Women, Mobility and Rural Livelihoods in Zimbabwe

Patience Mutopo, Ph.D (2012, awarded with a Magna Cum Laude), Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany, is currently a Post Doctoral Researcher with the University of Cologne, Germany and the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands, under the Volkswagen Foundation funding Initiative for Social Sciences. Her research interests include land and agrarian reforms, gender, livelihoods analysis, social entrepreneurship, and the politics of policy-making processes.

• DedicationList of IllustrationsAcronyms and TerminologyAcknowledgementsPreface1 Setting the Research Agenda and the Conceptual Framework 2 Methodology3 Description of the Study Area4 The Early Beginnings of Merrivale Farm5 Merrivale Farm during and after Fast-Track Land Reform, 2000–20106 Access to Land and the Shaping of Livelihoods at Tavaka Village, Merrivale7 Life beyond Merrivale Farm: Preparation for and Trading in South Africa8 ConclusionReferencesIndex

'A native Shona speaker, she spent 16 months in the field, including a trip to Pietermaritzburg to visit the farm manager’s wife of a generation ago (the family left years before the land invasions) and market trips to Mozambique and South Africa with the farm women. She asks many pertinent questions and presents a perspective that seems genuinely eager to understand the situation rather than to applaud or condemn ‘fast track’. Her methodological discussion also seems unusually scrupulous and her excellent photographs, including some from the white manager’s family in Rhodesian times, are a plus'.'Mutopo reminds us above all that the high road is not always the best road for everyone, but where the road that she delineates so clearly and sympathetically is going is not so clear. Yet she is aware of the big questions and that is why this monograph is of particular value'.Bill Freund, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, in Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 16, issue 2, pp.358-361