Locating New Mazwi in Zimbabwe’s Politics of Displacement

Urban displacements are neither new nor exceptional in the contexts of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe (Mlambo Reference Mlambo, Raftopoulos and Mlambo2008). Nor is the phenomenon unusual on the African continent (Falola & Okpeh Reference Falola and Okpeh2008; Myers Reference Myers2011) or globally (Doshi Reference Doshi2013; Harms Reference Harms2013). More commonly, planned large-scale urban evictions in the global South are associated with, among other things, various projects of “improvement” and “upgrading,” and the creation of “new urban zones” (Harms Reference Harms2013; Roy Reference Roy2013; Collins Reference Collins2016); with elite and middle-class “urban fantasies” of creating “world class cities” (Robinson Reference Robinson2002; Watson Reference Watson2013); with projects of “accumulation through differentiated displacement” of elite-controlled “bulldozing states” (Doshi Reference Doshi2013; see also Gastrow Reference Gastrow2017); and with the drive of neoliberal capitalist expansion more generally (Harvey Reference Harvey2003; Roy Reference Roy2006). But they are equally part of more overt, manipulative, or sinister projects of political or economic exclusion driven by states or party-states, often with context-specific class, race, ethnic, or religious dimensions or even narrower party-political agendas (Hammar Reference Hammar2008; Yiftachel Reference Yiftachel2009). Significantly, the kinds of mass urban displacements that have marked post-2000 Zimbabwe are closer to the latter type of projects, while they are discursively represented by the Zanu PF–ruled central state as being aimed at development, regeneration, and so-called responsible governance. These have been carried out alongside the state’s deliberate sidelining of opposition-led municipal authorities, or if possible, by its co-opting them or forcing them to be complicit.

Echoing some of the political intentions of the large-scale rural displacements in Zimbabwe that began in 2000 and continued throughout the decade and beyond (Hammar et al. Reference Hammar, McGregor and Landau2010), the main focus of urban displacement in this period was the central party-state–driven campaign of mass urban evictions and property destruction in mid-2005, code-named Operation Murambatsvina. In particular, it targeted residents of the poorer high-density suburbs across the country, and especially those living or working in informal properties. Within a matter of weeks, up to seven hundred thousand people were physically displaced. An estimated 2.4 million urban residents overall were said to have been directly affected by the operation (Tibaijuka, Reference Tibaijuka2005), although the indirect, yet often unmeasured, effects were felt much more widely, both in urban and rural areas (Sachikonye Reference Sachikonye2006; Solidarity Peace Trust 2005). Homes and other informal business structures were destroyed by bulldozers and demolition squads, and in many cases people were forced to dismantle “illegal” structures themselves under threat of fines, beatings, or imprisonment. Those living in squatter settlements, who were already accustomed to this kind of treatment—albeit more often by municipal authorities rather than by the central state—were included in the wide sweep.

Officially this campaign was aimed at “cleaning out the filth” of (alleged) crime and disease in high-density urban areas and “restoring order.” In a speech to launch the campaign, Sekesai Makwavarara, the head of a central state-appointed commission then running the City of Harare (in place of the opposition-elected councilors), promoted it as a necessary exercise to “enforce by-laws,” “eradicate chaos,” and “bring sanity back to the City of Harare.” ^{Footnote 11} What it caused in practice was wide-scale suffering on multiple levels through mass homelessness, dislocation, exposure, illness, and impoverishment—effects that lasted for a very long time (Ukuthula Trust et al. 2015).

Far from being a convincing claim to offer improvement or to “restore order,” Murambatsvina destroyed the relative stability and order that had preceded it. It was widely considered by some to have been a retaliation against the opposition strongholds in urban constituencies who had voted overwhelmingly against Zanu PF in the March 2005 parliamentary elections, as well as a way to reassert sovereignty through intimidation and force (see Hammar Reference Hammar2008; Kamete Reference Kamete2009; Potts Reference Potts2006; Vambe Reference Vambe2008). It was also seen as a way for the party-state to reassert control over revenue that had drifted away from the formal to the informal sector since the 1990s, and in particular to gain control over the black market in foreign currency that was mushrooming in key urban centers as the formal economy radically declined (Hammar Reference Hammar2008; Bratton & Masunungure Reference Bratton and Masunungure2007; Mawowa & Matongo Reference Mawowa and Matongo2010). On the other hand, Dorman (Reference Dorman2016) offers a convincing argument for seeing Murambtasvina as grounded in somewhat longer-term planning, as well as locating it in a longer political history of urban disruptions and dislocations across both colonial and postcolonial eras.

