Abstract
Like Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa, Zimbabwe was one of the countries that the imperial mission had targeted to establish as a settler economy. The objective of creating a white settler colony was evident in the entire colonial system, including place naming. Generally, place naming served political functions of declaring power and authority over the entire colony. While white minority rule ended in 1980, it, however, left some symbolic imprints on the cultural landscape of the independent nation, Zimbabwe. Given that colonialism entrenched white identity on the cultural landscape, this article interrogates efforts by the Mnangagwa government, which assumed political office in November 2017, to dislodge Rhodesian memory from the cultural landscape. This article demonstrates that decolonisation is not an event but an ongoing process that political elites execute whenever they want to serve present political purposes. It interrogates the dialectics of political power and remembering the past in Zimbabwe during the aftermath of the military-induced political change of November 2017. The re-inscription of the landscape that the Mnangagwa regime executed specifically targeted military cantonments throughout the country. This decolonisation process was ostensibly done to dismantle white identities from the cultural landscape. However, this article argues that the place renaming exercise served to write back the liberation war legacy into mainstream history, symbolically declared the regime’s political power, and served to legitimise the political status quo. These political purposes had roots in the succession race and the internal party politics within the Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU- PF) that preceded the political transition.
Highlights
The process of dismantling Rhodesian icons from the cultural landscape in Zimbabwe began during the internal settlement era (1978–1979) when the coalition government changed the name of the country from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Fisher (2010) provides a detailed list of changes that the new government made to the symbolic culture of the nation
In 1982, the Government constituted the Cabinet Committee on Place Names to steer the process of place renaming and correcting the spellings of indigenous names that had been mangled during the colonial era (House of Assembly, 21 August 1981, col. 1218 cited in Fisher 2010: 62)
This article has demonstrated that the holders of political power have the privilege of constituting a ‘national-text’ by selecting from the past aspects that can serve their present political interests
Summary
The process of dismantling Rhodesian icons from the cultural landscape in Zimbabwe began during the internal settlement era (1978–1979) when the coalition government changed the name of the country from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Fisher (2010) provides a detailed list of changes that the new government made to the symbolic culture of the nation. Given that Grace, the candidate that the G40 was allegedly backing to take over from Mugabe, did not have liberation war credentials, G40 desperately wanted to declare as invalid and inapplicable the policy that had been part of ZANU-PF’s political culture since independence in order to create a clear sailing path for Grace’s ascension to the presidency. In the case of the Mnangagwa regime, the toponymic order that the Mugabe regime created was not affected They continued with the process of decolonising the cultural landscape, targeting colonial names for defence cantonments that the Mugabe regime did not change. The names that the Mnangagwa regime used to rename the military cantonments presented a form of selective remembering of the liberation war history that was purposefully chosen to justify the political status quo. Knowing such potency of public signs, the Mnangagwa administration went beyond the usual practice of unveiling a plaque bearing the new names for places to put the public signs bearing the new names right at the entrances of the military establishments
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
