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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 7

Publication Date: July 25, 2023

DOI:10.14738/assrj.107.15073

Chiba, M. (2023). The Diversification of Rural Livelihoods After the Year 2000 in Zimbabwe. Advances in Social Sciences Research

Journal, 10(7). 296-313.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

The Diversification of Rural Livelihoods After the Year 2000 in

Zimbabwe

Moffat Chiba

(ORCID: 0000-0002-3267-5737)

Department of Anthropology and Archaeology,

University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield 0028, Pretoria

ABSTRACT

The article explores rural livelihood diversification patterns after the year 2000

using the Zimbabwean case. It relied on 30 households’ life history accounts

alongside document analysis by examining the processes, determinants, and

outcomes of these livelihood configurations. While rural households’ livelihoods

had come to entirely rely on either agriculture or wage employment or both before

the 2000s, evidence has demonstrated that after the year 2000, the means of

survival have been diversified into a number of a complicated archaeology of

occupational testing through the streamlining of land and labour away from

agriculture, and the consequent following of such occupations like hair-cutting,

vending, migration among others. These livelihood patterns have been due to a

complicated archaeology of events ranging from rural households’ socio-economic

changes, the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, the unemployment effects of the

fourth Industrial revolution and ecological destabilisation. Policy interventions,

thus, need to acknowledge rural livelihoods diversification and help citizens by

incorporating and helping these rural households into rural development projects

and programmes to better their livelihoods.

Keywords: determinants of livelihoods, Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, livelihood

diversification, rural households, Zimbabwe

INTRODUCTION

Livelihood diversification, a term that became popular after the 1970s, denotes additional

economic activities performed by households to supplement their income apart from farming

[1]. Recent times have, thus, recognised an explosion of scholarly literature and other related

studies concerning rural households, livelihoods, and their well-being and food security

particularly after the year 2000.

At the centre of this scholarship is an assortment of publications on rural livelihoods and the

precarious nature of livelihood patterns on general well-being [2]. These studies, most of them

case-based in Africa, Asia and South America, have often been framed around market

integration and the streamlining of the global economy following the popularisation of the

Bretton Woods Institutions’ neo-liberal agenda [3, 4]. Accordingly, peasants in the Less Mature

Economies have been incorporated into the global economy, diversifying their livelihood

portfolios leading to the creation of a semi-proletarian class [5]. Unfortunately, general well- being of rural households in the Global South has been on a plummeting path since the 2000s

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Chiba, M. (2023). The Diversification of Rural Livelihoods After the Year 2000 in Zimbabwe. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(7).

296-313.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.107.15073

owing to lack of adequate resources to meet subsistence needs [6, 7], including the

unemployment challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as admitted by Xu et al., [8]. In

India, the erosion of legitimacy privilege of the peasantries resulting from the penetration of

the silent process of globalization or commercialization has been recognised [9, 10]. In other

settings, the attrition of agricultural prospects has led to a social crisis due to migration of

villagers to urban areas and this has divided households, hollowed out settlements and left

families scattered [11].

This early literature has been grounded in the early depeasantisation and deagrarianisation

notions that became popular from the mid-1970s [12], ideas which have been influenced by

popular accounts around the characterisation of rural farmers as worker-peasants [13]. These

accounts have been associated with expatriate cost-cutting economies and signified a major

reorganisation of labour and land practices, determining the smallholder farmers’ livelihoods

for which the World Emerging Economies are recognised with in the current.

Whilst I acknowledge this increasing body of scholarship on livelihood change [12, 14], my

focus in this paper spreads out to investigate processes, determinants, outcomes of the post- 2000 rural livelihood configurations. I hope to widen both thinking and action on livelihood

transformation and argue that policy in the Global South should acknowledge livelihood change

and likewise help the poor to move out of poverty. Owing to the disruption of the Global Food

Supply Chains due to the impacts of COVID-19 [15], the precarious nature of agricultural-based

livelihoods due to climate change [16], higher unemployment levels and the habitual dodging

of rural agriculture by the youths, livelihoods diversification appears to be the only panacea to

the current socio-economic problems in the Global South. This paper, thus, contributes greatly

to the post-2000 livelihoods literature because it inco-operates a mixture of challenges that

rural households have faced after the millennium turn meaning that rural households’

livelihoods challenges need to be addressed using multiple lenses in government’s rural

development projects and programmes. From field-work evidence, the paper illuminates on the

urbanization conundrum of Zimbabwe’s rural areas because livelihood activities that had

entirely been regarded as city or town-based have become common sites in the rural areas,

especially haircutting.