The “validity” of the operation was asserted on the grounds that urban inhabitants had failed to follow laws related to building standards and “proper” occupation of properties. This was despite the fact that in the era of structural adjustment in Zimbabwe (starting in 1990) this type of informality, in terms of both housing and enterprises, had received de facto approval by the central government and, to a lesser extent, by urban local authorities. Defined benevolently as “self-provisioning,” such housing and livelihood alternatives devised by the poor were accepted at a time when neither level of government had the capacity to support them, and when public sector spending in general declined drastically and formal sector unemployment rose dramatically. It was one way for the state to assert authority or at least to sustain legitimacy by acting, seemingly, as the caring state. One should also note that this was an era of immense political confrontation between the virtual one-party state of Zanu PF and a wide range of civil society actors including trade unions, student movements, church organizations, and women’s movements (Hammar & Raftopoulos Reference Hammar, Raftopoulos, Hammar, Raftopoulos and Jensen2003). It also preceded the emergence of a truly viable opposition in the late 1990s whose support base would be primarily in urban areas.

The calculated reversal in mid-2005 by the Zanu PF government of its former acceptance of urban informality revealed a crudely timed partisan manipulation of the existing, if somewhat dormant, system of strong bureaucratic planning rules. This was legitimized specifically through asserting the need to adhere to strict urban building codes and health standards. But since Zanu PF’s own voters were primarily in rural areas, one might argue, in fact, that Operation Murambatsvina was really an attempt by the party-state to unmake cities. This was partly through trying to reverse certain aspects of historical trajectories of urban modernity, and partly through trying either to remove or reconstitute urban citizens who had consistently aligned themselves with the opposition in elections or who were viewed, as Dorman (Reference Dorman2016) notes, as “unproductive.” These constituencies were not only a challenge to Zanu PF’s long political domination, but also to its grounds for legitimacy, which were attached to asserting the primacy of a certain kind of national citizenship. Within its increasingly narrow narrative of national belonging—linked to the national(ist) liberation struggle in which it had played a central role and drawing primarily on a rural base—forms of either autonomous or opposition-oriented “urban” citizenship that rejected the primacy of Zanu PF’s leadership were violently rejected (Raftopoulos Reference Raftopoulos, Dorman, Hammett and Nugent2007; Ranger Reference Ranger2004).

As already noted, pressure on BCC from both the Killarney and Trenance squatters and their allies in resettling them needs to be understood in this broader context. On the one hand, the scale and intensity of the Murambatsvina campaign and its devastating effects, following on the heels of the mass rural displacements, meant increased global attention to Zimbabwe. It also resulted in a greater presence than ever before of international organizations concerned with internal displacement. This was the case in spite of a long and normalized history of urban evictions in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, since colonial times (Mlambo Reference Mlambo, Raftopoulos and Mlambo2008; Dorman Reference Dorman2016; Myers Reference Myers2011). On the other hand, for the mostly opposition-led urban councils, including in Bulawayo, the aftermath of Murambatsvina confronted them with new challenges of both service provision and political and moral legitimacy. While they had not themselves initiated the mass urban evictions, and in many ways tried to resist and counter them, urban local authorities were on the front line of having to address the devastating social, economic, and physical consequences of the campaign. In this regard Murambatsvina revealed urban councils to be, just as other state entities, “a unity of contradictions” (Roy Reference Roy2006:8). For long they had performed the paradoxical role of occasionally destroying illegal settlements such as urban squatter camps, while also (though far less frequently) allocating land for the resettlement of squatters (Dorman Reference Dorman2016). Ironically, for the Trenance and Killarney squatters, the advent of Murambatsvina created a unique opportunity for resettlement, which, more than likely, would not have arisen had the campaign of mass urban displacement not taken place.

