Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front Research Articles

Patriotic narratives on national leadership in Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) song texts, ca 2000–2017

The national leadership question in post-2000 Zimbabwe can be examined using the rhetoric of the politicians involved and the song texts of their supporters. This article focuses on selected ZANU-PF and MDC song texts with a view to demonstrating that both ZANU-PF and MDC rely on the logic of mutual exclusion in policing inter- and intra-party national leadership contestations. Through an analysis of images and viewpoints deployed in the selected songs to depict the qualities of political leaders in ZANU-PF and MDC as antithetical, the article argues that the musicians’ reluctance and/or failure to rise above the myth of the leaders of their respective political parties as the best ever to emerge in Zimbabwean politics serves to oversimplify a highly intricate national political question. Inter alia, the article addresses the volition in scholarship on contemporary Zimbabwe to exclusively associate patriotic narratives with ZANU-PF, in addition to challenging Zimbabweans to think beyond identities that limit them as members of specific political parties.

The strategies applied by the Zimbabwe African National Union – patriotic front (ZANU-PF) to dominate the 2013 harmonised elections in Zimbabwe

The strategies applied by the Zimbabwe African National Union – patriotic front (ZANU-PF) to dominate the 2013 harmonised elections in Zimbabwe

Finding Women in the Zimbabwean Transition

Abstract This essay is a feminist response to the 2017 coup in Zimbabwe that brought to an end Robert Mugabe’s thirty-seven-year on power. Mugabe came into power in 1980 after his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), successfully negotiated for an end to the civil war. The male-dominated ZANU PF has stayed in power because they consolidated power around Mugabe’s leadership. However, as the aging Mugabe became frail and his fifty-two-year-old energetic wife found her political voice, ZANU PF became deeply fractured and was facing electoral defeat in the 2018 elections. Grace Mugabe’s rise to power became the rallying point for ZANU PF to evict their longtime leader. Her fall from power has been used to restrict the voices of women even in this new era of political openness.

The Struggle over State Power in Zimbabwe: Law and Politics since 1950

The “normal standards of due process” did not apply when dealing with less “civilized” peoples, especially the Africans of what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. Such was the ruling white government’s approach to increasing indigenous political dissent and physical protests in the 1950s. Africans, writes this careful scholar of the evolution of the law and its place in Zimbabwean society, were “discursively constructed as simpletons or errant children”This book discusses the use of the law in all of its social extension to repress African aspirations from 1890 to 1980, to take farming lands away from Africans, and to curtail their access to urban life and amenities. Segregation, an apartheid-lite regime, was legally arranged as well as socially observed through World War II and, to some extent, afterward. The law, as the author indicates, was deployed creatively in the interest of ruling whites, a small minority of the total population. Later, it was used unilaterally to declare “independence” from Britain by white postcolonial usurpers.Following real independence in 1980, and the transfer of power to Africans, President Robert Mugabe’s increasingly authoritarian government used the old legal framework to limit the movement and free expression of opponents, to hamstring their rights of assembly, to remove most press freedom, to rig elections, and to reduce human rights. It also confiscated white-owned land, wholesale and illegally. The author also shows how customary law was made to serve the state instead of traditional society.This book is one of a handful of African examinations of the nature of legal history in sub-Saharan Africa. It is welcome on that score for its thorough scholarship, as well as for its explicit connection of law with state power in a manner that few other scholars have attempted. The making and employing of the full legal mechanism was coercive, in the usual manner, but also productive and discursive.This book closely examines the legal battles, and hence the political battles, that roiled independent Zimbabwe. The author portrays the legal pleading by accomplished lawyers, shows how the Movement for Democratic Change and Mugbe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front attempted to overcome each other’s legal arguments, and indicates some of the ways in which civil society tried to use legal means to free citizens from governmental constraints.The author interviewed a number of judges in the course of his research. He also quotes, tellingly, several courtroom exchanges between baffled and largely clueless state witnesses and experienced advocates to demonstrate how the laws of the land were misused and abused. But the author fails to say enough about the loss of judicial independence after 1999, and about what the shift from a principled to a regime-controlled judiciary meant for indigenous freedom and the contemporary evolution of his homeland.

The politicisation of health in Zimbabwe: The case of the cholera epidemic, August 2008-March 2009

In this article the case of the August 2008 to March 2009 cholera epidemic is used to examine the intersections between health and politics in Zimbabwe. The focus is on the different narratives deployed by the mainstream opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change under Morgan Tsvangirai (MDC-T) and the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU -PF) to explain the causes of, and responses to the cholera epidemic which emerged in the immediate aftermath of the disputed June 2008 presidential runoff. An analyses of how regional governments, especially South Africa, responded to the cholera outbreak is made. The opposition argued that the epidemic was a clear indicator of government’s mismanagement. On the other hand, public intellectuals aligned to ZANU-PF and government ministers invoked conspiracy theories and blamed external forces for the epidemic. South Africa and the region saw it through a humanitarian crisis lens. In the discussion the varied narratives explaining the causes of the outbreak and responses to the cholera epidemic exposed ongoing internal and external political contestations are noted. The epidemic seems to have become inextricably entangled with discourses revolving around political governance, human rights problems and the struggles over political power between the ruling party and opposition parties.

