153 © Springer International Publishing AG 2018 A.O. Akinola (ed.), The Political Economy of Xenophobia in Africa, Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64897-2_12 Chapter 12 Zimbabwe and the Quest for Development: Rethinking the Xeno-Ethnophobia Tint and the Land Reform Question Lukong Stella Shulika and Stella Chewe Sabi Introduction History records that at the dawn of independence in April 1980, Zimbabwe – for- merly Southern Rhodesia – was inborn into an askew and unsymmetrical confgura- tion of land distribution along racial lines that began with British colonisation in 1890 (Onslow 2011). The legacy of Zimbabwe’s inequitable land structure was established through 41 years (1923–1964) of British colonial rule, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, 1 and 15 years (1965–1980) of white minority rule by the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) under the leadership of Ian Douglas Smith (Hill and Katarere 2002). Paradza (2010) recounts that throughout colonial dispensation in Zimbabwe, the white minority controlled and owned vast majority of arable land, leaving peasants of African descent to subsist from their marginal Native Reserves known today as communal areas. As such, the imperative to emancipate the black majority citizenry from the imbalances and injustices of unequal access to land inherited from the colonial regime in the post-1980 epoch, saw Zimbabwe attempting different phases of land reforms. Major amongst the reform strategies was the Fast Track Land Reform policy of 2000, although its 1 This Act, among other provisions, decreed the legal basis for land and resource distribution mea- sures or what was termed white land policy because of the unequitable land allocation that favoured the whites over the indigenous black population (Herbst 1990). L.S. Shulika (*) Confict Transformation and Peace Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa e-mail: lukongstella@gmail.com S.C. Sabi Food Security, African Centre for Food Security, School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa e-mail: Sabis@ukzn.ac.za