This article analyses how changes in the private property regimes impacted on the success of the land reform in Zimbabwe. It interrogates the roles of institutions of freehold tenure on land and development in the context of post-colonial land redistribution in Zimbabwe. Land is one factor of production accessible to the majority of the poor; and, it is critical for subsistence, income generation and investment. Also, land is a territory for governance and community re/production. Since colonisation in 1890, land has remained a central issue in the Zimbabwean political discourse and, arguably, the most bitterly contested political issue in the post-colonial era. Colonial rule resulted in an inequitable land distribution between settler Whites and indigenous Blacks. The protracted armed liberation struggle leading to majority rule in 1980 in Zimbabwe was partly to regain land alienated by the colonisers. Zimbabwe’s accelerated land redistribution from 2000 that entails giving back land to the indigenous people, inadvertently attracted condemnation from the West. The land reform processes involved expropriating land owned by white farmers on a freehold tenure basis and redistributing it on leasehold as non-transferable state land. The land expropriated from white framers for resettlement was nationalised and the lack of transferability of land ownership rights reduced land value drastically and it coincided with severe declines in national output of agriculture. The assault on freehold tenure (and not the change of ownership per se) and the subsequent insecurity of new farmers downgraded the value of land. We further aver that private property regimes or other measures that promote transferability of rights and secondary markets for land are critical factors for the success of any land reform programme

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