From hunters to “poachers”: Historical transformations in the livelihoods of the Tembo Mvura of Kanyemba, Zimbabwe

This article is focused on how successive conservation regimes, from colonial wildlife legislation, through Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE programme to the present, reconstituted the identities of the Tembo Mvura people of Kanyemba in the mid-Zambezi Valley. Drawing on ethnographic research, I employ environmental subjectivity as an analytical framework to interrogate how governance reshaped who the Tembo Mvura understood themselves to be across three historical periods. I argue that identity formation among the Tembo Mvura operated through three simultaneous processes: institutional enrolment, criminalisation, and resistance. CAMPFIRE generated real benefits, employment, meat revenues and improved resource governance. These benefits were structurally elitist and captured by politically connected actors within the ward, while the Tembo Mvura, positioned last in the queue by ethnic stigmatisation and political marginalisation, were the first to lose access when distributions shrank. Building on the growing literature on the Tembo Mvura, I demonstrate that exclusion from CAMPFIRE was a subjectivity-producing event that actively reconstituted a hunter-gatherer community as perpetual suspects.