The Road to Resettlement in New Mazwi

As indicated, my main focus is on the journey of the Killarney settlers, from recurring displacement toward seemingly secure resettlement in New Mazwi. Through a chance visit to Killarney in July 2012, I learned of the anticipated resettlement project while talking to residents about their experiences of displacement and life on the margins. Following this up with officials in local NGOs and in the Bulawayo City Council itself, I came to hear of the collective effort by residents of Killarney to find an alternative to their continually harsh and disrupted lives, particularly in the aftermath of Operation Murambatsvina. During the mass eviction campaign, many of the makeshift homes in the settlement had been demolished and people had been removed to various places, some closer to Bulawayo, others as far as 80 kilometers away (Ukuthula Trust et al. 2015). Besides the trauma of physical destruction and dislocation, the experience of hunger was often mentioned.

Various international and local organizations, especially local churches, had assisted with temporary support at the time. In almost all narratives one particular pastor from a local church (whom I will refer to here as “the Pastor”) was praised for his consistent moral and material support. He was acknowledged for his efforts in finding food, blankets, or transport in those dire times, as well as for his role in lobbying the authorities for a resettlement solution for the squatters. One of the Killarney informants went as far as saying that “his involvement with us makes us think of him like Moses, leading us from Egypt.” Hyperbole aside, it appears that his efforts did indeed help to make the relocation to Mazwi a reality, particularly after yet another round of violent displacement of the Killarney residents in November 2010. This followed a formal eviction order initiated by the brick company on whose land they were illegally settled, but it also involved eviction letters sent earlier in the year by the neighboring Umguza Rural District Council (RDC) (strangely, not from the Bulawayo City Council). Approached by the community, the Pastor helped facilitate a meeting with the RDC. Earlier, apparently during a pre-election period, promises had been made by the RDC for land to be provided for resettlement, on the basis of which “deposits” had allegedly been paid to the RDC in 2009 by some of the Killarney squatters. Yet as one informant complained, “the RDC lured us to pay money but did nothing.”

With no progress in sight and with the constant threat of eviction hovering overhead, appeals were made again to the Pastor, who then discussed the situation with a larger group of church leaders. Together they approached the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which in response visited Killarney during 2010 and thereafter began looking for a meaningful resettlement solution. This became more urgent as a second round of eviction letters was sent out in October of that year. Then in early November, at the start of the rainy season, while one of the Killarney leaders was away attending a meeting about the very question of eviction and resettlement, she heard news that the eviction had in fact taken place. As she recounted, “I was informed that our houses were destroyed and our properties had been dumped on the Gwanda road.” Among the many things people lost in the fray were identity documents. What followed for most of the Killarney settlers were months of extreme hardship and hunger. Some found temporary refuge in churches, while others were accommodated for a time in Killarney by those who had managed to avoid being evicted until they could complete the arduous task of rebuilding shelters for themselves.

At this stage the IOM became more active, and by March 2011 the organization was able to inform the Killarney residents that it had raised the money to build them houses. The challenge then was finding land on which to build. According to Killarney informants, the IOM, the community’s leadership, and the Pastor began pushing BCC to allow the building of proper shelters in Killarney itself. This was refused outright, since the land was not zoned for residential living. But eventually BCC identified land suitable for resettlement. This was in an area some 20 kilometers to the southwest of the city called Hyde Park that had been part of the wider Western commonage linked to the City of Bulawayo for over a century (Ranger Reference Ranger2010). A second group of squatters, from Trenance, who had simultaneously been lobbying the council with support from the nongovernmental organization Help Age as well as the IOM, were to be resettled on the same site.

The particular part of Hyde Park that BCC had identified for resettlement of the Killarney and Trenance squatters was fairly close to several older peri-urban settlements: St Peters (closest to the new site) and two others called Robert Sinyoka and Methodist. The residents of these three areas viewed the establishment of the intended resettlement site as an intrusion on land they defined as “belonging” to them. While acknowledging that the land itself was formally owned by BCC, as one locally elected leader from St Peter’s noted, they nonetheless viewed it as being under their own (informal) jurisdiction, and believed it ought to remain available to their own communities as they gradually expanded. In addition, according to statements from new settlers from both Killarney and Trenance, their neighbors from these three existing settlements saw them as “thugs and thieves.” As several informants noted, “they didn’t want us living close by”; “they considered us like animals.”

