Property Rights and Labour Relations: Explaining the Relative Success of Native Purchase Area Farmers in Southern Rhodesia, 1930–1965

In the 1930s the colonial authorities in Zimbabwe set aside geographical areas where Africans were allowed to purchase land. Despite having private property rights to land, a rare occurrence among Africans in colonial times, the performance of this group of farmers has rarely been investigated. In this article, we show that the average group of ‘native purchase’ farming households performed far better than the average African farmer in the native reserves. We do more, by offering one of the first explanations behind the ‘success’ of this group of farmers. We argue that the explanation for this is not that private property rights were more secure than other forms of land rights as argued in mainstream economics. The farmers who owned land performed better than those who did not because private property rights changed social relations in a wider sense of the term. Private property rights enabled the emergence of various forms of non-family labour relations including sharecropping and wage labour that the landowner could exploit to increase production.