Goodbye Zimbabwe: Place naming as a cultural arena for symbolic resistance and spatial (in)justice in secessionist politics

Abstract

This article explores how secessionists in Zimbabwe deploy place naming to subvert, contest, and resist state-consecrated versions of national identity, belonging and citizenship. Zimbabwe has two super-tribes, Shona and Ndebele. Ethnicity is exceedingly entrenched in Zimbabwean politics. This has resulted in the conflation of ethnic and political identities. Since the formative years of African nationalism in the 1960s, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) has been aligned with the Shona ethnic identity, while the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) assumed a Ndebele identity. Ethnicity continued to cause tensions in the Zimbabwean political landscape. This has generated disgruntlement among the ethnic groups from the Ndebele-speaking regions. It eventually resulted in the formation of organisations and political groups advocating for the secession of the Ndebele-speaking areas from the rest of the country. Theoretically, the study deploys the tenets of critical toponomastics to explore how secessionists appropriate place naming in their quest for self-determination. It uses data gathered through semi-structured interviews with the choreographers of secession and cultural and language committees for the different ethnolinguistic groups from Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands. Preliminary findings indicate that secessionists use place names in the symbolic construction of Mthwakazi, an imagined autonomous state.