In fact, part of the delay in having the site finally confirmed for resettlement was due to BCC’s having to negotiate with the members of these three communities, who strongly resented the anticipated arrival not only of “strangers,” but also of “squatters.” As BCC officials informed me, the new settlers were viewed by some in these communities as “undeserving” and “dangerous” outsiders. Eventually, one of the compromises reached was that of the two hundred or so plots to be allocated and houses to be built in New Mazwi, eighteen would be allocated to households from within the three neighboring communities; that is, six from each. ^{Footnote 12} According to those from Killarney and Trenance, these eighteen households kept themselves apart in the new settlement, and some of the individuals made abusive comments and threats to the Trenance and Killarney settlers, occasionally even violently attacking them.

According to the accounts of Killarney settlers in particular, by mid-2012 the able-bodied members of households selected for resettling were required to appear at the new site to assist in clearing the land and establishing the temporary plastic shelters that would precede the building of solid permanent structures. However, those most fit for building work (mostly, though not exclusively, men) were typically also the most active income earners. They were provided with food but no cash payment while working full time at the Mazwi site—a very long and unaffordable distance away from Killarney in particular. The lack of cash meant there was no money to support those left behind, nor could they afford to travel back and forth on a regular basis. Those who remained behind struggled desperately to find food, many sharing what little they had and/or sharing the care of each other’s children so that some could find piecework to earn enough to buy basic supplies. Many members of this community were living in extreme poverty, and indeed, there was an extremely thin line between surviving and not surviving. That this level of vulnerability—exacerbated by the chronic crisis conditions in Zimbabwe—did not register clearly for the IOM, the council, and other support agencies as both a current and likely longer-term challenge was rather startling.

By the time my research assistant and I were interviewing people in Mazwi in late November and December 2012, the site was in fact well prepared. By then, households had been reunited and were living in the temporary but sturdy tent-like plastic shelters, waiting for the delivery of the needed building materials. The prospect of occupying the new houses (to be built by contractors with their assistance) became a reality as each day passed, first with the setting of the foundations, then as the construction actually began and the walls, roofing, windows, and doors were put in place. Thus despite the looming worries about distance from town, the loss of income, the lack of infrastructure and services, and also about missing ID documents—a point to which I shall return—excitement about future possibilities was palpable. As Mai Banda, leader of the Trenance community, observed, “Coming to this place has brought us a lot of joy. We’re overwhelmed. We feel free. We’ve attained our freedom. Now no one will destroy our homes.” Similarly, Mai Ndhlovu, then-leader of the Killarney community, noted, “We’re very glad to be at a place called home. In Killarney we were close to town but we weren’t home. It’s shifted our mind-set about the future. Now we can even think about the future” (interview, Mawzi, Dec. 4, 2012). ^{Footnote 13}

In their very optimism, comments such as these reflected both the kinds of challenges that confronted the Mazwi settlers prior to their resettlement and the transformative potential of their move. They also hinted at larger questions, however, not only having to do with these particular settlers’ status as citizens but also with the meaning of citizenship in the urban margins more generally (see Clarke et al. 2014), and especially under conditions of displacement and resettlement. The Mazwi settlers whom I have spent time with and interviewed over the years rarely used the terminology of “citizenship” in talking of their struggles to overcome the various forms of structural and physical violence and losses within their lives, or the achievements of such struggles. Nonetheless, citizenship seems a pertinent analytic lens for considering shifts in their relationships to space, property, authority, community, and belonging.

Despite the extremes of marginality and internal fragmentation that they have experienced, and persistent attempts to deny them a place in the city by both the central and local state at different times, at least some of the most active members of the squatter communities were able to visualize, and mobilize themselves and their fellow residents toward, alternative urban lives. Actively generating whatever support they could from independent sources, they eventually managed to pressure BCC to allocate land on which they could be resettled. The community members invested their labor in creating the new settlement, and in the process established new ways of seeing and experiencing themselves in the world and in relation to others. In so doing, they enacted to some extent what James Holston, in a lecture at Uppsala University in March 2013, called “residential citizenship.” ^{Footnote 14} But, as we see in the following discussion, the move to New Mazwi in itself, while profoundly life changing in some ways, was far from what the former squatters had dreamed of as a solution to marginalization. Instead, it produced a new set of conditions that would alter the terms of citizenship yet again.

