Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS): The Early Context of Sam Moyo’s Intellectual Development

Introduction

The work at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS) had a formative influence on Sam Moyo’s early intellectual development in the 1980s. As an experimental centre for the discussion of radical policy alternatives, located in a space between the state and academia, ZIDS provided both valuable opportunities and distinct limitations for new critical thinking. As a centre which hosted influential African intellectuals, ZIDS also exposed emerging Zimbabwean intellectuals to their thinking. It was, therefore, an important site to think through the political and economic challenges facing the new Zimbabwean state. Sam’s work on agrarian questions became one of the focal points of discussion within the Institute and his growing body of intellectual work, combined with his interaction with policymakers, quickly alerted those with whom he engaged to the importance of his research. However, from its inception, the Institute faced major ambiguities about its objectives and status, and the growing problems thereby presented eventually led to its demise, in the second half of the 2000s.

The Establishment of ZIDS

Following discussions in the leadership of ZANU(PF), ZIDS was established in 1981 as a parastatal, and Professor Abdala Bujra, at the time the Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science in Africa (CODESRIA), was tasked with developing a plan for its establishment. Until an Act of Parliament legally formalized its establishment in 1984, the Institute operated under the Ministry of Manpower Planning and Development, where the Permanent Secretary, Dr. Ibbo Mandaza, was one of its key architects. In the years to follow, Mandaza would become one of Zimbabwe’s most celebrated and renowned public intellectuals and mentor to the young intellectuals entering ZIDS. The 1984 Act set out the functions of ZIDS as follows (Anyang’ Nyong’o, 1990, pp. 8–9):

To serve through study, research, teaching and dissemination of information, as a leading instrument for the socialist transformation of Zimbabwe.

The Government of Zimbabwe (GoZ) took the decision to establish a new institute in the social sciences, considering the context of continued white minority domination of the sole university in the country, which was not ready to ‘provide the research and intellectual support to the programmes of social transformation that the new government wanted to set in motion’ (Anyang’ Nyongo, 1990, p. 7). Prior to independence, the discriminatory policies at the University of Rhodesia largely marginalized black students and severely limited their recruitment as staff members. In the 1973 Chimukwembe student demonstration at the University of Rhodesia, ¹ black students, who then comprised a mere 40 per cent of the student body, protested against the ‘University’s discriminatory policy of restricting student’s course and subject choices in which African students were discouraged from taking science subjects and economics’ (Mlambo, 1995, p. 481). They were pushed into taking on ‘teaching subjects’ so that they could take up teaching posts in secondary schools. Students also called for more African representation in the University administration and staff (Mlambo, 1995, p. 481). Many black Zimbabweans, including Sam, were forced into exile to seek both graduate and postgraduate university education.

At independence in 1980, many Zimbabweans returned from exile with very good university qualifications. At the renamed University of Zimbabwe, the new Vice-Chancellor Walter Kamba initiated a series of policies that rapidly transformed the racial composition of both the staff and students at the University, such that black staff increased from 25 to 47 per cent between 1980 and 1987. In addition, new departments were established, such as Veterinary Sciences, Economic History, Theatre Arts and the Masters in Business Administration (Mlambo, 2005, p. 3; Zinyemba, 2010). Parallel to this process, the public service was also rapidly Africanized in the first five years of independence, under an accelerated advancement policy (Raftopoulos, 1986). Given these parallel processes of Africanization in the University and public service, there was often competition for graduates in the two sectors. For many graduates, the civil service, with its more rapid access to the state and better remuneration, offered a better option for employment in the early years of independence (Raftopoulos, 1992). Several key members of the ZIDS staff spent a few years in the civil service before transferring to the Institute. For most returning intellectuals, there was a strong nationalist fervour about serving the new state, an affiliation similar to that of many African intellectuals in the post-colonial period. As Tiyambe Zeleza describes it, academics were as ‘intoxicated as nationalist leaders’ by the ‘totalising dreams of nation-building’ and contributed intentionally or not to the building of ‘an ideological authoritarian edifice that would later consume them’ (Zeleza, 2002, p. 11).

