Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy

This article provides a family perspective on the formation of Sam’s ideas.^* As a family, we see Sam’s life and ideas as having developed within three distinct periods, namely, his growing up in Highfields under the Rhodesian colonial regime, then the several years he spent in West Africa, studying for his first degree and later teaching at university, and the last period when he went to Canada to do his post-graduate work. These were his formative years, before he returned to Zimbabwe to carry on a long career in research and teaching.

Sam Moyo understood that the deployment of contemporary imperialism simply produces the savage destruction of peasant societies in Africa and Asia. In his honour, this article elaborates various dimensions of the challenge related to the so-called ‘emergence’ of the South. Conventional patterns of economic growth in the South, associated with relocation and subcontracting industries, produce nothing but ‘lumpen development’, that is, accelerated social disintegration and, in particular, destruction of rural societies. Emergence of nations, distinct from that of markets, implies the formulation of sovereign projects standing on two feet, engaging in the consolidation of an integrated industrial production system, on the one hand, and promoting the renewal of family-based peasant agriculture, on the other. This article offers a critical assessment of the African experiences and identifies alternative strategies beyond the blind alley of neoliberal re-colonization.

This article raises four issues which were very dear to Sam. All are, in a sense, classical questions, very commonly debated among Marxists, but need to continue to be address anew, in concrete situations. The first is the category of ‘the peasant’, in its analytical and empirical dimensions; the second is the relationship between the peasant question and the national question; the third is the form and character of accumulation in the agrarian sector; and the fourth relates to social agency for transformation and forms of its organization. These issues are raised somewhat tentatively, in order to contribute to the ongoing debate.

Agrarian studies in Africa today is taking place in the context of an aggressive plunder of resources by national and foreign companies and of other processes of primitive accumulation shaped by the global crisis of capital. This article analyses ongoing gender and class struggles over agricultural commercialization in Tanzania. The article is a tribute to Sam Moyo, whose rigorous scholarship and committed activism was an inspiration for this author, as for many other scholar activists involved in agrarian issues. The analysis here is shaped by transformative feminist analysis/action, which uses gender, class and race analysis intersecting with other social relations, such as age, to understand the changing agrarian political economy and to challenge patriarchy and neoliberal globalization.

One of the key sites of Sam Moyo’s early intellectual development was the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS). Established by the newly independent Zimbabwean government in the early 1980s to provide an alternative intellectual space for considering socialist policy alternatives, the Institute was subject both to the opportunities and to challenges of state politics. In his work at ZIDS, Sam drew on a long history of radical political economy studies on Zimbabwe, as well radical Africanist thought to pursue his seminal work in agrarian studies. In the midst of a highly contested fast-track land reform programme, Sam led the way in understanding not only the economic challenges of the programme but also the opportunities that it opened up to move beyond the unequal legacies of the settler-colonial agrarian political economy. However, while Sam pioneered the study of the changing forms of agrarian production relations in the 2000s, he focused less on the changing forms of political rule in the country. Into this space, a rich literature from different disciplinary frameworks has emerged and expanded the debate on agrarian and political change in Zimbabwe.

Sam Moyo’s insurgent intelligence and discipline made him a compelling and controversial intellectual leader. This article examines his life and work as part of the transnational production of intellectuals and institutions dedicated to the study of Africa. Tracing his passage sharply etches the global divisions and inequalities that mark the positions and struggles of scholars of Africa. Tracing Sam’s choices and commitments over time offer however something far richer: examples of how we might move beyond the stultifying past and open up the possibility of disrupting and decolonizing the institutions and intellectual frameworks surrounding the study of Africa.

This article focuses on the methodological lessons from Sam Moyo’s scholarship. Sam’s research is characterised by a combination of detailed empirical investigation, deep knowledge of the technical and practical aspects of agricultural production and farming livelihoods, and big-picture political economy analysis and theory. Sam’s method is an insightful contemporary application of the method originally set out in Marx’s Grundrisse. Many contemporary explorations of agrarian political economy fail to sustain the important tension and dialectical debate, between diverse empirical realities and their ‘multiple determinations and relations’ and wider theorisation of the ‘concrete’ features of emergent processes of change. The implications of Sam’s methodological approach for the analysis of Zimbabwe’s land reform are discussed, especially in relation to the land occupations and the politics of agrarian reform since 2000.

Zimbabwe’s decolonization could never be complete without addressing the land question. Sam Moyo’s work, spanning over three decades, has been a point of reference in the discussion of land policy performance, rural mobilization and trends in land reform. His work mostly focused on influencing policy, creating connections between local processes (such as land occupations), national policy and global debates. The article provides a summary of Sam Moyo’s writing on land reform policy in Zimbabwe. It highlights the complex relationships that exist between policy formulation, rural mobilization and implementation of policy. Whilst celebrating the work of an icon, the article also takes a more critical stance on outstanding issues as pertaining to the fast-track land reform process that began in 2000. The Government of Zimbabwe (GoZ) has not adequately resolved the land tenure question and currently faces the threat of elite capture.

Tanzania has been experiencing different periods of food shortages mainly because of insufficient food production. While the country has an undisputable potential for food production, the state and its development partners, such as the World Bank, believe that the unsustainable peasant food production is the main cause of the food crisis. As a panacea to the food crisis, a call for de-peasantization in favour of commercial large-scale farming, is advocated. Inspired by the work of Sam Moyo, this article argues that achieving food self-sufficiency should begin with improving peasant agriculture instead of dispossessing peasants of their land. The principles of food sovereignty must be adopted and the orientation of the state must be developmental. The state must play an activist role in investing heavily in agricultural-related projects.

This article is dedicated to Professor Sam Moyo, whose work on radical land reform in Zimbabwe within a neoliberal environment has engaged our attention and illuminated the subject of our own research, the agrarian question in post-land reform Kerala.

In Kerala, the experiment of democratic decentralization is now nearly two decades old. The present article focuses on one of its weakest links, the failure to generate sustainable livelihood opportunities, in either industry or agriculture. The crisis in agriculture is best seen as part of a larger process of structural transformation of the Kerala economy which has blocked agrarian transition and requires thorough overhauling of the social organization of production for overcoming the present impasse. Even though local governments have a major role in resolving the agrarian question, it presupposes greater involvement of higher tiers of government and deeper cooperation among different tiers.

Sam Moyo, Dzodzi Tsikata and Yakham Diop (Eds) (2015), Land in the Struggles for Citizenship in Africa. Dakar: CODESRIA. Paperback, ISBN 9782869786363, pp. 384, £30.

Sam Moyo and Yoichi Mine (Eds) (2016), What Colonialism Ignored: ‘African Potentials’ for Resolving Conflicts in Southern Africa, Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG. Paperback, ISBN 978995 6763399, pp. 365, £28.

Renata Motta (2016), Social Mobilization, Global Capitalism and Struggles over Food: A Comparative Study of Social Movements. Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge. Hardback, ISBN 9781 317053736, pp. 204, US $127.46.