Postcolonial Zimbabwe Research Articles

Rethinking the language of politics in 21st century Zimbabwe: A critical discourse analysis perspective

The struggle for political supremacy in postcolonial Zimbabwe has of late assumed a new form in which discourse contestations have taken centre-stage. The Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) politicians have engaged in discourse construction and discourse manipulation as tools of discrediting, vilifying and outmanoeuvring their perceived political opponents. This has been evident during and after the execution of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (the Third Chimurenga) and the urban slums clearance exercise (Operation Murambatsvina). Applied propaganda techniques in the form of discourse control, semantic twists, popular appeal, word approval, semantic forgery and semantic shifts have been deployed in attempting to justify the nobility of unpopular government programmes that have been condemned both locally and internationally. The article concentrates on ZANU PF political discourse because other political players in do not have access to the state controlled media. In attempting to unravel these deep-seated political machinations of the ZANU PF government, the article uses a mixed conceptual framework of hegemony theory and critical discourse analysis, coupled with empiricism. . LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research Vol.3 () 2006: pp.223-235

Yvonne Vera's Bulawayo: Modernity, (Im)mobility, Music, and Memory

This article explores the production and performance of urban modern subjectivity in Vera's Bulawayo, as represented in her two final novels, Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins. The modern subject emerges from these fictions as an inherently restless one: railing against colonial containment and articulating its desire for an elsewhere, it finds expression in Vera's privileged tropes of music and trains; both traveling tropes, music and trains in these texts are rendered as figures through which movement across rural/urban and national boundaries is articulated. Honing in on these tropes, as well as those of the photograph and the street corner, Vera cracks upon the ambivalences infusing urban modernity in both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Grappling with, and seeking not to subdue, the dissonance introduced by such ambivalence, the novels expose the fraudulent promises of colonial and national modernities, highlighting, in particular, their gendered logics. Vera's final novel, I argue, writes towards a utopian modernity yet to be realized. If modernity has been conceptualized and lived as a flight from the past, that towards which Vera writes draws upon memory to counter the homogenizing drive of the modern colonial or nation state.

Women and the Literature of Settlement and Plunder: Toward an Understanding of the Zimbabwean Land Crisis

Women and the Literature of Settlement and Plunder:Toward an Understanding of the Zimbabwean Land Crisis Julie Cairnie (bio) For nearly a decade the world has been intermittently gripped by the deepening political, economic, and humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. The government-sanctioned confiscation of approximately forty-five-hundred white farms commenced in 2000 and continued for a two-year period. Few human rights violations have produced more vitriol in Britain than the sight of white families expelled from their homes, often through violence and occasionally through the murder of the patriarch. The response in this country is quite different: sure, it is shocking, but in Canada the expulsion of white farmers in a former British colony may be a poignant reminder of our own colonial history. Although white Zimbabweans form only a small portion of the regime's victims, it is largely their experience which mediates international understanding of the crisis. The status of "home" and the ways in which it is inter-implicated in race, gender, and class is really what is at stake here. What is the meaning of "home" when an estimated one-quarter of the population has fled Zimbabwe, a country ravaged by 1,000, 000 percent inflation, worrying food and fuel shortages, and daily human rights violations? What is the meaning of "home" in a country where a "Marxist" president occupies a twenty-five-bedroom mansion and endorses the burning of the huts or shanties of opposition party supporters? [End Page 165] What is the meaning of "home" for two million urban slum dwellers whose modest homes and businesses were destroyed in the Orwellian-termed "Operation Murambatsvina" (Operation Restore Order)? Home has deep ideological and historical meaning in Zimbabwe. Just as the original plunder of land for white homes in the 1890s was constituted in gendered terms, so too is the current regime's re-appropriation of land and destruction of homes. From the beginning, the establishment of white homes was connected to the arrival of white women, and black women were taught by these same women to maintain their own homes to white European standards (Kirkwood 159). Even though his original "Pioneer Column," which set out from the Cape in 1890, was comprised of men, Cecil Rhodes envisioned white women on that landscape. In a footnote in his "Last Will and Testament," readers are told that Rhodes "circl[ed] his hands about the horizon [and] said, 'Homes, more homes; that is what I work for'" (Stead 5). Margaret Strobel explains that the arrival of white women in the colonies "intensified the appropriation of indigenous land" in order to facilitate this desire for homes (2). The hut tax and a forced labour policy meant that black men left their family kraals in order to pursue work on white farms and in newly developed mines. Their authority over their wives and children diminished substantially. Given this history, black men set out to "reclaim their manhood and masculinity" when they invaded white farms (McFadden 4). Black women were sometimes active participants in this process, but they were more often victims. Farm workers and their families were forced to leave, and many women were beaten and raped. Other rural people were invited to settle on reclaimed farms, but these former commercial farms were (and are) overcrowded and under-resourced. As well, Mugabe's targeted attacks on, first, urban and, more recently, rural supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have profoundly affected black women's (and a few white women's) ability to maintain a home. In both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, home is a highly contested and gendered ideological arena. In this paper I examine four white women writers' negotiations of the problematic of land, gender, race, and home over a hundred-year period. My aim is to trace the formation and reformation of white women's claims to belong, to be at home, in Rhodesia and in Zimbabwe. While it is understood that white women played a pivotal role in the settlement of Britain's colonies, I want to push this understanding further and point to the ways in which their writing reveals the complications of white women's claims to home space in...