The Paradox of Propertied Citizenship

In interviews conducted during fieldwork visits in the years after their initial resettlement, the Mazwi “pioneers” (as some thought of themselves) often revealed a painful ambivalence. On the one hand, there was immense pride and certainty in having become “proper” people through the legality of their residence and the dignity of their (impending) property ownership, or what one might call their propertied citizenship. On the other hand, they were experiencing the indignity and daily insecurity of what had become for many an ever-deepening impoverishment, precipitated in part precisely because of this new propertied status, and the physical location of the new site.

Ironically, the fact of having a house in Mazwi was itself contributing to economic decline for individual households. Part of the problem, as mentioned, was the distance from Bulawayo city center and the obvious lack of income-earning possibilities in Mazwi. But this was exacerbated by the pressure to pay monthly rates of U.S.$4 to the Bulawayo City Council, a requirement attached to urban (or in this case, peri-urban) property “ownership,” regardless of the very limited provision of public services in the area. While pit latrines had been built for each house by 2013 with donor funds, as of August 2016 there was no piped or running water (nor any apparent intention to provide it) and only a few very poor-quality and insufficient boreholes. There was no electricity, no health clinic, and no regular public transport (only intermittent private commuter taxis). The most severely impoverished households in Mazwi, especially among the very old, experienced a constant struggle to find enough cash to buy sufficient basic food supplies and soap, let alone to travel to town. For them, the monthly expense of U.S.$4 was much more than they could pay. Instead, it created a cumulative debt burden that haunted many. Under such conditions of extreme poverty, clearing the debt or even acquiring relevant ID documents or paying various administrative fees was beyond their reach, and stood in the way of their acquiring the promised long-lease agreements.

The painful consequences of this economic marginality are illustrated by the following example. A young man in his early thirties, whom we had come to know well on earlier visits, had struck us as vibrant, educated, articulate, and optimistic. He had many ideas about how the leadership in Mazwi could be improved. He had moved to Killarney as a young man, but he was unable to find formal employment. He did some piecework in the nearby residential suburbs and some artisanal mining close to Killarney, staying with friends until he could acquire his own shack and eventually marry. Between the initial interviews in 2012–13 and a later meeting in 2015, his circumstances had declined substantially. With no work at all to be found in the Bulawayo area and without the means to pay for a passport, he had crossed the border illegally into Botswana to find whatever work he could to support his family and the orphaned children of one of his siblings. The unlikelihood that he would ever be able to pay off what he owed to BCC (by then having mounted to close to U.S.$150) was a nagging psychological burden. In the meantime, Botswana had become increasingly dangerous for Zimbabwean migrants, with suspicion and mistreatment common and work opportunities having dried up substantially.

In addition, he was HIV-positive, and without legal papers he was unable to access ARV treatment in Botswana. Nor could he return often enough to Zimbabwe to access the free treatment he could get there. As a result, he had become extremely ill and was finally forced to return to Zimbabwe. He did eventually acquire a passport, but when I visited Mazwi again in 2016 he was no longer there. He had left for South Africa, and although he was occasionally in touch with his remaining family members—mostly consisting of several children of his own and of his late brother, cared for by his aged mother—they were largely struggling to survive by collecting and selling firewood.

A further challenge to becoming truly propertied in Mazwi was the procedure for formalizing one’s status in order to be granted the lease papers for the allotted house. At a community meeting I attended in Mazwi in late November 2012, officials from BCC informed the residents about the procedures for accessing the papers (for a 99-year lease) that they were all entitled to. Standing in front of the gathered crowd, a senior BCC representative—as much caught up in the optimism of new beginnings as were most others present—congratulated everyone on soon becoming “homeowners.” To formalize this, he advised, the individual to whom the plot and house were allocated merely needed to appear at the Council’s Housing Office with his or her ID documents so that the leasehold papers could be processed and issued.

However, a recurring concern expressed to me by a significant number of the newly resettled residents was that either they or their close family members did not have ID documents, or at least not all the ones needed. ^{Footnote 15} A fairly common situation was described by one young man from Killarney, who said, “I lost my documents, my ID, and my birth certificate when our shelters were burned down in 2010. When I tried to get my ID reissued, they referred me to the Registrar General in Bulawayo. But there they needed my birth certificate number and I don’t have that.” The opaqueness, circularity, and cost of trying to get new identity documents was a matter of deep frustration. In this particular man’s case, his wife was still in possession of her documents, and they hoped they would be able to make use of these for navigating the leasehold procedure. But for him and others, the issues at stake were related not only to landed property, but also to accessing a much wider range of basic services. In Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, such documents are required for formal employment, access to public goods and services, and of course, the right to vote. One mother explained, for example, that because she didn’t have the money to get a national ID for her twelve-year-old daughter, the girl was unable to receive her final exam results from primary school and would therefore be unable to proceed to high school.

