ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on work carried out in Masvingo province in the southeast of the country since 2000. It also focuses on the patterns and processes of social differentiation, highlighting differential patterns of asset ownership, styles of accumulation and dependence or involvement in labouring. The chapter shows that how a class of petty commodity producers or middle farmers' with a mix of origins from the peasantry but also from the urban middle classes, including business people and civil servants in particular are emerging as a potential political and economic force. These people are not the classic rural peasantry of populist land reform are renditions, nor are they by and large the elite cronies' of the many critics of Zimbabwe's land reform. The focus of attention on party-connected elites has meant that most analysis has missed this new political dynamic, emergent from the processes of production, accumulation and social differentiation that have unfolded over the last 15 years.