where permits to land are issued only to men. The extended family grows cash crops and, in addition, each woman cultivates a one-acre plot traditionally granted by a husband for their wife's exclusive use. On this gandiwa she grows crops for the family, selling any surplus to meet school fees and to supplement family expenses. However, her access to this land is precarious: if her husband dies, or if she is abandoned, the woman must forgo her plot and may be denied land by her own land-hungry family. Unable to register for land a single woman can be left in economic limbo. One such woman in Jompani said, "We are treated like beggars".

Although pressure for land reform has come mainly from women a significant minority of men, including male farmers, also support it. They reject fears that women with legal rights to land will control cropping and income, or spirit away family farm profits to their parents. And increasingly, development experts and activists for women's rights are arguing that women's land rights are integral to national development.

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