munities, the government proved unable to reduce the power of village heads (Alexander, 1996, p.187). The Report of Land Tenure Commission, published in 1994, concluded that village heads remained much more powerful than VIDCOs and continued to perform wide-ranging functions (Ncube, 2011, p.94). Another study noted that where VIDCOs were successful, it was because they served as advisers to rather than rivals to the village head (Munro, 1998, p.270).

Since the mid-1990s, the government has focused on trying to regulate village heads, rather than creating parallel institutional structures. Village heads now have official recognition and receive small salaries of $25 per month from the state. They have official duties per Zimbabwean law, including collecting levies and taxes, maintaining an up-to-date population register, and allocating land. There are regulations regarding the procedures through which they are supposed to make decisions and how to treat villagers. However, village heads continue to have much more de facto power than they do under the law, and they frequently do not follow regulated procedures. Indeed, many village heads have retained a measure of independence from both formal legal regulations and informal partisan pressures to support Zimbabwe’s ruling party. Village heads are much more divided in their political loyalties than higher-level traditional leaders, who have been more thoroughly co-opted by state patronage.<sup>7</sup> The main complaints against village heads are that they abuse their power by allowing their personal interests and biases to enter into their decision-making. In particular, they do not follow regulations requiring broader consultation before making decisions and they are frequently accused of self-interested behavior and favoritism, especially, in Zimbabwe’s polarized political system, along partisan lines.<sup>8</sup> Village heads are often accused of favoring their co-partisans in food distribution and court cases. Importantly, many but not all of these complaints are against village heads affiliated with the ruling party; village heads affiliated

> 7An underground pro-democracy organization in Zimbabwe, Sokwanele, attempted to collect comprehensive information on the political affiliations of traditional leaders in three constituencies in Manicaland that experienced violence during the 2008 elections. In their sample, 89 percent of higher-level traditional leaders (chiefs and headmen) were supporters of the ruling party, 0 percent were supported the main opposition, with the remaining 11 percent considered politically “neutral”; in contrast, 69 percent of village heads were supporters of the ruling party and 31 percent of the main opposition. See Sokwanele (2011). When we asked the village heads in our survey an open-ended question about whether they felt close to any “masangano”, a Shona term for organization that connotes both political and non-political organizations, 44 percent of village heads in our sample said that they felt close to the ruling party, 13 percent said that they felt close to an opposition party and 43 percent did not offer a political response, either because they did not feel politically affiliated or because they self-censored in response to the question.

8For more on the politicization of all spheres of life in Zimbabwe, see LeBas (2006).

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