Joost Fontein’s Remaking Mutirikwi is a compelling study of the ways that people create landscapes—specifically, within the limitations imposed by the materialities of both the physical world and the pasts that earlier inhabitants inscribed upon that world. Set in the context of the early 2000s farm invasions in Zimbabwe, the book demonstrates how the past continually intrudes upon the present even as it shapes the futures to which people aspire. Mutirikwi’s landscapes are shared ones, and so they contain traces of multiple pasts. “Entanglement” has been a buzzword in African history for over a decade now, but its meaning and significance are demonstrated here with particular clarity.

The setting is Mutirikwi—Zimbabwe’s second-largest lake, created when the Mutirikwi River was dammed in 1960. The time is the early 2000s, when Zimbabwe’s farm invasions were at their peak. In part 1, readers are shown how fast-track land reform not only was a strategy crafted by a small political elite for their own gain, but also captured the imagination and frustrated aspirations of many people. “By being seen as responsive to such aspirations,” says Fontein, “the ruling party was, in a sense, re-opening access to state-making processes, revitalizing the possibility, for at least some, of making the state work towards their interests” (43). The chapters in this section explore those aspirations, the claims to autochthony and belonging that undergirded them, the ways in which water indexes power through both technocratic and spiritual interventions, and the “genealogical geographies” and “contested history-scapes” that emerged out of a century of shuffling people around the country and that shape present-day land claims.

Part 2 moves back in time, to the years bookended by the massive expulsions of Africans from farmland after World War II and the farm invasions of the 2000s. Fontein notes that while archival sources demonstrate land alienation with the arrival of white settlers in the 1890s, local people date their losses to the 1940s, when developmentalist colonialism and expanded white immigration caused many who had retained access to land to finally lose it. It was during this time that the dam was built—only one of many that was envisioned. In the quest to realize both an aesthetic ideal of “wilderness” and beauty and to provide water for the massive sugar industry developing nearby, Africans were moved off land they occupied, and their ancestral graves and built environment were submerged or re-created as islands in the middle of a lake. Fontein shows how during the liberation war in particular these apparently erased pasts reemerged, while it was the material manifestations of the white Rhodesians’ “playground” that were threatened with erasure.

In the years after the war many people sought the “return” of land. Local chiefs claimed overlapping spaces, and people who were expelled from given places insisted that their claims took priority over those of others who had been “resettled” there. Definitions of “squatters” and “foreigners” were in the eye of the beholder, embedded in Mutirikwi’s complicated and entangled pasts. In this context, Fontein argues, the “returns” of the 2000s look less like a rupture than a continued quest for long-sought futures.

Remaking Mutirikwi is a marked departure from the literature on dams in Africa, which tends to frame histories of dam building as declensionist tales of environmental degradation, human suffering, and permanently alienated landscapes. By contrast, in the landscape of Mutirikwi—Zimbabwe’s second-largest lake, created when the Mutirikwi River was dammed in 1960—heroic, modernist futures are derailed by the vagaries of both the physical environment and human action. The reservoir’s ultimate contours surprise even the engineers, flooding a lodge that was meant to anchor the new Rhodesian playground. Some of those who lose land to the rising lake rejoice at the higher fertility of the land they are resettled on. And always, pasts that appear obliterated at one moment reemerge later to animate claims to the future. In Remaking Mutirikwi, landscape is not an infinitely malleable concept. Both the environment and human imagination impose limits on what can be imagined, claimed, and acted out: “The material presence (and absence) of the past makes the politics of the present, and indeed of the future, possible in the first place” (6).

Fontein engages deeply with literatures on landscape, water, and power, precolonial and colonial political history, political ecology, Zimbabwe’s liberation war and independence, and much more. The very entanglement of multiple imagined futures and multiple reimagined pasts, each iteration shaping the others, means the book’s stories, like its arguments, are complex. But it is richly researched—Fontein’s interviews are remarkable—and thoughtfully argued. A careful reading will yield rewards for anyone interested in environmental history, political ecology, histories of settler colonialism, and postcolonial state making.