William Wolmer's work stands out among a handful of recent books integrating the material and symbolic dimensions of land in Zimbabwe. Scholarship of the colonial and postcolonial periods has long focused on the visceral and obvious turf battles between blacks and whites, and between both of them and the state. Even now – as Mugabe's ‘land reform’ program has ruined the economy – one could be forgiven for treating soil and water as objects pure and simple. Set against this conventional wisdom, then, Wolmer portrays Zimbabwe's landscape as a field of imagination, signification and aesthetics. He concentrates on a region known as the South-East Lowveld, the sump of Zimbabwe, where it drains into the Save and Limpopo rivers. From the 1890s, Europeans have represented this zone in extreme terms: as pristine wilderness, lawless waste, ideal cattle country and/or as an Arcadia for irrigated sugarcane. The very number and plasticity of these visions attests to the power of symbolic forms.

But Wolmer steers clear of naive social construction. Adopting a position of critical realism, he indicates where and when hydrology, biology and epidemiology have contributed to the success or failure of elite visions. The chapter on cattle and their diseases is particularly convincing. The late nineteenth-century outbreak of rinderpest decimated both domesticated stock and wild buffalo, pushing viruses, parasites and their vectors clear out of the South-East Lowveld. Africans redoubled their herds, and white settlers later did the same. Initially, Shangaan- and English-speakers co-existed relatively free of conflict: European ranches were vast enough and stocking rates still low enough to accommodate large numbers of African herdsmen living under the most informal of tenancies. This history of bovine-based compromise complements the bulk of more crop-focused studies of land alienation and eviction in Southern Africa. Rare to begin with, détente began to disintegrate with the rise of foot-and-mouth disease in the 1930s. Ranch-owners sought to protect their herds – and ensure access to restrictive European beef markets – by segregating them from African herds. The state's Veterinary Service quarantined large zones and lobbied effectively for the eradication of wildlife from the vicinity of ranches. Such rules systematically pushed African-owned herds out of world trade and to the margins of viability. The Lowveld became (white) cattle country – until, that is, whites changed their point of view. In search of the increasingly lucrative post-independence tourism market, they destocked the cattle and restocked with wild game. Wolmer narrates this multiplex relationship between viruses, ungulates and people with sensitivity and due attention to the agency of each party (or, in Bruno Latour's terms, each ‘actant’).

This spirit of equivalence, however, draws Wolmer into occasional ambiguity. At two points, he draws parallels between black and white attitudes that, upon closer examination, appear problematic. In introducing the concept of ‘landscape’, he argues against those who have reserved it for painters, poets, and chiefly Europeans (p. 42). Shangaan, too, value the South-East Lowveld as ‘a web of people across space’ (p. 52). In support of this contention, Wolmer details hunting, grazing and religious practices all interwoven with the landforms of the Save and Limpopo catchments. Still – however rich these meanings are – they do not necessarily add up to a concept of landscape. Such an abstraction would contain values and measures of wide application. They would allow Shangaan to appreciate – or not – other places they visit or observe through photographs. Perhaps, some or all Shangaan do hold such ideals with respect to topography, vegetation and so on, but Wolmer does not delve into them. Indeed, the ‘visions’ for the South-East Lowveld have derived entirely from whites.

So has the South-East Lowveld itself: the parallel between black and white approaches also unravels on the question of scale. Before the 1890s, there was no ‘South-East Lowveld’. The first settlers ‘made’ this region when they described it as ‘unfit for white occupation’, and remade it when they developed ambitions involving development and/or tourism. Ranchers, such as Clive Stockil, organizer of the Save Valley Conservancy, marketed the Lowveld as a scenic destination. More recently, proponents of the Great Limpopo Transboundary Conservation Area (about which Wolmer has written more elsewhere) have recharted a three-country eco-zone. Shangaan geography, on the other hand, is both more local and more cosmopolitan. Women may stay in their communal lands, especially in light of longstanding regulations against transhumance. Men mostly work for a stretch in South African industry. As migrant laborers, they exit and enter the South-East Lowveld at will, perhaps not even recognizing it as a relevant unit. Surely, their ‘web of people’ crosses the Limpopo and extends as far south as ‘Joni’ (Johannesburg). The post-2000 land reform – which Wolmer analyzes in rare detail – has likely further jumbled this multiplicity of spatial scales operating among his subjects.

Notwithstanding these quibbles, From Wilderness Vision to Farm Invasions documents the production of and production in the South-East Lowveld with an insight and verve sure to be appreciated among scholars, students and policy-makers.