accumulation by land dispossession and labor ... - Land Portal

Land Act empowers the President to transfer – in ‗public interest‘ – any area of village
land to any other category of land whereby under the Act the term ‗public interest‘ also
includes ―investments of national interests.‖ It is important to note that even though all
land is regarded as public land these two land laws, which only became operational two
years later, in 2001, created 3 categories of land: (1) general land, (2) reserve land and (3)
village land.
It is the legal process of transferring land from one category to another – not yet so
commonly known as ‗uhawilishaji’ in Kiswahili – that is at the heart of transforming
village land into ‗investment land.‘ The contradictions inherent in this process will
become evident as we present the case studies from Kilwa and Kilolo. Here it suffices to
conclude that the politics of land in the country is currently characterized by contestations
over the consolidation of neoliberalism vis-à-vis nationalism. It is also important to bear
in mind that, in both phases, peasants and pastoralists – as well as workers – have
resisted, with varying degrees of success, labour devaluation and land dispossession
through both legal – e.g. signing petitions, marching in protest and standing in court –
and ‗illegal‘ means e.g. raiding company premises and defying court injunctions (See
Charles Lane 1996, URT 1994b and Kemal Mustafa 1990). A number of academics,
researchers, lawyers and activists, including those who participated in the process of
formulating the Land Policy of 1995 which partly informed the Land Acts of 1999 that
were drafted by a legal consultant from Britain, have been supporting those dispossessed
through legal aid, monitoring land rights abuse and advocating for legal amendments
among other interventions (See Sifuni E. Mchome 2002, Issa G. Shivji & Wilbert B.
Kapinga 1998 and Jwani T. Mwaikusa 1993). This comparison aptly captures the ironic
continuity across the two phases:
In the neoliberal era, the same system of land tenure allows the state to appropriate land,
this time around not for parastatals, but for private investors. Under ‗state nationalism‘,
the state could dispossess a customary owner because land was ‗mali ya umma‘, public
property. Under neoliberalism the private investor—a former Zimbabwean settler, a Boer
farmer from South Africa or a US seed company experimenting on GMO—can
dispossess a customary owner, through the state, because the state says it is in ‗public
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