Wilderness gained,wilderness lost: wildlife management and land occupations in Zimbabwe's southeast lowveld

This paper explores the physical and imaginative construction of the Zimbabwean ‘lowveld’ landscape. A powerful legacy of the colonial encounter with Zimbabwe was the notion that the lowveld is a wilderness. This logic underpinned attempts to preserve or rehabilitate parts of the lowveld landscape as pristine and glorious pieces of national heritage and, more recently, attempts to exploit sustainably ‘wilderness quality’ and wildlife. The landscape has been physically modified accordingly – often to the detriment of many of its inhabitants. This has played out in oxymoronic attempts to manufacture wilderness in a national park, conservancies and game ranches. But this vision has recently come under its most severe attack to date as these new wildernesses have been re-peopled, and the politics of land and the needs of black smallholders, pushed to the top of the national agenda. The land occupations since 2000 by both state-sponsored war veterans and peasant farmers have revealed starkly contrasting ways of seeing and understanding this landscape which have radically different implications for conservation and development policy.