Forestry policy in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe: continuity and change

Using the case of Mafungautsi Forest Reserve, this paper discusses continuities and changes in policy and practice at the communal and reserved forest interface in Zimbabwe. Colonial forestry policy in Zimbabwe has often been labelled as oppressive, as communal area citizens were not allowed to participate effectively in its formulation and implementation. Independence in 1980, it was thought, would usher in an era of greater participation within the forestry sector. However, the hope that local communities would have greater input in the forestry policies and management has largely remained unfulfilled. The state institutions responsible for managing forests have largely remained unsympathetic to the involvement of local communities in the management of forestry resources despite the pre-independence rhetoric. Alongside the co-management attempt to make local peasants citizens through their inclusion in decision-making has been the continuity of the colonial policy that treated local peasants who used resources as criminals destroying trees and forests. This paper examines how the fundamental policy perspective of forestry in Zimbabwe still perceives local peasant farmers to be unsustainable exploiters of forests. The local resource users have not remained passive recipients of the repressive forestry policies and practices based on science but have actively contested them since the 1950s.

Zimbabwe Colonial and Post-Colonial Language Policy and Planning Practices

This monograph focuses on the development of colonial and post-colonial language policies and practices in Zimbabwe, attributing changes to evolving philosophies and politics in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. In colonial Zimbabwe, we argue that the language policies had as one of their key objectives the development of a bilingual white colonial ruling class proficient in both English and at least one African language. Contrary to what some scholars might think, we will show that what was being imposed during the colonial era was not English on Africans but European variants of African languages on Europeans. The monograph also describes how, through linguistic description, Europeans appropriated African languages as a prelude to the imposition of European variants of African languages on Africans under the guise of the promotion of indigenous language. Despite the power and influence of the colonial regime, we demonstrate how Africans still retained a strong sense of agency during the colonial period which enabled them to select, albeit within restricted limits, the nature and type of education they received, the languages through which they were taught, and indeed even the materials which were used in teaching them languages, particularly English.

Legitimizing indigenous knowledge in Zimbabwe: A theoretical analysis of postcolonial school knowledge and its colonial legacy

This article is a theoretical discussion on the social construction of knowledge in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. It examines effects of hegemonic knowledge constructions and how they may be de-legitimated through incorporating indigenous knowledge in postcolonial school curricular. The article questions the importance attached to Euro-centric school knowledge and the devaluation of indigenous knowledge in postcolonial states. It further argues that indigenous knowledge as informal knowledge plays a major role in society and should be formalized in educational institutions to constitute a transformative and inclusive educational system. The article proposes hybridization of knowledge to give voice to the formerly marginalized in school curricular in Zimbabwe. It also proposes that knowledge as a historical, cultural, social, spiritual and ideological creation should be a product of collaborated efforts from all possible stakeholders to foster social development and self-confidence in individuals.

