Moyo, Sam

Sam Moyo (1954–2015) was a Zimbabwean scholar and land reform activist, the co-founder and executive director of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS) (renamed the Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies following his death in 2015), and President of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESIRA). He was a research professor at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies, and taught at the University of Zimbabwe. Throughout his life, Moyo argued for, and was heavily involved in, land reform in Zimbabwe, taking an anti-colonial and Marxist approach to questions of land and labour. He published extensively on agrarian, rural and environmental issues, and founded the journal Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. His work, while interdisciplinary, is characterised by a strong critique of imperialism and neoliberalism, and he is well-regarded for his work in building knowledge networks among indigenous scholars in the Global South.