By HRH Princess Eugene Majuru, Princess of Harare
The destruction of traditional chieftaincy in Zimbabwe cannot be understood apart from the systematic alienation of land. Colonial conquest was, at its heart, a project of territorial appropriation: to seize the most fertile lands, relocate African populations, and break the bond between people, chiefs, and ancestral soil.
Land as the Core of Identity and Authority
For Zimbabwean societies, land was never a commodity to be bought or sold. It was:
Sacred inheritance, passed from ancestors to descendants, with each generation holding custodianship rather than ownership. The source of sustenance, providing fields for crops, pastures for cattle, and rivers for fishing.
The spiritual link to ancestors, whose resting places sanctified the soil and gave legitimacy to the community’s presence.
A chief’s power was therefore inseparable from land. To alienate land was to disempower chiefs and dislocate communities from their cultural and spiritual anchors.
Colonial Seizure of Land
The British South Africa Company (BSAC), under Cecil John Rhodes, introduced a wave of land seizures from the 1890s onwards:
Conquest and Allocation (1890–1893)
After occupying Mashonaland in 1890 and defeating the Ndebele kingdom in 1893, settlers claimed vast tracts of fertile land. Chiefs and their people were driven into marginal, less fertile areas, undermining their economic independence.
The First Chimurenga and Reprisals (1896–97)
The Shona and Ndebele uprisings, motivated in large part by land dispossession, were brutally suppressed. Defeated communities faced intensified displacement, with surviving chiefs stripped of authority.
Legal Codification of Dispossession
The 1930 Land Apportionment Act institutionalized racial segregation of land: White settlers, though less than 5% of the population, were allocated over half the arable land. Africans were confined to “Native Reserves,” often infertile and overcrowded.
The Land Husbandry Act of 1951 further entrenched colonial control by restricting African land use, reducing grazing rights, and enforcing individual land tenure.
Impact on the Mbari Clan and Other Custodians
The Mbari, like many other clans, were among those uprooted. Fertile ertile ancestral lands were expropriated. Sacred shrines and burial sites were desecrated or left inaccessible. Chiefs who resisted displacement were either deposed or co-opted into colonial administration.
The deliberate scattering of the Mbari people was not merely about geography. It was an assault on the very cohesion of the clan, designed to erase memory of their paramount authority. This mirrored what happened across Zimbabwe, where displacement fragmented kinship ties and weakened traditional institutions.
The Dual System of Land and Authority
By the mid-20th century, Zimbabwe operated under a dual system: European Settler Farms and Commercial Areas: fertile, well-watered land worked by African labour under exploitative conditions. Native Reserves (later Tribal Trust Lands): overcrowded, arid lands where African communities, under chiefs weakened by colonial interference, struggled to survive. This system ensured that chiefs could no longer fulfil their ancestral duty of guaranteeing land and prosperity to their people. Instead, they became overseers of poverty.
Nationalist Awakening and the Land Question
Land dispossession became the central grievance fuelling nationalist resistance: The Second Chimurenga (1966–79) was fought under the rallying cry of land restoration. Liberation leaders invoked the memory of ancestors and dispossessed chiefs, framing the struggle as both a political and spiritual reclamation.
Slogans such as “the land is the economy, and the economy is the land” reflected the enduring centrality of land to Zimbabwean identity.
The Legacy of Alienation
Even after independence in 1980, the legacy of colonial land alienation remained: A small minority of white farmers continued to control the best agricultural land.
Indigenous communities — including displaced clans like Mbari — were still scattered, their ancestral shrines unprotected. The Fast Track Land Reform Programme (2000 onwards) attempted to redress this imbalance but also introduced new controversies regarding fairness, legality, and sustainability.
Its importsnt to always know that land is a living heritage. The story of land in Zimbabwe is not simply about economics or agriculture. It is about heritage, authority, and memory. The dislocation of clans such as the Mbari shows that colonialism sought to erase entire identities by severing the link between people and their ancestral soil. Thus, the reclamation of land is inseparable from the reclamation of heritage and chieftaincy. To restore the land is to restore memory, dignity, and identity.
This piece is taken out of the book “Chosen” a book written by HRH Princess Eugene Majuru, Princess of Harare. The bookmis avaialble on Amazon see link below :
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