<P> As of 2011, 237,858 Zimbabwean households had been provided with access to land under the programme . A total of 10,816,886 hectares had been acquired since 2000, compared to the 3,498,444 purchased from voluntary sellers between 1980 and 1998 . By 2013, every white - owned farm in Zimbabwe had been either expropriated or confirmed for future redistribution . The compulsory acquisition of farmland without compensation was discontinued in early 2018 . </P> <P> The foundation for the controversial land dispute in Zimbabwean society was laid at the beginning of European settlement of the region, which had long been the scene of mass movements by various Bantu peoples . In the sixteenth century, Portuguese explorers had attempted to open up Zimbabwe for trading purposes, but the country was not permanently settled by European immigrants until three hundred years later . The first great Zimbabwean kingdom was the Rozwi Empire, established in the eleventh century . Two hundred years later, Rozwi imperial rule began to crumble and the empire fell to the Karanga peoples, a relatively new tribe to the region which originated north of the Zambezi River . Both these peoples later came to form the nucleus of the Shona civilisation, along with the Zezuru in central Zimbabwe, the Korekore in the north, the Manyika in the east, the Ndau in the southeast, and the Kalanga in the southwest . </P> <P> Most Shona cultures had a theoretically communal attitude towards land ownership; the later European concept of officiating individual property ownership was unheard of . Land was considered the collective property of all the residents in a given chiefdom, with the chief mediating disagreements and issues pertaining to its use . Nevertheless, male household heads frequently reserved personal tracts for their own cultivation, and allocated smaller tracts to each of their wives . Population growth frequently resulted in the over-utilisation of the existing land, which became greatly diminished both in terms of cultivation and grazing due to the larger number of people attempting to share the same acreage . </P> <P> During the early nineteenth century, the Shona were conquered by the Northern Ndebele (also known as the Matabele), which began the process of commodifying Zimbabwe's land . Although the Ndebele elite were uninterested in cultivation, land ownership was considered one major source of an individual's wealth and power--the others being cattle and slaves . Ndebele monarchs acquired large swaths of land for themselves accordingly . </P>

Evaluate problems faced by beneficiaries of the land reform programme in zimbabwe