The death of the Subject with a capital ‘S’ and the perils of belonging: a study of the construction of ethnocracy in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse the dynamics of politics of ethnocracy in Zimbabwe. Ethnocracy developed as an indictment on civic and inclusive nationalism. The contest between forces of ethnocracy and those of inclusive nationalism permeated the struggles for liberation, reducing them to a complex terrain of mobilisation of ethnicity and regionalism, displacing all pretensions and rhetoric of national unity. At birth in 1980, Zimbabwe was permeated by a deep Shona ethnic orientation, partly due to the fact that ZANU-PF was, for all intents and purposes, a Shona-dominated political formation since its emergence in 1963. But the question of subjectivity has remained under-researched if not repressed by those in power, who practise ethnocracy and benefit from it. The article posits that Zimbabwe as a postcolonial ‘nation-state’ developed along the lines of an ethnocracy rather than a unitary nation. It situates the debate of subjectivity within the broader politico-philosophical and theoretical interventions of Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall that modified the traditional sociological view premised on unified and stable identities. This article emphasises dislocations, displacements, discontinuities, fragmentations, contradictions, ruptures and pluralities as the hallmarks of the construction and reconstruction of identities. By the late 1990s, ethnocracy, which had since the 1960s been read as a bimodal phenomenon pitting the majority Shona against the minority Ndebele, became even more complex with the ‘pan-Shona’ ethnic unity imploding, giving birth to clan-based factionalism within ZANU-PF, as well as fracturing the opposition Movement for Democratic Change into two factions in 2005. The reality today is that every political actor and political formation has to devise ways of managing ethnicity through the official institutionalisation of ethnicity at party and government level, if the nation is to survive and political stability is to be attained. Other political actors – particularly from minority groups – have responded by peddling politics of federalism, irredentism, the devolution of power and even secession, as a solution to the problem of ethnocracy. Yet, others still believe that a democratic therapy is capable of purifying the territorial nationalism of ethnocracy.