Zimbabwe has adopted the name of the Shona state, centred on the city of Great Zimbabwe, which flourished between five and eight hundred years ago, and whose ruined stone walls are one of the most remarkable monuments in Africa. Great Zimbabwe was a considerable human achievement, evidence of the acquisition and management of a huge and docile labour force, of prolonged political stability and economic prosperity.

When the British South Africa Company occupied the country in 1890 the monument became the subject of considerable settler polemic and controversy. While its origins were still uncertain Cecil Rhodes recognized the considerable propaganda value that evidence of ancient foreign settlement, preferably white and successful and with Biblical origins, would have. It would give a precedent and respectability to the conquest and a promise of similar prosperity to the settlers and investors in the new colony. Rhodes acquired many antiquities from Great Zimbabwe, and initiated excavations at the site and searches of the archives of Rome and Lisbon for documents referring to it. He himself sought parallels to its art in the museums of Cairo. He also commissioned eminent mining engineers to determine the origins and yield of the ‘ancient gold workings’ in the country. Finally, he had Richard Hall, an enthusiastic propagandist of the settler cause in newspapers, lectures and exhibitions, and a fanatical advocate of immensely old Biblical origins for Great Zimbabwe, appointed curator of the Ruins expressly to instruct important visitors in his theories.

During the first months of 19811 was in Makoni district, Zimbabwe, carrying out research on its twentieth-century history. I arrived there bearing a powerful letter of credit from the Minister of Local Government and, as a result, the District Commissioner allowed me to see his current files on chiefs and headmen. These files – far fatter than any that had survived from an earlier period in the National Archives – covered the period 1960 to 1980, with a scattering of earlier material. They were full of elaborately researched precolonial histories of the chiefdoms, the more elaborately researched the later in time they were compiled. They were also full of equally elaborate chiefly genealogies, often covering a dozen or so pages. The District Commissioner supposed that his files would be interesting to a historian because of these evidences of the past. But I soon came to realize that they were secondary to, and dependent upon, the relationship which the files really documented.

Western journalists and other commentators offered two contrasting explanations for the results of the 1980 elections in Zimbabwe. The defeat of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's United African National Council (UANC) by the guerrilla parties was explained in terms of immediate and short-term intimidation. On the other hand, the victory of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU(PF)) over Joshua Nkomo's Patriotic Front was explained in terms of primordial history. The Shona and the Ndebele, it was held, were divided by 'traditional' tribal history–and in the elections the majority Shona voted for Mugabe and the minority Ndebele voted for Nkomo.

On 18 April 1980, a new black government took power in Zimbabwe. It confronted the widest gap in the world between the very poor and the very rich. Some 6000 white farmers owned farms with an average size of 6000 acres, comprising the best half of the arable land in the country. 800,000 African farmers scratched a living out of the sand and rocks that constituted the other half. Seventy-five per cent of the children of wage workers on the white farms suffered from malnutrition: their parents had a minimum monthly wage of $20 (Rhodesian). Eighty-five per cent of those children had never received a medical examination or visited a clinic. The dismal figures roll on and on.

In 1930 the Land Apportionment Act created freehold areas exclusively for blacks, known as the ‘native purchase areas’. Forty-seven years later these sixty-six separate areas lost their legal identity when the Land Tenure Amendment Act consolidated them, and the formerly ‘European’ commercial farms, into the ‘general area’ distinct from the communally held ‘Tribal Trust Land’. Today, although the new Government has not yet touched Zimbabwe's land law, it has popularized new terms to describe these three categories: ‘rural farmers’ describes the peasantry in the communal lands; ‘small-scale commercial farmers’ locates freeholders in the former African purchase lands; and ‘large-scale commercial farmers’ are those whites– and handful of blacks – who work land in what used to be the ‘European area’. The small-scale commercial farmers, however, remain exclusively black. Thus we can talk of the African purchase lands as if they had not been affected by the Land Tenure Amendment Act of 1977.

In September 1980 the Government of Zimbabwe embarked upon a programme of agricultural resettlement which is modest in terms of the extent of the problems which it seeks to mitigate, but ambitious in terms of the capacity of a new administration to implement it. The target rates of resettlement designed into the original programme have subsequently been multiplied some ninefold by the addition of a second, parallel programme, which makes resettlement now and in the foreseeable future the major rural development activity in Zimbabwe; indeed, it is currently the only sustained public sector programme with the potential to affect fairly immediately and significantly the economic welfare of large numbers of rural dwellers.