Conflicts over Harnessing of Diamond Resources in Marange Communal Area, Eastern Zimbabwe, 2006–2015 (chapter in "Natural Resource-Based Conflicts in Rural Zimbabwe")
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Author(s): Mathew Ruguwa
Date: 2024
Topics: Conflict Causes, Extractive Resources, Governance, Land, Livelihoods
Countries: Zimbabwe
This chapter examines local-level conflicts over the exploitation of diamond resources in the Marange communal area of eastern Zimbabwe during the period from 2006 to 2015. The main argument is that while diamond extraction opened up new economic avenues for residents of Zimbabwe (especially during the artisanal mining phase in Marange), it stimulated multiple forms of local conflicts and contestations in Marange, resulting in injury and deaths of dozens of people at the mining site, the destruction of community social institutions like schools by panners, land alienation, forced displacement, and shattering of livelihoods. Access and rights to exploit diamond resources was a hotly contested issue between various social actors that include the local villagers, neighbouring communities, diamond diggers or magweja as they are locally known, magombiro (armed robbers), mashurugwi (violent machete-wielding gangs from Shurugwi), extractive companies, and the state. Guided by a combination of oral interviews, journalistic reports, and secondary sources, the study demonstrates that the major precipitants of such conflicts were differential access to and control of diamond resources, dispossession, forced displacement, and the problematic execution of relocation schemes by government and mining corporations, including the issue of compensation.