This empathy with the nationalism of the new state was clearly expressed by the first Director of ZIDS, Andreas Rukobo. He emphasized the ‘need for intellectual nationalism’ and argued that the debate for, and discussion on, the development direction and future of Zimbabwe must be led principally by Zimbabweans themselves in a serious attempt to create a truly Zimbabwean intellectual tradition (Rukobo, 1989, p. 47). In the early years of the Institute, Thandika Mkandawire was seconded from CODESRIA to help with its establishment. During his stay at ZIDS, Mkandawire was particularly influential in assisting in the establishment of an excellent library, backed by the institutional support of the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Development Countries (SAREC). Mkandawire also assisted in the development of weekly discussions and set up a reading group on the subject of Marx’s Capital. Other visiting scholar to ZIDS in the 1980s included the South African academic, Archie Mafeje, and Ugandan scholar, Yash Tandon. Through regular discussions with such scholars, the young intellectual grouping at ZIDS were exposed to a range of discussions around imperialism, the social sciences in Africa, the lessons of the Dar-es-Salaam debate and other topics. Moreover, with the establishment of the headquarters of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS) in Harare, to which many of the ZIDS researchers belonged, the latter were able to engage with several leading African scholars, including: Claude Ake, Samir Amin, Horace Campbell, Mahmood Mamdani, Issa Shivji, Dan Nabudere, Jacques Depelchin, Ben Magubane, Peter Ekeh, Patricia McFadden and many more. Dialogue and discussions with such scholars through AAPS, and in the 1990s through the Southern Africa Political and Economic Series (SAPES Trust), in both of which Ibbo Mandaza played a leading role, expanded the exposure and networks of the ZIDS staff.

A key point to note in the establishment of ZIDS was that, at an epistemological level, it represented a continuation of the radical Western tradition around the centrality of political economy, even as the institute attempted to be part of a process to establish an independent African presence within this tradition. At a seminar on intellectual decolonization in 1987, Ibbo Mandaza set out this problematic (Mandaza, 1987, pp. 3–4):

[…] the Radical Third World is, in many respects, essentially an outgrowth of Radical Western scholarship. This should give us insight into the nature of the relationship of Third World and progressive Western scholars. It might indicate that whatever conflict […] that does arise from time to time between the two factors has less to do with the question of intellectual and ideological paradigm than with the quest of Third World scholars (particularly African scholars) to gain independence from the hegemony of progressive Western scholars. Sometimes, this struggle has expressed itself in nationalist forms not quite different from those characterising the overall Third World Nationalist struggle against colonialist and imperialist domination.

Continuing in his critique of radical Western scholarship and its inhibiting effects on the development of an independent progressive African intelligentsia, Mandaza criticized the need of the former to ‘maintain this hegemony over African Studies which in some cases tended to throw cold water on any attempts by African scholars to assert their independence’ (Mandaza, 1987, p. 11). He also noted that it was around the theory of imperialism that ‘there appeared great divergence between the Eurocentric view and Third World intellectual’ (ibid.). Thus, for those involved in the establishment of ZIDS, the major emphasis was less on establishing major new epistemological questions than on reconfiguring structures of control and representation in such institutions, to strengthen the role of national research and scholarship. It was an idea that originated among radical Zimbabwean intellectuals ‘anxious to pre-empt the control of intellectual life and academic life by expatriate Western scholars’ (Mandaza, 1987, p. 15). The dominance of this epistemological framework was clear in the first book to be published under Mandaza’s leadership on Zimbabwe’s problematic transition from settlercolonial rule, in which several ZIDS scholars, including Sam Moyo, were involved (Mandaza, 1986).

The dominance of political economy among the African intelligentsia for a long period of time was recently noted by Mahmood Mamdani in his discussion of decolonization. With reference to debates within African scholarship, Mamdani (2015, p. 28) writes:

The hegemony of political economy was inscribed in most new and innovative departures in the post-colonial academy: the core of the inter-disciplinary programme called EASE and Development Studies at the University of Dar-es-Salaam was political economy; even the Dar-es-Salaam School of History was known from a perspective anchored in political economy; and above all, CODESRIA was the home of radical scholars who swore by political economy, as if it were an oath of loyalty.