In all of my visits to Mazwi I was struck by how much BCC underplayed this obvious obstacle of missing ID documents while continuing to proclaim that they were a prerequisite for confirming ownership of the houses. Christian Care and a few other NGOs were trying to assist residents in accessing key documents, but the problem remained widespread. In 2015 I was informed by the current Mazwi leader, Mai Banda, that only about eight (out of almost 200) households had acquired their lease papers. Rumors were circulating that the difficulty in getting the leaseholds confirmed was in fact “deliberate”—a hidden tactic of indirect dispossession that potentially opened the door to “house grabbing” by well-placed elites. There was no actual evidence of this on the ground, yet neither was there much evidence of ownership being formalized for the majority of residents. By late 2016, according to a sample survey of close to 50 percent of residents, fewer than 15 percent had acquired their papers. ^{Footnote 16}

Reproducing Habit(at)s of Marginality and Immobility

Occasionally, those subjected to displacement are resettled in intentionally positive ways even by the same authorities that have caused their vulnerability. The resettlement of former urban squatters in Mazwi by BCC could, justifiably, be considered such a case. Yet as this article has been arguing, the results of often too-simplified solutions to the complex conditions of displacement are not always as intended or hoped for, calling for attention to a wide range of interconnected dynamics associated with assumed improvements through resettlement (Hammar Reference Hammar and Hammar2014). This section further explores some of the paradoxes of property and propertied lives whereby the hoped-for progress associated with Mazwi—including the anticipated movement forward in terms of legality, life, and livelihood—has been countered in practice by continued insecurity and precariousness. The focus here is on the ironies of four interrelated kinds of mobilities promised by the move to Mazwi. First, there was the literal, physical movement of bodies from one (kind of) place to another: that is, from a squatter settlement to a brand new, officially created and legitimized peri-urban resettlement site. Second, overlaying this, there was a socio-legal movement from being defined as illegal, as a de facto noncitizen, to becoming legalized and legitimized through property ownership. Third, there was a symbolic movement, from informal/“non-person” to formal/ “proper” person. Finally, through relocation there was an existential movement from seeming immobility in the squatter settlement to the promise of mobility in life: from a condition of recurring disruption, removal, and uncertainty to a condition of settledness and seeming certainty.

All this assumes, of course, that leaving a context of disruption and uncertainty and gaining access to one’s own secured property necessarily constitutes a form of “progress.” And yet we see that depending on the particular context, the “gift” of a new life and the promise of owning property itself, even if desired, can be an ambiguous accomplishment, to say the least. Those who have been resettled in Mazwi, for example, remain substantially underresourced both in material terms and in terms of social capital and social networks, with little to fall back on in emergencies or to draw on to help them invest in their new lives. Given the location of the resettlement site on the peri-urban margins, and given the preexisting histories and ongoing conditions of marginality of recurringly displaced and then resettled subjects, one can argue that resettlement, just as displacement, offers both possibilities and barriers (Hammar Reference Hammar and Hammar2014).

Many of the Mazwi settlers who were interviewed in 2013, merely a year after being resettled in new, secure homes, were already talking in different ways about the prison of “nothingness” that their resettlement had created in practice. By then, the material evidence of the limitations in their life circumstances and the growing immiseration of many was clearly visible. For example, one of my main informants from the Killarney community was desperately ill when I visited. Usually an outspoken, energetic, and combative woman, she could barely walk or talk. Although she had been suffering for some time, she was unable to see a doctor because of her distance from town and a basic lack of cash. In Mazwi more generally, many of the beautifully maintained houses stood closed and eerily silent in their neatly kept yards. Staying in Mazwi basically meant not having the possibility of earning a living of any kind, and so a number of people were spending much of their time back in Killarney, from where they could commute to a nearby suburb and find domestic work, or find a job in the area in artisanal mining, or work as vendors in Bulawayo city center.

