‘The Hunger Games’: politics and drought in post-colonial Zimbabwe, 1980–1992

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This paper explores the politics of drought and hunger in the immediate post-colonial period in Zimbabwe, 1980–1992. This period was characterised by the state's efforts to consolidate power in the context of the African citizenry's anticipated reform of the colonial system and ensuing white supremacist state. The new African-led state's power consolidation efforts manifested in the Gukurahundi massacre between 1982 and 1987, in which drought became a tool to enforce hunger in the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces. There followed a continuation of the politics of patronage and poor administration, which came to characterise the state's drought relief programmes. We explore this political context and deploy a socio-environmental approach to explain the history of drought in the first decade of post-independence Zimbabwe. We begin our analysis in 1980 at the start of political independence, where the political structure of drought response changed, and end in 1992 with the worst drought of the century. Our primary sources are oral history interviews, newspapers, and parliamentary debates. We demonstrate that the post-colonial droughts between 1980 and 1992 were characterised not only by failure at government level but were a conscious manipulation in line with the ruling party's neopatrimonialism stance. Where loyalty could not be bought, it had to be coerced. So the state-forced starvation on drought victims was central to its strong-arm programme of control. Indeed, the failure of the rains could be an excuse when the state needed to claim an alibi for its own failures. In essence, we contend that politics eclipsed policy in fighting drought.