Patriotic History and Public Intellectuals Critical of Power

Abstract

This article focuses on the response of critical Zimbabwean public intellectuals to the ZANU-PF government's uses of Zimbabwe's liberation history in national politics from 2000 to 2004. The ZANU-PF master narrative is referred to as ‘patriotic history’. This article examines the activities of the five most prominent critical public intellectuals in the Zimbabwean public sphere, namely Brian Raftopoulos, Masipula Sithole, John Makumbe, Elphas Mukonoweshuro and Lovemore Madhuku. It argues that these critical intellectuals were effective in deconstructing patriotic history's distinction between ‘patriots’ and ‘sell-outs’, and in underlining the role of land as one of several grievances causing Zimbabwe's liberation war. But the article highlights their failure to disentangle a local struggle for human rights and democracy from appeals to alleged ‘democratic’ and ‘human rights respecting’ western countries. It concludes that critical public intellectuals' challenge to patriotic history was largely ineffectual, and puts forward several explanations for this.