The assessment of agrarian labour regimes is critical
in the understanding of agrarian change as they influence
the organisation of agrarian production in rural Africa
and the social reproduction of the majority of the
populace. The super-exploitation of wage labour in the
large scale commercial farms or plantations has received
the most research attention (e.g. Gibbon 2011; du Toit
and Ally 2003; Rutherford, 2001;Loewenson 1992) in
(settler) Africa. This is partly because wage labour in the
large farms fits into the formal employment criteria of
neo-classical economics (Leavy and White 2003; ). A few
scholars have however examined the self-employed
labour forms and wage labour relations amongst the
peasantry (e.g. Sender et al. 2006; Adams 1991). The
literature is thus dominated by separate analysis of
agrarian labour relations in large scale capitalist farming
and the peasantry. The linkages and relationships that
exist between these differentiated competing modes of
production are therefore missing. Recent redistributive
land reforms in Zimbabwe through the Fast Track Land
Reform Programme (FTLRP) provides an opportunity to
examine the transition of the agrarian labour regime from
one based on the dominant land control of a few large
scale agriculture to a relatively broad based agrarian
structure involving peasants, middle farms and a
downsized large scale commercial farm (LSCF) sector.
In its focus on one district case study, this paper is an
attempt to explore this dynamic, drawing more general
conclusions about the importance of understanding
labour regimes in the context of rapid agrarian change.