We Rise For Our Land

The African context is one marred with the vestiges of colonial rule with the most prominent reminder of age-old systematic and structural processes of dispossession being visible through the state of land across the African continent - who owns it and who has access to it. Traversing through the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, the documentary film We Raise For Our Land: Land Struggles and Repression in Zambia, eSwatini (formerly known as Swaziland) and Mozambique, seeks to facilitate the movement of these conversations to the forefront of our public conscience. In its articulation of agrarian reform in the aforementioned countries, We Raise For Our Land engages aptly with the worrying realities of our present - where people are continually subjected to land dispossession; whether it is through the destruction of homes, evictions or the ongoing degradation of the environment to the extent that it becomes uninhabitable. At the forefront of social movements agitating for change are women who are acutely invested in establishing a world where they are empowered with the land.

We Rise For Our Land has affirmed that an engaged pursuit of agrarian reform requires extensive civic and popular education - particularly in rural areas. It is imperative that we take seriously the work of social movements in actively imagining and creating a world where agrarian reform and ecological justice is not a pipe dream, but an attainable reality - a transformative and promising locus of thriving material conditions — and stand in solidarity with those in the front line.