Gramsci, Doke and the Marginalisation of the Ndebele Language in Zimbabwe

Clement M. Doke's 1929–1930 research on Zimbabwean languages has played a key role in shaping the tribalised and politicised linguistic terrain that characterises modern Zimbabwe. Doke, professor of linguistics at the University of Witwaters-rand, was commissioned in 1929 by the government of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) to research the language varieties spoken by Zimbabwean natives. His work, which was premised on the quest for standardised, monolithic and homogeneous linguistic categories, marked the genesis of language politics in Zimbabwe. The Dokean legacy left an indelible mark on the terrain of language treatment and language policy formulation in postcolonial Zimbabwe. This paper uses Antonio Gramsci's hegemony theory to interrogate and problematise the contribution of Doke's pioneering work to language politics and language margin-alisation in Zimbabwe. Gramsci's theory of hegemony posits that dominant social groups impose their supremacy over weaker groups either by overt coercion or by using more intellectual means of realising their dominance. The paper concludes by observing that the marginalisation of Ndebele in contemporary Zimbabwe cannot be fully understood outside the context of this Dokean legacy.

Disciplining a ‘Dissident’ City: Hydropolitics in the City of Bulawayo, Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, 1980–1994

Post-independence Zimbabwe experienced three severe droughts within ten years, that is: 1982–1984, 1986–1987, and 1991–1992. The impact of these droughts was particularly severe on the urban poor as well as the overall economy of Bulawayo because of the perennially arid conditions that the city experienced since its establishment in 1894. This article explores four central propositions. First, that although independence theoretically ended restrictive and racialised access to water for the people of Bulawayo, it did not necessarily bring about increased water security. Second, that water crises persisted on a recurring basis. Third, that to a large extent these crises were man-made and linked to intense struggles over access to, and management of, water resources in postcolonial Zimbabwe. Fourth, that the conflicts were embedded in a larger set of ethnic and regional tensions which antedated the postcolonial period and were intensified by the ongoing ZANU–ZAPU political divide. The article documents the intense competition between the central government and the Bulawayo City Council (BCC) over water, and explores the social, economic, and political bases of this conflict between 1980 and 1994.

“Settlers” and Zimbabwe: Politics, Memory, and the Anthropology of Commercial Farms During a Time of Crisis

This article examines the contested politics surrounding the participation of white farmers in the national public sphere in Zimbabwe. It examines how farm workers have acted as an “interior frontier” to white farmers and how this has helped to shape the public identification of white farmers in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. In so doing, the differential use of the term settlers and the memory of colonialism within the current violence surrounding land reform and democratization are analyzed. Through addressing some of the engagements with this ambiguous identification of white farmers, the politics of analysing “settlers” within anthropology and postcolonial studies is raised.

Working on the Margins: black workers, white farmers in post-colonial Zimbabwe by BLAIR RUTHERFORD London: Zed Books, 2001. Pp. 268, £45.00; £15.95 (pbk.).

<b>Working on the Margins: black workers, white farmers in post-colonial Zimbabwe</b> by B<scp>LAIR</scp> R<scp>UTHERFORD</scp> London: Zed Books, 2001. Pp. 268, £45.00; £15.95 (pbk.).

Sexual Tensions of Post-Empire

In this essay Katherine Franke examines two contemporary cites in which state efforts to eradicate the traces of empire and to resurrect an authentic post-colonial nation have produced sexual subjects that serve as a kind of existential residue and reminder of a demonized colonial past and absence. Looking first at post-colonial Zimbabwe, Franke argues that President Mugabe's aggressively homophobic policies have played a key role in fortifying his leadership as authentically African and post-colonial. Franke then turns to current efforts by the Mubarak government in Egypt to publically prosecute men for having sex with men. The Mubarak government has used homosexual show trials, first in security courts, and then in civilian courts, as a dry run for the reorganization of the Egyptian court system's jurisdiction over dissenters and outcasts.

Changing Racial Attitudes in Zimbabwe

This article focuses on racial attitudes in post-colonial Zimbabwe as revealed in letters to the editor, published in one of the country's weekly newspapers from the late 1980s through the 1990s. These data revealed that African authors were the consistent majority during this period and focused on their institutional needs, becoming increasingly critical of their government. White authors, on the other hand, remained the minority and emphasized the maintenance of institutional standards and efficiency, remaining consistently skeptical of the country's Black government. The analysis concludes by addressing the theoretical and policy implications of these results.

Christianity and the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings

During the twentieth-century, Christendom shifted its centre of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere, Africa becoming the most significant area of church growth. This volume explores Christianity's advance across the continent, and its capturing of the African imagination. From the medieval Catholic Kingdom of Kongo to a transnational Pentecostal movement in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the chapters explore how African agents - priests and prophets, martyrs and missionaries, evangelists and catechists - have seized Christianity and made it theirs. Emphasizing popular religion, the book shows how the Christian ideas and texts, practices and symbols, which have been adapted by Africans, help them accept existential passions and empower them through faith to deal with material concerns for health and wealth, and to overcome evil.

State culture and development in Botswana and Zimbabwe

This article makes two major claims. The first is that independent Botswana was able to generate and sustain a type of developmental state because of the presence of an indigenous initiator state culture that was preserved by the Protectorate state and was inherited by the post-colonial state elites. The second is that the non-emergence of the developmental state in post-colonial Zimbabwe is explained by the presence of a non-initiator indigenous state culture which was preserved by the Rhodesian colonial state and was inherited by the post-colonial state elites. The article briefly reviews the literature, analyses the Tswana and Shona pre-colonial state cultures, and shows that these were preserved by the colonial states and inherited by the nationalist politicians.

Power, Education, And Identity in post-colonial Zimbabwe the fate of King Lobengula Of Matabeleland

Abstract

‘Rocking the boat?’: Church‐NGOs and democratization in Zimbabwe

Historically, relations between church and state in independent Zimbabwe have tended to be co-operative and non-confrontational. However, in 1997 the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC) initiated the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), leading to the government's defeat in the first post-independence referendum and setting the stage for the violent elections of June 2000. Nevertheless, as the NCA developed the strength and capacity which enabled it to challenge the status quo, the ZCC withdrew. As a key-player said '. . . as churches we had to take issues that don't raise too much dust or rock the boat too much, but the boat was rocking'. This suggests that, although the church may play a critical role in opening up space for debate, the state may still co-opt and weaken churches and other groups, in its effort to retain hegemony. Churches and church NGOs relate ambiguously to both the state and society, in both colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe, and remain vulnerable to political, economic and social pressures. Theories of democratization, and in particular the role played by churches and NGOs, must begin to recognize the complexity and ambiguity of state-society relations as detailed in this study. ZIMBABWE HAS A RICH LITERATURE ON THE ROLE OF CHURCHES and church organizations in the colonial period, which neatly captures the complexity of their relations with the Rhodesian state.1 Yet post-independence churchstate relations have been little studied. Upon investigation, many similarities between the earlier literature and the post-independence period become apparent, especially in terms of relations between state elites and church Sara Rich Dorman is a DPhil Candidate at St. Antony's College, Oxford. This article draws on research carried out between 1995 and 1999,whichwas greatly facilitated by, among others, Jonah Gokova and Tawanda Mutasah. The article has benefited from the comments of Erica Bornstein, W. J. Dorman, Tim Kelsall, David Maxwell, and Gavin Williams. 1. See Carl Hallencreutz and Ambrose Moyo (eds), Church and State in Zimbabwe (Mambo, Gweru, 1988); Terence Ranger, Are We NotAlso Men? The Samkange family andAfrican politics in Zimbabwe: 1920-64 (James Currey, London, 1995); Michael Lapsley, Neutrality or Co-option? Anglican Church and state from 1964 until the independence of Zimbabwe (Mambo, Gweru, 1986); Canaan Sodindo Banana, The Church in the Struggle (Mambo, Gweru, 1996); Diana Auret, Reaching for Justice (Mambo, Gweru, 1992); J. A. Dachs and W. Rea, The Catholic Church and Zimbabwe (Mambo, Gweru, 1979); Ian Linden, The Catholic Church and the Struggle for Zimbabwe (Longman, London,1980); R. H. Randolph, Dawn in Zimbabwe: The Catholic Church in the new order: a report on the activities of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe for the five years 1977-1981 (Mambo, Gweru, 1985); Janice McLaughlin, On the Frontline: Catholic missions in Zimbabwe's liberation war (Baobab, Harare, 1996); Carl Hallencreutz, Religion and Politics in Harare (Swedish Institute of Missionary Research, Uppsala, 1998); David Maxwell, Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999).

