Nature - autonomous learning

132 de-naturalisationWhat, it may be asked, has all this got to do with hegemony? Mooreargues that what was at stake in this local dispute over a cattle dip were setsof ideas that were contested within Zimbabwe as a whole. Specifically,during the long period of colonial rule in Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia, as itwas called) an attempt was made to supplant the ideas and beliefs of indigenousAfricans with those of British society. In Kaerezi, land occupied byChief Dzeka Tangwena was bought, without his permission, by whiteRhodesians. Backed by the colonial state, white landowners in Kaereziclaimed that their paying for land superceded any rights Tangwena’sfollowers might have by virtue of their occupancy and use of the land.Thisinitiated a long period in which Kaerezi’s black people were compelled topay taxes and rents to white landowners and the colonial state.Added to thisattempt to define property rights in land in terms of monetary purchase,part of Kaerezi was made into Rhodes Inyanga National Park in 1947 (thepredecessor of Nyanga National Park).The park was a material expressionof a growing British (indeed Western) belief that parcels of the naturalenvironment were best preserved by keeping people out of them (on thissee Neumann 1995, 1998 and Adams and Mulligan [2002]).Yet this beliefclashed with the claims of Tangwena’s descendents that the park wasancestral land that had been wrongly appropriated by the British.The relevance of all this to the cattle-dip dispute, as Moore shows, isthat the dispute was a local crystallisation of contests over the hegemonyof colonial beliefs that surfaced strongly after 1980, when the British withdrewfrom Zimbabwe.The dip was not simply a hole in the ground filledwith chemicals and the River Kaerezi was seen not simply as a water course.Rather, both were interpreted in terms of hegemonic ideas about property,conservation and rights to land. On the one side, parts of the post-colonialstate (specifically the DNPWM) had internalised the conviction thatenvironmental protection is best achieved by excluding people. Onthe other side, though, herders in Kaerezi had been granted property rightsto land by the MRD, thus reversing the long history of colonial dispossessionin the area. Meanwhile, the local trout-fishing club had a white membership,whose agitation against the dip struck black herders as a lingeringexample of colonial domination.Faced with a divided state apparatus and local white opposition tothe dip, Moore shows how livestock owners tactically used and opposedhegemonic ideas about property, conservation and land rights inheritedfrom the colonial period.To quote him at length: