Abstract
In 1980, the independence government of Zimbabwe adopted a political and administrative policy which was hostile to chiefs. The charge was that chief taincy was backward, unproductive, undemocratic, and a “sellout” institution that had sided with the colonial system. Consequently, chieftaincy was relegated to the fringes of the state, whereby it lost its authority over grassroots judicial and land affairs, a key marker of its power and status. However, from 1985 the government began to court the chiefs by, among other ways, ceasing hostile rhetoric and promising to return them their “original” powers. The scholarship has mainly explained this shift in terms of growing political opposition, among other factors that challenged the government’s legitimacy. This article examines the relationship between chiefs and government from 1985 to 1999. Building on literature that has emphasised the government’s motives for turning to chiefs, it considers whether chiefs got their powers back. It argues that the state did not cede back to chiefs the powers they yearned for and continued to keep them at the margins of its administrative processes. It mainly sought chiefs’ legitimating and mobilising capabilities in the context of waning political fortunes. By the close of the 1990s, chiefs were still battling to get their land and judicial powers back.
Highlights
In 1985, after five years of open hostility against chiefs, the post-independence government of Zimbabwe was compelled by various sets ofNkomo / Winds of small change circumstances to reconsider its position.[1]
The emergence and instant popularity of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999 to challenge Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)’s hegemony radically transformed Zimbabwe’s political landscape. It presented ZANUPF with its most formidable electoral challenge since 1980.128 This was a culmination of what Alexander and De Wolf observed of ZANU-PF in the 1990s, that the party was rapidly declining at a local level, including in rural areas.[129]
ZANU-PF had to turn to chiefs for a base of political mobilisation in rural areas
Summary
In 1985, after five years of open hostility against chiefs, the post-independence government of Zimbabwe was compelled by various sets of. This article joins the discussion on the post-independence relationship between chiefs and government in Zimbabwe.[12] Scholars largely concur that after its initial sidelining of chiefs in the first five years of independence, from 1985, the state began to make overtures to chieftaincy in search of more cordial relations.[13] As Maxwell demonstrated, as in the late colonial era, there was a political dimension to this development – ZANU-PF politicians sought to reactivate potential sources of legitimacy that it had previously sidelined.[14] It is revealing that the new direction was made in the run-up to the 1985 general elections. This study builds on these debates to tell the story of chiefs and government relations in Zimbabwe between the mid-1980s and the end of the 1990s
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