The Interface between Western and Indigenous Signs in Zanu-PF Advertisements for July 2013 Elections

ABSTRACTPolitical contestation in Zimbabwe post-2000 has been largely acrimonious. In the electoral domain of the epoch, political advertising, has been one of the key tools through which this contestation took place. However, these advertisements have been barely studied and those that have made an attempt to study them did not examine them from advertising theory and/or sign theory perspective. The study argues that locating the analysis of political advertisements in advertising theory and sign theory presents an opportunity to gain insights into how political products gain sign value, exchange value and utility value. The study deploys advertising theory and sign theory to examine the value that selected indigenous and Western signs used by the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) invest in the political products: ZANU-PF and Mugabe. By interrogating four purposively selected signs in ZANU-PF advertisements for the July 2013 elections, I seek to establish how political products are produced as signs and signs as political products. The selected signs are subjected to semiotic analysis. The findings show that ZANU-PF's use of these valorised Western and indigenous, often contradictory, signs is designed to appeal to votes on the basis that it is a democratic, divine anointed, Christian and African-oriented party.

Peasant Agency in a Changing Agrarian Situation in Central Zimbabwe: The Case of Mhondoro Ngezi

This article explores peasant agency during a changing agrarian situation in Zimbabwe. The article pays particular attention to the way landless peasants deployed ‘weapons of the weak’ such as illegal extension of plots beyond the boundaries marked by Ministry of lands officials, encroachment on common grazing lands, and faking membership of the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) to gain access to land. This demonstrates peasant agency and resistance which has so far received limited attention in the literature.

Whither Zimbabwe, after 37 Years of Robert Mugabe

A non-coup coup; a coup by any other name is still a coup. What is interesting about the recent coup in Zimbabwe, is that while the world found occupation in whether what had happened was a coup or not, Zimbabweans themselves were in utter disbelief that President Robert Mugabe was finally on his way out and sooner than expected. Most of them had become resigned to him leaving the presidency upon his death. Focused on the goal to see President Mugabe out of office, no one seemed to care anymore about how this would happen; the end justified the means. Now that his departure seemed possible and imminent, they wanted him to leave soon, or, in the words of some of the people interviewed by the media during the march, they wanted him to leave “like yesterday”. While Zimbabweans may have had grievances against the Zimbabwe Defense Forces (ZDF) and other security institutions in the country for their role in President Mugabe’s violent and brutal rule, this was outweighed by the fact that they did not want the man they reviled so much staying in power until they could engage in the next round of the futile exercise of voting him out. Against this pragmatism, the coup became “cool”, according to one of the placards carried by demonstrators. As non-violent as the coup was, it provided humorous moments as when men and women in the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), the ruling party in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, came out to disown President Mugabe and his wife. The same people had treated the couple like a cult for decades, kneeling and groveling to the shock and amusement of ordinary Zimbabweans. When exactly did it occur to them that President Mugabe and his wife were not good for the country? Had they not presented President Mugabe as the ZANU PF candidate in the election in 2018? One can only wonder how Mr and Mrs Mugabe felt watching this level of betrayal from those who had, as recently as days before the coup, praised them to the skies.

The Educational Corner: Reading on Zimbabwe to Find Pathways for Stability, Transformation and Peace in the Post-Mugabe Period

On November 13, 2017, the Zimbabwe National Army intervened to launch Operation Restore Legacy, which was brought an end on December 18. The operation resulted in the resignation of former President Robert Mugabe on November 22 and the installment of Emmerson Mnangagwa as President of Zimbabwe on November 24. Elections are on track for and schedule to take place in 2018. Zimbabwe is important because of the role it plays within the region and the global transformation taking place among the communist parties across the globe. It is within that context that this educational piece is written. Part one examines religion, ethnicity, tribalism, and identity politics. Identity politics are at the heart but not the cause of the challenges facing Zimbabwe. As the existing literature highlights, Zimbabwe is multicultural, multilingual, multi-religious, and has diverse ethnic and racial groups. Yet, the national narratives put forward have tended to exclude rather than include the others, and the political parties and politicians have used the politics of exclusion and division to their benefit rather than for the people. Part two looks more closely at the game played by the two dominant political parties, namely the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the nature of political fragmentation along the religious, ethno-tribal, geographical (urban/rural), and generational cleavages. It concludes that focusing on and blaming the so-called “other” will not bring about transformation, stability and peace. Rather, the keys to them requires a focus on issue areas as the point for discussion, and from that strategies for transformation, stability and peace can be developed. Finally, part three looks more closely at transformation, stability and peace, but from a generalist perspective and not per se within the context of Zimbabwe. This was intentional on my part because the discussion on them within the context of Zimbabwe truly should be led by Zimbabweans.

