‘Who does the Mugabe regime say that I am?’ Dissecting the toponymic commemoration of Joshua Nkomo in Zimbabwe’s cultural geography

Abstract

ABSTRACT Political power is negotiated in the cultural geography when state actors exclude some names in toponymic commemoration or assign them to less visible places. Places that are more visible to the public carry more ideological significance than those found in the background. This article explores the state’s representation of Joshua Nkomo in the toponymic commemorative landscapes in Zimbabwe. The discussion unfolds against the realisation that existing scholarship on the commemoration of Joshua Nkomo argues that the populist state commemorative practices done after his death in 1999 projected him as a national hero. However, the patterns of immortalising Nkomo’s name in the cultural geography were informed by the Mugabe’s political culture of framing reality in exclusionary terms. They indicate the state’s conscious efforts of portraying him as a regional leader, not a national hero. The Mugabe regime did not want to honour Nkomo in landscapes with a high political significance, such as the Central Business District in the capital Harare. Instead, there is a high concentration of Nkomo’s namescapes in Matabeleland. The article underscores the significance of toponymic commemorative landscapes in propagating and sustaining dominant political ideologies because they are relatively enduring and can naturalise the socio-political order.