Land reform remains a salient issue across Africa and new publications frequently appear, including in this journal (Africa 83 (1), February 2013). But since the early 2000s, no example has been as controversial as Zimbabwe's fast track land reform. During that decade of misery, Zimbabweanist scholars often appeared to be just as polarized as the country's politicians, even though much of the discussion was marked by empirical paucity. Into this fraught arena Matondi launches his intervention with admirable clarity, nuance and empirical fortitude.

Undoubtedly, the book's greatest strength lies in its empirical basis. Researched by a team of Zimbabwean scholars over nearly a decade, its detailed comparison between the different districts of Mazowe, Shamva and Mangwe is its mainstay. Yet its ultimate aim is to say something broader. Readers should be reassured that Matondi avoids generalization and simplification. Neither his rich empirical material nor his analytical frame allow this, and he wisely avoids seeking to dispel any condensed list of assumptions. Instead, the book divides into chapters exploring the relationship between land occupations in the late 1990s/early 2000s and the formal acquisitions of commercial farms that followed; the controversies that swelled up around the allocation of resettled lands; ongoing problems of tenure uncertainty; the dramatic reduction and change in forms of agricultural production; the problems of infrastructure, service provision and investment; the absence of reform of women's land rights; and, finally, the re-forged social formations that have emerged among fast track land reform's diverse beneficiaries.

There is much in these detailed chapters, so just a few comments must suffice here. Matondi is noticeably careful to neither condemn nor absolve, preferring to take the programme on its historical merits without wallpapering over any of the obvious cracks. In the preface he asks whether fast track land reform ‘has finally resolved the land issue’. Matondi begins to answer this by situating the reform in the longer durée of Zimbabwe's troubled land politics, examining how ‘local social pressures for land’ often influenced land acquisitions and subsequent A1 and A2 allocations. This was a process sometimes repeated several times over, as elite capture, political manoeuvring and multiple, parallel allocation processes came into play, amid endless lists and audits. Chapter 4 points to continuing uncertainties of tenure as one of the most problematic legacies. These legacies will be felt for a long time, as no immediate resolution seems likely between government preference for leasehold title, beneficiaries’ preference for freehold, and the very mixed reality of promised but often unavailable ‘offer letters’ and ‘99-year leases’, not to mention credit facilities.

A particular contribution lies in the book's analysis of the ambivalent forms of mutual dependency that emerged between government/‘the state’ on the one hand, and new farmers/land occupiers on the other – each dependent upon yet constrained by the other. The ‘state’ was concerned with ‘ordering’ the chaos of the land occupations, yet remained keen to protect those who led the ‘jambanja’ (chaos or violence). Deploying technocratic apparatus and audits to effect such ‘ordering’, it left the process incomplete and underfunded, thereby maintaining new farmers’ sense of insecurity and perhaps their loyalty. New farmers, particularly on A1 schemes, felt the precariousness of their new lands – often hiding family holdings in communal areas – yet were acutely aware that government needed them to make the programme work. Because, once begun, the programme had to be seen to work, the government funded farm inputs on a scale never before attempted, yet in an economic and political context that made such efforts ineffectual. Zimbabweans resorted to kukiyakiya (informal trading) as hyperinflation took hold, and a thriving black market in subsidized inputs, fuel and fertilizer emerged. Many A1 farmers struggled against adversity to become productive, but some hired cattle or built empty houses in order to appear to occupy allocated lands, while others quietly abandoned their plots to return to town or to communal areas. Matondi's skilful pen produces a nuanced picture of the numerous actors, intentions and manipulations involved across local, district and national levels; he defies caricatures that sketch a powerful state/party/government imposing its will on an impoverished, landless underclass, as much as those that posit a radical disruption of formal, technocratic and bureaucratic regimes by a populist politics ‘from below’. Neither and both – or rather all – of these things were in play.

A superficial reading might suggest that all this reflects an unwillingness to commit to a political stance. But, as I read it, the analysis echoes not just the complex diversity of life on resettled farms, but also the ephemeral nature of state–society relations re-established through the remaking of Zimbabwe's agrarian landscapes. Matondi shows how these relations are at once new and developing, yet resonate with deeper histories, as older motifs, authorities and forms of rule over people and land reassemble in novel ways. This is most obvious in the last chapter, which explores new social structures on resettled lands. New class-like divisions and collaborations are emerging between the very mixed bag of A1 and A2 ‘new farmers’, former farm workers and others (technocrats, civil servants, traditional leaders). Although new socialities are being forged, with accolades such as varungu venhasi (white people of today), the echoes of past land orders resonate powerfully. The ‘colonial land question’ may have faded, but it has hardly disappeared.

This is not the first book on Zimbabwe's land reform, nor the last. It makes no claims to be either. Fast track land reform's sheer enormity will occupy researchers for a long time. Matondi's book may represent only the end of the beginning, and that, perhaps, is its greatest strength: raising the bar for future analysis high above the fissures of the 2000s. Avoiding the shrill tones of earlier debates, Matondi offers a sober, sometimes sobering, yet finally optimistic analysis of Zimbabwe's emergent agrarian landscapes. It should find its way to anyone concerned with understanding how the reform took place, what it enabled, what it did not or could not do, and why. Was the land issue ‘finally resolved’? Unlikely – ‘still, many questions linger’. Published before Zanu-PF's electoral return in July 2013, Matondi's optimism about agricultural recovery may be delayed. But the need remains ‘to pay serious attention to the ways in which communities construct new lives’ after rapid, ‘massive land transfer … without optimal resources’. Matondi and his team have led the way. I look forward to the next instalment.