In September 2013 one of very few journalists reporting on the Mazwi resettlement evoked the Old Testament story of the exodus from Egypt to reflect on the false promise that resettlement represented. On behalf of the settlers he proclaimed, “What good have you done us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is it not better for us to go back to where we were enslaved and worked for Egyptians, rather than to lead us to die of hunger in the wilderness?” (Dzobo Reference Dzobo2013). However, at the same time as Mazwi had not transformed the lives of former squatters in the ways they had hoped it would, in the face of worsening economic conditions after the 2013 elections, a whole new wave of factory and business closures was pushing an increasing number of impoverished urban residents into the periphery, to informal settlements like Killarney. In a newspaper report in June 2014, some eighteen months after the establishment of Mazwi, another journalist wrote of her visit to Killarney. People there, the journalist reported, were “sleeping rough and literally scrounging for food,” and under continuous threat of eviction from the Bulawayo City Council. One such new arrival in Killarney—named Marvellous Dube—had lost his job due to staff reductions at a local company, and he had moved to the squatter settlement because he could no longer pay his rent. He expressed hope that eventually BCC would allocate a house to him “to free him from the harsh conditions” in which he was living. “Every day of my life,” he said, “I hope that our turn of being allocated houses will come because the living conditions in this area are unbearable. What makes it even worse is that we face harassment from the police and we have been labeled criminals yet we are just poor” (Chinobva Reference Chinobva2014). The Bulawayo City Council, however, had clearly denied the possibility of a second round of resettlement in Mazwi (Ukuthula Trust et al. 2015), presumably because of a lack of resources (the IOM had withdrawn from the area long ago) and a reluctance to reinforce a precedent that it could not hope to fulfill in the foreseeable future.

Mapping Multiple Authorities in New Mazwi

As the terms of citizenship, property ownership, and even of life itself remained precarious in both the former squatter sites and in Mazwi, the relationship between property and authority shifted in various ways. As others have observed (e.g., Hammar Reference Hammar2007; Sikor & Lund Reference Sikor and Lund2009; Tsing Reference Tsing1993), there is no singular “authority” in such settings; indeed, trying to map the varied authorities and the nature, reach, and durability of their respective (sometimes overlapping) spheres of power is far from a straightforward process. Even trying to determine which are relevant in Mazwi with respect to access, distribution, and use of property (including individual plots or houses or other related public goods) will require future research. Nevertheless, as the physical and social landscape evolved, various authorities began to reveal themselves, along with their contested interests involving control not only over property, but over people as well. It is clear at this point that the most significant actors include the Bulawayo City Council, the District Administrator’s office from neighboring Khami District, and the Mazwi community leadership itself.

The Bulawayo City Council, as we have seen, is the key formal authority that allocates plots to individual households within the Mazwi settlement, registers settlers as property owners, and issues the long-term leasehold papers once relevant IDs are shown and fees have been paid. This is not in dispute. However, beyond the formal domain of land and property, the nature of control over other kinds of political processes, resources, and projects within Mazwi is less clear. In this context the lines are somewhat blurred, and more overtly political (party-related) actors have come to the fore.

Some of this blurring manifested itself in relation to the role of the District Administrator (DA) in nearby Khami District. Since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, even if the DA is officially a civil servant employed by the Ministry of Local Government, the position has always been highly politicized, and in practice is closely tied to the ruling party (Zanu PF). In an often violent post-2000 political context in which a viable opposition emerged mostly in urban areas, the Zanu PF–controlled central state has looked for ways to undermine, or at least police, the opposition-led urban councils. The Ministry of Local Government has been key in this regard. Unsurprisingly then, at various times the DA’s office at Khami, according to various Mazwi residents, has attempted to assert power over the new settlement, proclaiming, for example, that it falls under the wider authority of the governor of Bulawayo Metropolitan Province (a political appointee within the legislative framework of local government). While this assertion had no direct bearing on the original allocation of plots in Mazwi, it surfaced some years later in relation to the one major development initiative supported by outside donors, namely a large chicken production project officially called the Mazwi Poultry Project.