Certainly, reading through the Dar-es-Salaam debate (Tandon 1982), as the scholars at ZIDS did in the 1980s, one of the major concerns for some of us was the reductionist and economistic conception of politics derived from a certain reading of political economy (Raftopoulos, 1988). For Mamdani, the epistemological questions of decolonization that have focused on ‘the categories with which we make, unmake and remake, and thereby apprehend the world’ have more recently become an increasing focus for more African scholars (Mamdani, 2015, p. 29).

By 1987, the Institute was organized into the following departments: Agriculture and Rural Development; Education and Social Development; Labour Studies; History and Politics; Industry, Science and Technology; and Southern African and International Relations. Sam was appointed Head of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department, and very quickly established himself as one of the most productive researchers at the Institute. From the early stages of his research, Sam set out a research agenda that he pursued throughout his career. Working with a brilliant young historian Thomas Shopo, who influenced Sam’s early thinking, both scholars worked on understanding the ways in which state policies during the settler-colonial period were aimed at protecting white-settler agriculture, as well as providing optimum conditions for industrial production largely catering for a minority market, resulting in the general marginalization of workers, both in agriculture and industry. Their research on vulnerable working households in Zimbabwe was concerned with, in their own words (Shopo & Moyo, 1988, p. 6),

[…] the transition from the so-called primary labour markets with a circulatory migrant labour force characteristic of primitive accumulation, to the secondary labour markets with stabilised urban working households, characteristic of capital intensive manufacturing industry.

Moyo’s research in this area followed the preceding work of several radical scholars on Zimbabwe, including Arrighi (1970), Clarke (1975), Palmer (1977), Van Onselen (1976), Phimister (1988) and Stoneman and Cliffe (1988). All these studies focused on the vulnerability of labour, locating this condition within the structural constraints of land inequality that was central to the white-settler economy. Within this framework, the figure of the migrant worker was predominant. Throughout the colonial period, the challenge of attempting to stabilize the reproduction of the workforce was noted by various government commissions. For example, the Urban African Affairs Commission of 1958 observed that the growth of the urban African population was ‘very largely dependent on the migration to its urban centres of people whose interests are still associated with rural pursuits’, and noted, therefore, that it was ‘neither practical nor politic’ to attempt urbanization and industrialization policies without fostering ‘economic progress and social development of the African population in the rural areas’ (Plewman Commission, 1958, p. 2). Predictably no colonial commission or administration could deal with the fundamental problem of land theft inequality that defined the structural conditions of coloniality.

Thus, Sam Moyo’s work built on a longer series of enquiries into labour vulnerability and land inequality. His work in the 1980s and 1990s concentrated on a number of issues, including: the persistent constraints of the unresolved land question, including the willing-buyer-willing-seller compromise, on broader economic and social development; the lack of a popular land movement; and the increasing inequalities on the land, resulting from the neo-liberal politics of the 1990s (Moyo, 1986, 1999, 2000).

Within ZIDS, the challenges around the conceptualization of the Institute and its relationship to the state were the cause of increasing uncertainty and concern to researchers. From its inception, the ZANU(PF) government was not clear with regards to what kind of research institute ZIDS should become, leading to vacillation and ambiguity in state policy towards the Institute. This ambiguity was indicative of the broader ideological uncertainty of the new Zimbabwean state, which as Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2011, p. 60) aptly observes, was a mid-decolonizer that was caught between the declining world of ‘actually existing socialism’ and the emerging triumphalism of neoliberalism.

The result was that, as Anyang’ Nyong’o (1990, p. 11) described it, the lack of strong governing organs and the resultant delays in decision making, along with ‘floppy’ appointments, led to the lack of a clearly worked out research policy. This, in turn, resulted in a good deal of ‘eclectic work’ whose quality depended more on the individuals who undertook such work than on the ‘personality’ of the Institute. Moreover, lurking beneath this vacillation was the state’s distrust of autonomous intellectuals. At the 1987 conference, already mentioned above on ‘Intellectuals, the State and Imperialism: Towards Intellectual Decolonisation’, the Minister of Industry and Technology sent a sombre message to intellectuals. He warned against intellectuals outside of the sphere of the ruling party who ‘tend to carve for themselves a world of their own far removed from reality and the practical demands of national development’ (Donald, 2005). By the late 1980s, such distrust had turned into increasing hostility towards a critical university student body, and by the 2000s, with the assertion of authoritarian nationalism, the state’s assault on critical intellectuals had gone into a more aggressive mode (Tendi, 2010).

