The law of the land: party and state in rural Zimbabwe

In this paper, we describe a clash between a farm owner and labourers which took place in one of the commercial areas in the north-west of Zimbabwe in 1982. We call the clash a 'dispute', mindful that what occurred was more than a 'private' conflict between the competing claims of equals: it was a dispute which goes to the heart of many deep issues of past and future Zimbabwe. In essence, the paper illustrates basic differences of values and expectations which were prevalent in the rural areas of Zimbabwe shortly after independence in 1980. These differences concern the people's relationship to the land, their interpretations of their past and future, and the role of Party and State structures in determining these matters. This particular dispute, and the many others of which we have records, raises matters of importance to for example, rights of ownership in land and the legal regulation of labour-management relations. But this is not a paper about law in its formal sense and we do not intend to focus on and criticise the defects of the legislation in this area. Indeed, the labour regulations relevant to this dispute were chaotic at the time, but they have since been amended and consolidated. I Rather, we are concerned with the actions taken by the various parties involved to settle the matter to their own satisfaction, and with the conceptualisations behind their actions. The questions we try to answer can be put in the following way. The experience of the field researcher who observed (and to some extent participated in) this dispute, was that the workers involved felt that they had been betrayed by the Labour Officer whose duty it was to deal with matters of this kind. We will be asking: why did these workers expect the Labour Officer to take their part? And why were they so disappointed when he did not that, at the meeting they called to report back to their fellow workers on the outcome of the dispute, they accused him of being a 'sell-out'? As anyone familiar with Zimbabwe over the last decade will know, the term 'sell-out' (vatengesi) is an extremely powerful one. Its power derives from its use during the War of Liberation to refer to blacks who supported the regime of Ian Smith against the Nationalists. It indicates betrayal by one on whose support you had