Suffering for Territory

Abstract

Situated StrugglesSaGumbo plunged a rusty steel rod into packed soil, loosening earth we would soon work with hoes to carve an irrigation channel.In 1991, his toil transformed landscape, tapping a mountain stream's flow to his garden.MaiNyasha, his wife, and their teenage daughter Celia weeded furrows in budding maize fields that fanned out from the homestead's heart: a thatched, round mud-and-wattle cook hut and three smaller, square sleeping huts.A stone's throw from the raised granary, Tsitsi, their youngest daughter drew drinking water from a clear spring.When wild pigs from the neighboring Nyanga National Park marauded crops, SaGumbo emerged from his hut to drive them away by nightfall.Penned in a kraal carefully tucked downstream from their garden, six cattle provided manure, a stout team of oxen o√ering draft power for subsistence production.After milking a cow, MaiNyasha or Celia could easily heft a heavy pail the short distance to the cook hut.Gathering emplaced acts and environmental resources, their homestead assembled livelihoods.From an administrative optic, however, these agrarian micropractices defied governing grids of rule.∞ State administrators branded SaGumbo's family and his neighbors ''squatters'' whose scattered homesteads defied spatial regulations.They lived inside Kaerezi Resettlement Scheme but outside planned settlement sites.O≈cials called these planned residential rows straddling a dirt road ''villages,'' as if the pegged yet uninhabited spaces conjured vibrant sociality.Kaerezians called them maline, ''the lines,'' the same term used for imposed colonial settlements.Pairing the pluralizing Shona prefix ma with the English line, the inadvertent double entendre, pronounced ''malign,'' aptly captured popular sentiment.Those refusing to occupy the lines, the District Administrator warned in a letter to squatters and in charged Kaerezi meetings, risked eviction from the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.