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PREFACE IN 1995, DURING MY FIRST FORTNIGHT IN VHIMBA, ELIAS NYAMUNDA showed me his map ofhouseholds and administrative divisions. The map did notsurpriseme.After all, Eliaswalkedregularlyupanddown theescarpment ofthis remote area ofZimbabwe, performing his duties as an officer oftwo local committees. Amap would help him find his way, and I copied Elias's map for the same purpose as I carried out fieldwork in Vhimba. In 1996, Elias made more maps-these showing various possible locations of the disputed boundaryofChimanimani National Park. These cartographic efforts did not surprise me either. The Zimbabwean organizations that had helped place me inVhimba had warnedthatland andboundarieswere political there. Elias drew his maps to defend squatters inside the Chimanimani National Park and to undermine the government's claim to land. The government , he argued, had unjustly moved the park's boundary to the detriment ofVhimbapeople. Smallholderfarmers had notencroached upon the park. Rather, through asurveyor's sleightofhand, the parkhad encroached upon smallholders. Since my historical research confirmed Elias's position, I assisted him and his committee to elaborate upon the original maps. We joined together in what is sometimes called "countermapping"-the effort legally to substantiate the use of land and natural resources by groups not represented in the state. In 1997, asimilar engagement led me to direct aproject in Mozambique, at alocation onlythirtykilometers distant from Vhimba. Gogoi-the name of the place and its chief-challenged my assumptions in a way Vhimba had not. The same organizations and some new ones had briefed me again: XIII PREFACE Gogoi, theysaid, resembledVhimba in everyrespect-same Ndau language, same structure of traditional leadership-and, so, I should have no problem in functioning there. Thus assured, Iopened the projectbyaskingChief Gogoi to drawamap ofhis territory. Gogoi understood thatthis mapwould help protect his people's sacred forests and farmland from expropriation by South African timber companies. Yet, he could not draw a map appropriateto the task. Theproblem was nottechnical. Rather, at aculturallevel, ChiefGogoi did notgraspwhat Imeantby"territory." Markingtheground with astick, heindicated thelocation ofsacred forests andofhis headmen's homesteads, but he did not and could not encircle them with a boundary. Chief Gogoi simply did not know where the physical limits ofhis rule lay. Nothing in my experience in Vhimba or anywhere else had prepared me for this impasse. The project plowed ahead, nonetheless, and in the course ofmakingmoremapsand walkingaround thelandscape, ChiefGogoi grappledwithboundaries andtheir currentimportance. Bytheendoftheproject, ChiefGogoihad demarcated his zone ofcontrol and presented the provincial government With a map to prove it. He and those around him were starting to think about land in Vhimba's terms. This book attempts to account for the vastly different concepts of territory and geography that I encountered in Vhimba and Gogoi. It also attempts to explain the change I witnessed in Gogoi. How can two Ndau communities view the landscape and the politics ofland so differently? To answer this question, the book explores the past hundred-odd years ofthis region's history-a period in which British-ruled Vhimba became "territorialized " and Portuguese-ruled Gogoi did not. White settlement around Vhimba and wildly different forms of administration, development, and conservation caused Vhimba and Gogoi to diverge from one another. In effect, the wider colonial and state systems-and local reactions to themcreatedtwo distinct cultures. Thus, for almostthe entiretwentieth century, the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border has marked a sharp disjuncture in the politics ofland, chiefship, farming, timber, labor, and numerous other factors . Inthe late1990S, however, power inGogoi began to move intolinewith Vhimba. WhiteSouthAfricans soughtto establishtimberplantationsin and aroundGogoi. Theseloggers-aswenas«countermappers"-reorientedthe relations between strong and weak parties so that land emerged as the preeminent political object. In large measure, these processes in Mozambique recapitulate the dynamics ofwhite settlement on earlier hinterlands, from Vhimba to the American West to Australia. Ultimately, then, this book describes power on a frontier ofcolonization. XIV ...

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