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The increasing need for food production and economic development has put pressure on land resources making ownership important for sustainable agriculture in Zimbabwe. To make food production and environmental protection sustainable, agricultural practices need to take cognizance of pressure placed on the environment, and the increasing need for food in rural and urban centres. To make communities conscious and supportive of sustainable land use, food production requires that continuous increases in ecological awareness and education need to be maintained. This makes us question what and how land contributes to sustainable development. Centrally, people’s attitudes, opinions and ideas are shaped by the faith they have. This, however, takes cognizance of historical land and agricultural systems. African rural communities have successfully been undermined by colonial agricultural systems in Zimbabwe. For this reason, Africans took to arms to recover such “lost” lands, and to bring back onto the limelight Africans pushed onto the economic peripheries in the country. Tracing the history of land management in Zimbabwe, one finds that successive waves of violence to facilitate European expansion was adopted by the independent government of Zimbabwe in the Fast Track Land Reform (FTLR) of 2000 – 2003. Without legitimating or de-legitimating any wave of violence and land ownership, land reforms affected Zimbabwe’s economy in either way. Unfortunately, the translation of these policies into the living standards of ordinary people has remained questionable given the increasing poverty among rural communities. Added to this, large populations in rural communities where agricultural production continued to decrease led to unprecedented levels of land degradation. For the colonial government, poor rural communities was a positive strategy for continued labour reservoir for large-scale commercial agriculture, while the Fast Track Land Reform, many attest, was a political survival strategy for ZANU PF. In either case, the environment was affected. Further, during the colonial period, indigenous Africans were pitted against settler farmers who were out-produced by indigenous farmers (Bhebhe, 1979:5; Beinart, 1982:3). In the current scenario, Africans were out-produced by white commercial farmers, but the incumbent authority’s interests were in the majority of voters who lived in rural and urban centres. Thus the Fast Track Land Reform (FTLR) was a reversal of colonial economic systems, a subject not adequately treated in this book (Lebert, 2006). Rather, this study suggests discussing ecologically sensitive criteria for a theological discussion of land ownership and use, challenging African governments to devise indigenous solutions to ecological design. These suggestions however happen within the context of Shona, Hebrew and Christian religions. An ethical approach informed by this background, and an ecological design sensitive to religion can save the country from economic, political and ecological collapse thus achieving a theology of development.
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Zimbabwe’s problems of land degradation date back to the colonial era when the Rhodesian government created native reserves, the so-called Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs) in 1926. Through the enactment of the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, the country was subdivided into European and Native Lands. Since the Act ignored the population disparities of these areas, an environmental crisis was bound to occur in the near future. Furthermore, the Europeans took the best agricultural land while blacks were relegated to the drier and less productive areas. Due to the introduction of the ox-drawn plough, the communal lands were subjected to massive land degradation in the form of deforestation and soil erosion. Although massive land re-distribution has occurred since 2000, land degradation has spread to the newly-resettled areas as human and livestock populations continue to increase in these former white farms. The demand of timber for building purposes as well as wood fuel in these areas, have worsened the environmental crisis. In tobacco farming areas deforestation has been worsened by the demand for energy to cure the harvested crop. Another challenge has been that of a weak environmental education (EE) programme which focuses on scientific facts about the environment rather than behavior change. Organizations such as the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) are not well equipped to provide their mandate due to the lack of resources, vehicles for transport and inadequate manpower. Based on information that was collected in September, 2017, this paper examines Zimbabwe’s land degradation problem from an historical perspective. It argues that unless the rate of deforestation and soil erosion are curbed or reduced, Zimbabwe’s dream of achieving sustainable resource conservation in future is unlikely to be achieved in the long run.
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Mother Earth, Mother Africa & African Indigenous Religions
