Sam Moyo

On 20th November 2015, Moyo, along with two other academics, was involved in a car accident in Delhi, while attending a conference on "Labour Questions in the Global South". He died in hospital two days later as a result of his injuries. Moyo's family declined to have him memorialised as a national hero by the ZANU-PF party.

In 2002, Moyo co-founded the African Institute of Agrarian Studies, a policy research organisation that worked toward equitable land rights and agrarian systems throughout the African continent, and remained its Executive Director until his death in 2015.

In 2000, Moyo was made head of the Land Reform Technical Advisory Team to the Government of Zimbabwe, which observed the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). He later argued against the characterisation of these radical land reforms as 'land grabbing', contending that such language "created a moral and political equivalence between the restitutive appropriation of colonially dispossessed lands for state-led land redistribution and the recent externally inspired land grabs in Africa, despite the latter's neoliberal roots", and that the reforms undermined the class structure of settler-colonial relations

In 1995, Moyo published the book The Land Question in Zimbabwe, which argued that there were five dimensions to Zimbabwe's land question: distribution, utilization, tenure and adjudication, policy around each of which, he argued, further reinforced racial and gender injustice. Based on a detailed set of case studies, the book is described as "comprehensive", and an "exhaustive, multi-disciplinary overview" that "stresses that land is above all a political question and that the issue of race is central to it".

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.