Communal Land Rights in Zimbabwe as State Sanction and Social Control: A Narrative

AbstractThis article takes a historical approach to argue that communal lands in Zimbabwe are a construct inherited from colonial days (prior to 1980) which governments in post-colonial Zimbabwe have found convenient to maintain rather than dismantle. The construct is not only a convenient framework for the delivery of collective consumption goods but in turn it enables the government to subtly use communal lands as a framework for social control, especially in terms of urban management. The continued existence of communal land areas and land rights also sustains processes of social control at the household level. However, these are issues that will not receive attention in land debates as long as the larger problem of redistribution of large-scale commercial farms remains unresolved.

Communal Land Rights in Zimbabwe as State Sanction and Social Control: A Narrative

This article takes a historical approach to argue that communal lands in Zimbabwe are a construct inherited from colonial days (prior to 1980) which governments in post-colonial Zimbabwe have found convenient to maintain rather than dismantle. The construct is not only a convenient framework for the delivery of collective consumption goods but in turn it enables the government to subtly use communal lands as a framework for social control, especially in terms of urban management. The continued existence of communal land areas and land rights also sustains processes of social control at the household level. However, these are issues that will not receive attention in land debates as long as the larger problem of redistribution of large-scale commercial farms remains unresolved.

‘Catch the Cockerel Before Dawn’: Pentecostalism and Politics in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe

AbstractThe article examines relations between pentecostalism and politics in post-colonial Zimbabwe through a case study of one of Africa’s largest pentecostal movements, Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa (ZAOGA). The Church’s relations with the state change considerably from the colonial to the post-colonial era. The movement began as a sectarian township-based organisation which eschewed politics but used white Rhodesian and American contacts to gain resources and modernise. In the first decade of independence the leadership embraced the dominant discourses of cultural nationalism and development but fell foul of the ruling party, ZANU/PF, because of its ‘seeming’ connections with the rebel politician Ndabiningi Sithole and the American religious right. By the 1990s ZAOGA and ZANU/PF had embraced, each drawing legitimacy from the other. However, this reciprocal assimilation of elites and the authoritarianism of ZAOGA’s leadership are in tension with the democratic egalitarian culture found in local assemblies, where the excesses of leaders are challenged. These alternative pentecostal practices are in symbiosis with radical township politics and progressive sources in civil society. Thus, while pentecostalism may renew the process of politics in Zimbabwe, it may itself be renewed by the outside forces of wider Zimbabwean society.

'Catch the Cockerel before Dawn': Pentecostalism and Politics in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe

The article examines relations between pentecostalism and politics in post-colonial Zimbabwe through a case study of one of Africa’s largest pentecostal movements, Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa (ZAOGA). The Church’s relations with the state change considerably from the colonial to the post-colonial era. The movement began as a sectarian township-based organisation which eschewed politics but used white Rhodesian and American contacts to gain resources and modernise. In the first decade of independence the leadership embraced the dominant discourses of cultural nationalism and development but fell foul of the ruling party, ZANU/PF, because of its ‘seeming’ connections with the rebel politician Ndabiningi Sithole and the American religious right. By the 1990s ZAOGA and ZANU/PF had embraced, each drawing legitimacy from the other. However, this reciprocal assimilation of elites and the authoritarianism of ZAOGA’s leadership are in tension with the democratic egalitarian culture found in local assemblies, where the excesses of leaders are challenged. These alternative pentecostal practices are in symbiosis with radical township politics and progressive sources in civil society. Thus, while pentecostalism may renew the process of politics in Zimbabwe, it may itself be renewed by the outside forces of wider Zimbabwean society.