The uncertainty that underpinned the future of ZIDS by the late 1980s was one of the key determinants that pushed the Institute, in search of legitimacy, into a growing reliance on consultancy and commissioned research, namely the kind of work demanded by government ministries and donor agencies (Rukobo, 1989, p. 65). This consultancy effect of a growing neoliberalism on intellectual production was part of a broader trend among institutions in Africa and the developing world (Mamdani, 2007). Within the deepening conditions of austerity that marked neoliberalism’s disciplinary conditions, intellectuals sought refuge in the hard currency payments that provided a certain autonomy from the strictures of local economic conditions (Petras, 1990). This condition undermined the emergence of strong theoretical formation among intellectuals and resulted in the absence of work on new epistemological questions. The intellectuals at ZIDS did not escape these constraints, with a good deal of energy being expended on consultancy work.

Thus, for the 1980s and much of the 1990s, ZIDS provided an uncertain intellectual and political space with an ambiguous relationship to both the state and the University of Zimbabwe. Few government ministries or organizations outside of the state knew much about the work at the Institute, and some intellectuals at the University were hostile to the very idea of such an institute being established outside of the auspices of the University framework. Questions were raised about the quality of the research at ZIDS, for there were certainly a number of researchers employed who failed to carry out any substantive work during their stay at the Institute (Anyang’ Nyong’o, 1990, pp. 29–33). However, from very early on Sam, was among the most productive of the group, and he also established a wide network of consultancy work in the area of agrarian studies.

The Zimbabwe Crisis and New Intellectual Debates

In 1990, the government decided that ZIDS should be placed under the University of Zimbabwe, thus deciding the status of the institute. Once under the structures of the University, the three most productive academics from the Institute attained promotion to professorship within the first decade, with Sam Moyo leading the way through his work on agrarian questions in Zimbabwe, which had already begun to set the pace around these issues. However, it was the growing crisis of the Zimbabwean state and economy from late 1990s that led to a new surge in intellectual debates over Zimbabwe’s colonial inheritance and its contemporary iterations. Even as the state moved to place increasing control over the administrative and academic leadership at the University (Cheater, 1991; Hwami, 2013; Mlambo, 2013), there was a vibrant surge in intellectual discussion over the cause and future implications of the growing crisis in the country.

In response to what Moyo regarded as negative constructions of the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) of the 2000s, he and his team at the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS) carried out the first major empirical studies of the changes on the land during this period. Among the many findings of this research that Moyo and his team concluded were the following: by far the largest number of beneficiaries were people of ‘relatively low status’ and ‘limited political and financial connections’; people on the resettled land reproduced themselves in a variety of ways, in terms of land use, residency of extended families, extraction of natural resources and a range of local farm and non-farm activities (Moyo et al., 2009, pp. 175–178). Moreover, building on the politics of the land transformation in Zimbabwe and in other parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, Moyo and Yeros (2005, 2007) argued that the central force of anti-imperialist politics in the post-Cold War world was located in the ‘countrysides of the periphery’, where land occupation movements were challenging neoliberalism and opening up national debates.

In his most recent publication, Moyo’s long-term concern with the limits of labour reproduction in the absence of radical land reform was once again the focus of his analysis, in which he reiterated the view that the limits of proletarianization in the periphery results in most producers remaining in the ranks of the ‘semi-proletariat’ (Jha, Moyo & Yeros, forthcoming 2016). Several scholars built on and developed the work of AIAS (Hanlon, Manjengwa & Smart, 2013; Matondi, 2012), adding substantively to the empirical evidence and insights of that work (Scoones et al., 2010), even if such work was not as sanguine as Moyo and Yeros about the anti-imperialist trajectory of these developments.

