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Land Apportionment, the Native Land Husbandry Act and African Removals in Southern Rhodesia

1930–1962 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Displacement Territory Seized

Displaced

500,000

Colonial reports and later studies indicate that between the 1930s and the early 1960s something on the order of 100,000 African families were moved from European areas into Native Reserves and Native Purchase Areas; at average family sizes of the period this implies roughly half a million people. The figure is a reconstruction from Native Affairs Department annual reports and later scholarship rather than a single official count.

Share of the population affected

45%

of the African population of Southern Rhodesia at the time of the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, 1931

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What happened

The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 gave statutory form to racial land division in Southern Rhodesia, reserving the best-watered high-veld for European ownership and confining African freehold to designated Native Purchase Areas. Africans living as tenants or squatters in newly designated European areas were served with eviction notices and moved to reserves, a process that accelerated after the Second World War as settler immigration rose. The Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951 went further, allocating individual arable and grazing rights in the reserves, compelling destocking of cattle and cutting off land rights for those working in towns; it produced widespread rural resistance and was effectively abandoned in the early 1960s. The reserves became overcrowded and eroded, and the removals are a direct antecedent of the land question that dominated Zimbabwean politics after 1980. The 1969 Land Tenure Act extended the division further and falls outside this entry's period.

Parties

The settler government of Southern Rhodesia divided land by race and moved African families off land reserved for Europeans

Disputed

Estimates of how many families were moved vary because colonial records counted eviction orders rather than people, and because some movement was gradual and administratively recorded as voluntary.

The denominator

Colonial estimates put the African population of Southern Rhodesia at roughly 1.1 million in 1931 alongside about 50,000 Europeans; African numbers were estimated rather than fully enumerated until the sample censuses of the 1960s. By 1962 the African population had grown to roughly 3.6 million while the land division remained essentially unchanged.

The removals ran for three decades over which the African population more than tripled, so the share against a 1931 baseline overstates the proportion of the population moved at any one time.

Where the baseline comes from

Land Apportionment Act — Wikipediaopen-edited
Demographics of Zimbabwe — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no significant direct death toll. The harm was dispossession, impoverishment and overcrowding in the reserves rather than killing; deaths from the resulting land pressure and malnutrition were never measured.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of Property

Native Affairs Department records and later historical studies document evictions, hut destruction and compulsory destocking.

Movements mapped

African families moved from European farming areas into reserves

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Zimbabwe

Sources

Land Apportionment Act of 1930open-edited
Origins (Ohio State): Colonial land injustices in post-independence Zimbabwescholarly