Rethinking the State and Political Opposition Through the Prism of the Prison

Abstract

One of Becoming Zimbabwe's purposes is to dismantle a teleological history of the nation. From the pre-colonial period to the present, the book's authors are intent on exploring not the nation's steady march of unity and progress but its wobbly, contingent history of division and dispute, expressed in fluid identities, contested political ideas, and a complicated interplay of domination and resistance. The book takes to task a range of historical and political writing, new and old. Central targets include an influential and long-standing body of nationalist historiography and political analyses of the last decade. Many nationalist writings told a teleological story of the liberation of a united nation, a story which has now been reworked by ZANU(PF), Zimbabwe's erstwhile ruling party, as 'patriotic history' (Ranger 2004; Tendi 2010). Much recent political analysis is inspired by the abuses of the post-2000 period and would have us see Zimbabwe as reduce-able to a tyrannical teleology (see Muzondidya 2009). Becoming Zimbabwe refuses to see Zimbabwe's past in either of these ways, and thus adds a fresh and compelling layer to Zimbabwe's already rich historiography. I do not want to challenge these broad lines of historical revision. What I seek to do here is use my current work on the history of political imprisonment, a topic which is not directly addressed in Becoming Zimbabwe, to add to and to complicate various aspects of these arguments, and specifically their contribution to our understanding of the state and opposition politics. This research draws on a large number of interviews with political prisoners who were incarcerated or detained between 1959 and 2010, as well as a wide range of archival and other material. My work forms part of a growing literature that explores 'penality' and which has contributed to an understanding of the ways in which punishment broadly conceived has been and remains an important avenue for state and nation building, for the construction of relations of class, gender and race, and for the delineation of the contours of citizenship.