While Moyo and his colleagues located their questions largely within the realm of political economy, several other contributors to the land debate, myself included, asked different questions that often brought them into contestation with Moyo’s position. The disagreements often centred on the authoritarian nationalism of ZANU(PF) and its longer-term implications for Zimbabwean politics. An early volume on the land occupations of the 2000s was concerned not only with the dramatic changes in Zimbabwe’s political economy, but also the constructions of state narratives and their relations to power, and the changing forms of state rule and violence under authoritarian nationalism (Hammar, Raftopoulos & Jensen, 2003). Additionally, other scholars produced excellent longue durée studies of the land question as a central part of state formation and violence, from colonial to post-colonial Zimbabwe (Alexander, 2006; Alexander, McGregor & Ranger, 2000). Rich historical ethnographies have also tracked competing contestations over land and sovereignty, and the changing politics of landscapes and belonging within different political technologies of rule (Fontein, 2015; McGregor, 2009; Moore, 2005; Worby, 1998). This included the legacy of ‘domestic government’ of farm labourers working for white commercial farmers and the ways in which this legacy was used to ‘other’ these workers as ‘foreigners’ in the context of the challenges to ZANU(PF)’s political legitimacy (Rutherford, 2001). The massive disruption and reconfiguration of livelihoods that were produced by the FTLRP also gave rise to important work on ‘displacement’. These studies have sought to study the re-ordering of old and new ‘resource regimes’, and to track the enforced changes in the ‘spatial, social and symbolic conditions and relations’ in people’s livelihoods (Hammar, 2014, p. 9; Hammar, McGregor & Landau, 2010).

Other scholars have also drawn on an understanding of the changes in the political economy of Zimbabwe to map out the longer term implications of the accumulation challenges and contested imaginaries of ‘progress’ in former settler-colonial states, on the politics of patronage, state repression and securitization of state politics in the post-colonial period (Alexander & McGregor, 2013; Mandaza, 2015; Moore, 2003; Moore, Kriger & Raftopoulos 2013; Sachikonye, 2012). These works represent only a part of the rich historiography and political analysis that now constitutes the debate on land, history and politics in Zimbabwe. Moreover, this work has been produced from a range of epistemological positions that have greatly enriched the debates on Zimbabwe’s agrarian questions.

The long-term impact of the re-ordering of production relations on the land in Zimbabwe continues to be a site of both political and academic contestation: On one hand, the massive de-industrialization and informalization that has increasingly marked the economy since the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme of the 1990s and been exacerbated by the breaking of linkages between industry and agriculture in the land policies of the 2000s; on the other hand, the emergence of new production dynamics among the resettled farmers, along with the growth of new markets largely linked to the growth of small towns and the new, though still fragile accumulation patterns emerging from these spaces (Scoones, 2016). Moyo characterized the dramatic changes in Zimbabwe’s land structures as one of many around the globe that sought to challenge the imperatives of neo-liberalism’s political and disciplinary reason. In so doing, he sought to reaffirm a commitment to what he regarded as the forces for radical change around the agrarian questions of the South, in a post-Cold War world in which growing cynicism and exhaustion had grown around such alternatives.

In a broader context, David Scott has described such a feeling of exhaustion and disillusion as emerging from a global political moment in which time is experienced as having been betrayed by history. Within this framework, history is ‘confronted as inauthentic time, the irreversibly lapsed time of our former anticipations of political futurity’ (Scott, 2014, p. 2). Sam’s response to this moment was a critical optimism about the longer term implications of the land reform process through his recurrent thinking around the issue that dominated his work since the 1980s: the structural problems of labour reproduction in the shadow of the colonial political economy of land dispossession. By means of this consistent interrogation, and through the perceived ‘predictability’ and ‘legibility’ of the structural concerns of political economy, he sought a locus from which to sustain a vision of an alternative future.

However, in my view, Sam underestimated the dire consequences of the authoritarian logic of the politics that have significantly defined the agrarian question in Zimbabwe. He regarded these concerns as ‘super-structural’, which would be resolved in the longer term changes resulting from agrarian reform, criticizing the demands of opposition and civic activists for political and human rights reforms as neo-liberal interventions. The debate around these issues will continue, as they must, and Sam’s contributions, as a leader in this field, will remain an important part of the contestations.

It was privilege to know, work with, as well as disagree with Sam. His work along with that of his colleagues such as Paris Yeros and his associates at AIAS made a seminal contribution to agrarian studies, generally, and the Zimbabwean debate, in particular. For the foreseeable future, his research and insights will continue to be a key marker in the debates.