'Living and Struggling on the Margins': A Post-Relocation History of the Zimbabwean Tonga's Livelihoods in Binga District, 1950s to 2009

In this dissertation, I focus on the Zimbabwean Tonga people's livelihoods after their displacement from the Zambezi River plains to the adjacent arid uplands, the lusaka, due to the construction of the Kariba Dam in the late 1950s. Exposure to the lusaka's unfamiliar regime of state centered ownership of wildlife changed the Tonga's relationships to local natural resources. What they understood to be ordinary fishing and hunting while living under the minimal gaze of the colonial state by the Zambezi became poaching punishable by the state in the uplands. My central argument is that the Tonga experienced double displacement through the Kariba Dam induced relocations to the uplands. This means that the Tonga experienced physical dislocation from the Zambezi River plains followed by social and economic displacement in situ through state regulated exclusions from livelihood improving opportunities of exploiting the uplands' wildlife and areas with fertile soils as well as the fishery and waters of Lake Kariba. Due to unequal power relations at nation state level, 'outsiders' such as whites, Shonas and Ndebeles also dominated in the exploitation of the local natural resource assemblage. In advancing this argument I seek to underscore that displacement is not a simple and linear occurrence. It is a complex process whose dimensions change over time depending on emerging social, political and economic developments. Besides unpacking the diverse power structures and ways through which the Tonga were excluded from accessing local natural resources, I also seek to reorient discourses on Zimbabwe's natural resource debates. The Tonga ethnic minority's experiences of exclusion from accessing Binga District's diverse natural resources of land, water and wildlife expose the limits of the hegemonic articulations of the country's natural resource question. This is largely viewed through the narrow prism of racialized colonial land dispossessions by Europeans followed by post-colonial African repossessions. This dissertation draws on the Tonga's oral renditions and subjective interpretations of their livelihoods; archival sources; and policy documents to construct a detailed view of the interior world of their everyday household and communal efforts for accessing the artificially scarce local resources of land, water and wildlife.