The material infrastructure of privatization, dispossession and resistance at the Zambian land frontier

The privatization of communal lands continues to be a central tenet of capitalist and settler-colonial appropriations with devastating implications for the dispossessed and land denied. This article traces how dispossession and resistance become bound up in the material infrastructure of privatization – fences, concrete, rebar and survey lines – and the colonial histories sedimented within them. In dialogue with legal-geographical work on property and materiality, I show how such artefacts become the nodes through which law’s abstraction gives way to struggle; once law is materialized in objects, these become susceptible to alteration and enrolment in new lives of legal association that can subvert – and creatively invert – the power trafficked through property. The analysis draws from ethnographic fieldwork in Mulonga village, central Zambia, where a privatization scheme evolved into a localized struggle between creative cultivators who reworked the things of property to resist displacement, and a bureaucracy that struggled to make them perform the political work assigned to them. Abstract property, I conclude, must be read alongside the contingency and resistant reworkings of its material articulation, which creates new legal surfaces upon which people can act, redirect legal signs, and unsettle translations through which private property achieves exclusionary effect.