The article is chronologically organised: immediately after this introduction, I discuss rural

livelihoods upto the late 1990s and then present the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework

Approach as it helped to build up a framework of analysis that guided the study. After this, I

discuss the field sites and methods used. The section that follows is a presentation of results

followed by a discussion. Finally, the article provides a conclusion.

RURAL LIVELIHOODS UP TO THE LATE 1990S: UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEXT

Available scholarship on human presence on the planet earth reveals that human existence is

approximately 4 million years and that during these early days, human beings heavily relied on

hunting and gathering as survival strategies, particularly during the Stone Age [17]. With the

development of iron tools during the Iron Age, hunting and gathering ceased to be important

means of survival and were subsequently replaced by crop production; a strategy of living that

enabled communities to at least produce their own food through settled farming even though

some African communities continued with a hunter-gatherer’ life-style well into the twenty- first century [18].

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 10, Issue 7, July-2023

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

While a hunter-gatherer’s life was gradually deputised by food production, evidence show that

international trade then became another livelihood portfolio to run in tandem with crop

production from the 10th century [19]. During this period, the Arabs and the Swahili merchants

had become the business middlemen between Indian traders in the east and the South-Eastern

African communities [19].

With the establishment of colonial rule in the 1890s, scholarship on Zimbabwe’s colonial

history has shown that peasants were able to respond to new agricultural and market demands

following the opening up of mines by the whites, particularly in high rainfall regions [20]. In

this literature, African peasants responded to the European demand for maize and the need to

pay hut tax by producing marketable surplus that was required to support settler mining capital

[21, 22, 23].

Black African competition in the product market created anxieties among settler whites, and

was eventually eroded through various state legal initiatives including discriminatory pricing

policies as guided by the Maize Control Act of 1931 [23]. On the other hand, the state poured

resources on commercial agriculture and created Native Purchase Areas for the African rural

elite, which automatically implied neglecting reserve area agriculture [24]. Similarly, the

subsequent enaction of the Land Apportionment Act (LAA) of 1930 usurped the bulk of

productive land from the Africans [25] and this fundamentally changed their livelihood

portfolios. Though wage employment had been harnessed as an important livelihood trajectory

well before, it became increasingly important in their day-to-day living and this led to the

creation of the wage-hoe/hoe-wage combinations from the 1930s [5], leading to the

proletarianisation of the African peasantry. It was arguably these policies, which also fostered

the out-migration of men to mines and towns that set-in motion the destruction of African

peasant commercial production in the post-1930 period. The more important point here is that

the policies had a strong bearing in the reserves that they undermined later efforts to intervene

in reserve area agriculture after World War II, especially with regard to developing ‘yeomen

farmers’ that produced for the market [26].

Attempts by the colonial state after WWII to improve African peasant production lacked any

sincerity, and was clouded by racial concerns. As Bush and Cliffe [24, p.80] put it, while there

was a recognition ‘that the reserves would have to be able to produce more foodstuffs for

market, but this must be done without posing an 'unfair' disadvantage to white settler farming

interests’. Compounding this dilemma of having to play a balancing act was the hostile reception

the intervention received among the peasantry, with some communities openly resisting their

implementation leading to ‘ungovernability’ in the countryside [26], and the subsequent

abandonment of the policy in the early 1960 [27].

The failure of the policy was further compounded by the war of liberation, which was mostly

fought in the rural areas. As the war intensified in the 1970s, the resultant displacements

further constrained peasant agriculture production, and the waging war similarly prevented

households from concentrating full on the farming enterprise. While commercial farmers were

targeted by guerrilla armies, they continued to dominate the agriculture product market

together with the grain market in the 1970s, whereas even maize production, which has been

the peasantry’s principal farm enterprise, stagnated in the small farm sector [28]. Commercial

farmers produced nearly 70 per cent of outputs, and 80 per cent of marketed products including