Donald Moore tells a story of how victims of forced eviction in the colonial and postcolonial periods (1890 to the present) have used their suffering at the hands of the state to claim ownership of the land. (“We suffered for this land, therefore it is ours.”) Focusing on Kaerezi, a part of Zimbabwe's eastern border with Mozambique, Moore traces three phases of suffering: (1) colonial land dispossession, (2) participation in Zimbabwe's national liberation war, and (3) postcolonial removals. After suffering from colonial land dispossessions, people supported nationalist guerrillas fighting for Zimbabwe's independence from Mozambique on the promise that they would get their lands back after independence. Struggles over the nation intersected with local struggles, and both were kutambudzikira nyika (‘suffering for territory’) (p. 189). In this suffering they were led by their chief, Rekayi Tangwena, who is famed for helping Robert Mugabe—the man who would be president—escape through their land into Mozambique to take charge of Zimbabwe's liberation war. Today—and this is Moore's main argument—Tangwena's people cite their suffering for the nation to claim entitlement to a special place in postcolonial Zimbabwe.

The book unfolds in three parts, each dealing with how space is governed, mapped, and entangled. Each section has three chapters. Part I, “Governing Space,” explores what Moore calls “lines of dissent.” Here he examines competing claims between the state, the chief, and ancestral spirits to authority over local people and space, which affect both the state's land-use interventions and local people's livelihoods. Part II turns to competing meanings of a particular place. Local people saw their land as “the Tangwena chiefdom” (i.e., the chief and his people), while the colonial state partitioned the area into “Gaeresi Ranch” (a white-owned production site exclusive of Tangwena and his people). The state saw Tangwena's people as squatters. “But on our own land?” they asked. This section summarizes Zimbabwe's history of land dispossession between 1890 and 1980, and explains why Africans supported nationalist guerrillas. Part III looks at the entangled “localized regimes of rule—chiefs, rainmakers, and headmen—in relation to projects of government administered by officials of the nation-state” (31). Moore emphasizes “the multiple spatialities alive in postcolonial Kaerezi,” and challenges political theorists' assumptions that we can “map sovereignty to states.” He presents the governance of local people by rainmakers as a counter-example.

This is a theoretically sophisticated book that combines ideas of Chakrabarty, Foucault, Haraway, Latour, and Gramsci to conceptualize what Moore calls “provincialized governmentality,” framed within “situated struggles” and “hegemonies.” In the last three chapters Moore brings these strands together to analyze what he calls “articulated assemblages” of livelihoods, landscape, and environmental resources, ancestral spirits, rainmaking territory, and political rule. While Moore's extensive use of Shona words to express informants' voices ‘undiluted’ might seem routine to anthropologists, the particular way in which he uses them opens a dialogue between indigenous knowledge as philosophy and Western philosophies.

Here and there I found Moore's use of theory obscured lucid narratives of people who were convinced they have earned a right to own the land through suffering, and sacrificing their lives for it. Academics might enjoy the theoretical sophistication and juxtapositions of categories, but policy-oriented readers who work in the field may find the book dense and impenetrable. On that score, the book presents ethnographers with a challenge: can an ethnography satisfy the aspirations of both the academy and the people we write about?

The book will take its own place among genuine works that fuse history and anthropology, and Moore adroitly integrates primary documents with ethnographic material. Using the anthropological toolkit of ethnography, Moore delves deeply into the spiritual and material texture of ‘suffering,’ and with the eye of an historian he utilizes the archives to map the geographies of suffering diachronically.