Chilonga cultural landscape in the shadow of eviction: living cultural heritage, livelihoods and minority Indigenous people’s rights under threat in Zimbabwe?

Abstract

Indigenous people’s cultural heritage is increasingly being subjected to political, social, and economic pressures in the light of capitalism, foreign investment, and displacement perpetuated by external development programmes. Shangaan people in Chilonga communal lands, Chiredzi District in Masvingo Province of south-eastern Zimbabwe are victims of such regimes as the government seeks to evict them from their ancestral lands. The Zimbabwean government’s plan to relocate the Shangaan people from their communal territory is problematic for many reasons; it shows the government’s failure to uphold human rights, respect property rights, Indigenous rights, and cultural rights. The displacement has a longer-lasting socio-cultural, ecological, and economic impact, affecting cultural diversity and socio-cultural interactions as the government plans to forcefully remove families from their heritage and way of life and change their community set-up. This may, in turn, lead to new patterns of inequalities, loss of cultural heritage, and vulnerabilities. This article disentangles such dynamics and sheds light on endangered human rights, cultural heritage, and its practitioners.