Emerging Smallholder Cotton Irrigation Agriculture and Tensions with Estate Labour Requirements in Sanyati, Zimbabwe, 1967–1990

This article explores agrarian labour relationships between the pilot Smallholder Gowe Irrigation Scheme, the contiguous dryland farming community and TILCOR/ARDA’s core irrigation estate in Sanyati, Zimbabwe, from 1967 to 1990. It is an analysis of the emerging smallholder cotton irrigation agriculture and the contradictions between this process and the labour requirements of the estate sector. The article argues that, once the main irrigation estate was established, the Gowe plot-holders, who until 1974 had existed as a quasi-autonomous unit (overseeing their own labour needs), then served as the estate’s major manual labour repository. At the core of the article is the interesting tripartite tension between a state-run cotton estate, a group of associated plot-holders (later outgrowers) benefiting from land and irrigation arrangements and a farming community at large.