In recognition of the very limited livelihood possibilities and the almost no-cash status of many of its residents, the Poultry Project combined the support of several donors—under the rubric of the Government of Zimbabwe—to provide Mazwi with income-earning opportunities. ^{Footnote 17} Once in place, the project was supposed to be “handed over” to the Mazwi community, to be managed by a committee chaired by its recognized leader, Mai Banda. Initially the project was quite substantial in scale. By 2015, several large buildings were established, a borehole was drilled, equipment was installed, and three thousand laying chickens were purchased (although many of them died en route). Each subcommunity was supposed to have “representation” in the project; twenty representatives each from the original Trenance and Killarney groups and ten each from the three neighboring settlements. Around one hundred people were expected to gain income through a rotating labor system, according to one of the former committee members. Yet as with many similar development projects, very limited initial training was provided. In addition, the external supervisory support trailed off far too early, and it was impossible for the community to acquire additional technical advice on its own. All this contributed to the project’s failure, which was obvious during a visit in August 2015, when only one small shaded area remained occupied by a few scrawny-looking chickens and the buildings were mostly empty and unused.

An equally significant contributing factor to the failure was the apparent attempt by Zanu PF to control the project by trying to impose as a committee leader one of its own party loyalists from a neighboring settlement, thereby countering the influence of non-party leaders from Trenance and Killarney. Such efforts at party control were made via alleged intimidation by an official from the nearby Khami DA’s office. According to numerous accounts, the party-appointed vice chairwoman contributed to the project’s decline, behaving in a disruptive manner and “stubbornly refusing” to step down or follow the more responsible decisions of the committee. Yet it seemed that the leadership within Mazwi was not sufficiently empowered to withstand the mismanagement or the intimidation of a local ruling party heavyweight. A senior official at the opposition-led BCC indicated that with respect to establishing the project at Mazwi, the Council had been accused of “doing something without the Governor’s knowledge” and was told “to hand the project over.” As he noted further, “We were going towards elections. Once the elections are over, they don’t follow up such things. But our intentions are completely different.” While touching on only one domain of power, this brief example illustrates the kinds of interweaving tensions existing between both internal and external poles of authority in Mazwi.

Conclusion: The Paradoxes of Propertied Transformations

Mazwi is a space in which and through which a number of overlapping if ambivalent property-related transformations have occurred. ^{Footnote 18} To begin with, there has been the material transformation of literally “empty land” into a “built” environment, marked now by neatly maintained housing infrastructure and still-limited provisions for water and sanitation. In other words, out of “bush” a new (peri)urban property formation is emerging. There has been an economic transformation (if still only vaguely acknowledged in some quarters) of formerly unoccupied, low-value land into propertied plots. Such plots, even if still on the urban periphery, and occupied by still-marginalized urban residents, nonetheless have already increased the value of the land itself by being settled. In the process, this has generated a political-administrative transformation of ungoverned space into a “settlement,” now with multiple, contested forms of authority. At the same time, there has been a symbolic transformation of a former “nowhere” into a somewhere, that is, into a place on the map, and not least a place of complex and contested social belonging. It is a place in which formerly illegal, “surplus” people have been transformed into legal and (almost) property-owning citizens, with more formal recognition and rights, with greater symbolic value as citizens, and with a greater sense of self-worth even while their level of material worth remains fragile. Nevertheless, the shift from unsettled subjects to settled citizens, with all the anticipated social and economic repositioning it seemed to promise, remains a project in the making.

Such ambiguous or uneven transformation is not surprising or unexpected, given the multilayered empirical conditions of urban displacement and resettlement. Reinforcing the results of studies elsewhere (see Hammar Reference Hammar and Hammar2014), the Mazwi case demonstrates the complex and often paradoxical ways in which both the wider structural and institutional framings and the more intimate dimensions of everyday life are articulated and at the same time changed through processes of dislocation and relocation. Spatial, social, economic, political, cultural, legal, and administrative elements are all involved in processes of displacement and resettlement in context-specific and interrelated ways, while simultaneously being refashioned by the very conditions they have been part of producing. Given the messy realities of such multiplicity and relationality, particular cases—and real places—like Mazwi can offer valuable and fresh insights into what is by now the well-recognized co-constitutive relationships among property, authority, and citizenship. On a more pragmatic level, such cases also suggest that those planning, supporting, or opposing similar urban resettlement projects need to pay greater attention to the linkages among altered spatial location, legal status, authority structures, economic possibilities, and social relations, and their differentiated effects. Such cases may provide insights for residents of informal settlements themselves, or for those facing or requesting resettlement, which they may draw upon in order to articulate their demands for livelihood and security.