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INTRODUCTION
Every morning, for close to two months - December 2014 to January 2015 - we drove along this desolate road in the semi-arid Lupane District in north-western Zimbabwe, trying to get a glimpse of the flooded Gwayi River, which as we were told, had burst its banks the previous season. I will admit here, I have something for livid nature, and as a boy, I was always fascinated by the boisterous sounds of flooded rivers. Every day we travelled that road, our imaginations consumed by the beautiful side of nature, everything appeared normal - people went about their business of ploughing, cultivating or fencing their fields on either side of the road.
However, anyone familiar with this area would have realised that all was not as normal as we at first thought it to be. What was now occupied by fields, and in some parts, randomly scattered rudimentary huts, was once a heavily forested forest that was once designated as an arable zone by colonial authorities as part of the centralisation measures, and appeared to enjoy the protection against 'madiro' by both local traditional and political structures and society as a whole after independence in 1980. This forest has been decimated; trees have been felled; pastures cultivated and rudimentary fences of tree branches built to keep out livestock. As the people put it, 'baziphile' (they had engaged in self-provisioning of the land), underscoring the fact that their occupation of the land was not sanctioned by any authority. The deployment of the term 'siziphile' by the land occupiers depicted, in part, the agency of households in self-identifying themselves and the land they need and the dynamics of land access in Zimbabwean communal areas (CAs) since colonialism (see Nyambara 2001: 782).
I use the term 'madiro' here, to refer to unauthorised occupation of land and the accompanying freedom to '"tema madiro'' (clear as much land as one has the energy to)' (Chimhowu & Hulme 2006: 735). The practice of 'madiro' as some form of demonstrations of frustrations of land hunger, has a long history in Zimbabwe; it started as a response to the deprivation of land rights under the Native Land Husbandry Act (NLHA)...