ABSTRACT
This chapter unravels the process of social exclusion and discrimination against former farmworkers in peri-urban farms around major cities and towns in Zimbabwe. The drive towards urban expansion and housing development twelve years after completing the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) of 2001 became a catalyst that triggered contestation over land in heterogeneous former-farming communities in peri-urban areas. The FTLRP was a government initiative introduced in the year 2001 to speed up the redistribution of land. The majority of former farmworkers face deprivation, discrimination, and invisibility in urban development interventions because they are of foreign origin, migrants, and direct descendants from neighbouring countries. Their citizenship has been questioned both during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Exclusion, discrimination, and segregation persist in urban development interventions in Zimbabwe. Despite the constitutional recognition of these former farmworkers of foreign origin as citizens in 2009, they still experience the same challenges in a different environment of urban development because intervention projects fail to adopt a more inclusive approach. The chapter reveals the exclusionary nature and pattern of Zimbabwe’s urban transformation agenda and engages with the challenges of urban development for farmworkers dispossessed of their citizenship in peri-urban Zimbabwe.
