Zimbabwean Shangani People Forced to Move
A coalition of environmental and equality groups in Zimbabwe released a statement on March 5 opposing the government’s newly passed Statutory Instrument 50, which ordered more than 2,000 families of the Shangani community in southeastern Chiredzi District to leave their homes and ancestral lands.
The Green Governance Zimbabwe Trust, a non-governmental organization working in Zimbabwe to promote sustainable environmental management, spearheaded the joint press statement. The other groups involved in producing the statement were the Women’s Academy for Leadership and Political Excellence, the Institute for Community Development in Zimbabwe, the Masvingo Centre for Research, Advocacy and Community Development, the Matabeleland Institute for Human Rights, the Heal Zimbabwe Trust, and Advocates4Earth.
Their condemnation of the act noted that evicting 2,258 households, consisting of 13,840 people, violates the “fundamental rights and freedoms set out in the Constitution.” The national constitution states in section 71.3 that “no person may be compulsorily deprived of their property except where the following conditions are satisfied,” and then lists applicable situations such as “the deprivation is in terms of a law of general application” and “the deprivation is necessary… in order to develop or use that or any other property for a purpose beneficial to the community.” However, the constitutional violation lies in section 71.3.c.ii which states that adequate compensation is required: such an exchange was not included in the statutory instrument.
The statement later notes that the Shangani people were previously evicted from their homes by the colonial government in the 1950s and 1960s in order to make way for the establishment of Gonarezhou National Park. The government justified such actions by arguing that “animals and humans could not co-exist.” A research article titled “Shangaan eviction experiences from Gonarezhou National Park” related this viewpoint to the racist sentiment that “Western wildlife protection management systems were superior to the wasteful and destructive local conservation practices.”
However, one key difference between the displacement of the Shangani people in the 50s and 60s versus their displacement today is that, instead of making room for a national park, the land is being turned into a multi-million dollar Lucerne grass farming project to provide food for cows. The grass is in high demand in the export market and the region of Chiredzi is “an ideal place [for] its growth given high temperatures in the area.”
The government advertised this development as ensuring the revival of the livestock sector, but the coalition argued that the benefits of such an improvement in agriculture would not outweigh the Shangani people's loss of their ancestral lands, heritage, and culture.