“Mweya weToyitoyi – the spirit of protest”: re-inventing toyi-toyi in Zimbabwean hip hop

At the turn of the millennium, Zimbabwe’s ruling party commissioned a large-scale cultural nationalist project. Urban youth music was particularly targeted in an effort to (re)gain the support of young voters, who largely had come out in support of the opposition. While some young artists utilised the state-subsidised platforms to further their careers, others refused to be categorised under the banner of urban grooves and resisted taking advantage of state sponsorship. Particularly members of the small, but vibrant Hip-hop community have continued to critically engage with and question Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front’s hegemonic and authoritative discourse through their music. In this article, I aim to illustrate this youth resistance through Hip-hop music by closely analysing selected song texts by three artists – Dizzy Don, Outspoken and Biko MC. Albeit different with regards to their ideological understanding of Hiphop, all three have released songs in which they reappropriate elements of toyi-toyi, a civic form of protest rooted in southern Africa’s liberation wars. By doing so, they do not only add a local aesthetic to their music, but also reshape the meaning of toyi-toyi by applying it to new contexts. In fact, by counteracting the revival of chimurenga songs through the ruling party, the artists voice and define their own understanding of Zimbabwe’s past and present situation.

“I Am as Fit as a Fiddle”: Selling the Mugabe Brand in the 2013 Elections in Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe’s dominance in Zimbabwean politics post-independence has led critics to argue that politics in Zimbabwe is personal and patriarchal. Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU PF)’s alleged use of violence, violent discourse, and other unorthodox power retention strategies have been used to justify claims that Zimbabwean politics is the politics of chaos. In this post-colonial (mis)reading of African politics, ZANU PF and Mugabe discourses have been labeled nativism, patriotic history, Mugabeism, grotesque nationalism, etc. However, these studies have either been uncritically pro- or anti-ZANU PF (Moore 2012). The paper, through an analysis of ZANU PF’s rebranding of Mugabe in the July 2013 elections, suggests a new multitheoretical approach to overcome this uncritical reading of Zimbabwe’s political branding practices. The suggested approach utilizes insights gleaned from sign theory, political branding and/or advertising theory, post-colonial theory, and decolonial theory.

Language and the (re)production of dominance: Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) advertisements for the July 2013 elections

ABSTRACTLanguage is a political tool used to legitimise, delegitimise, produce and (re)produce dominance. In Zimbabwe, ZANU-PF advertisements for the July 2013 elections were an attempt to deploy language to (re)produce dominance. The advertisements were produced in the context of a power-sharing government comprising ZANU-PF and the MDCs. Adopting sign theory, the article uses legitimation analysis to explore the ways in which ZANU-PF used language to retain dominance. Research revealed that ZANU-PF legitimated its dominance on the basis of performance, for example, implementing the multiple currencies system after the Zimbabwe dollar’s collapse and delivering a constitution that guarantees the values espoused by the liberation struggle. Mugabe’s incomparable “wisdom and deftness” in handling matters of state, ZANU-PF’s care for ordinary urban ratepayers and economic indigenisation were used to justify the party’s dominance. It also legitimised its rule by portraying the MDC-T as an uncaring, dishonest and sell-out party, thus delegitimising it while skilfully concealing its own blame in the collapse of the economy post-2000.

Patriotic history and anti-LGBT rhetoric in Zimbabwean politics

Over the past 20 years, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and his political party, Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), have relied heavily on political rhetoric that demonizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons. In this paper, it is argued that the anti-LGBT political rhetoric in Zimbabwe is part of a larger program known as “patriotic history,” which emphasizes a particular kind of Zimbabwean identity to legitimize the continued rule of Mugabe and ZANU-PF. The value of combining patriotic history and political homophobia emerges out of the unique political and economic context which Mugabe’s regime found itself unable to adequately address. To illustrate how and why this has happened, the paper focuses on two key incidents: the 1995 Zimbabwe International Book Fair, and the public conversation over writing a new constitution between 2010 and 2013.

Fighting for justice and freedom through music: The case of Thomas Mapfumo, Hosiah Chipanga and Leonard Zhakata, ca. 1988–2015

The pervasive contention in scholarship on contemporary Zimbabwe is that the quintessence of the post-independence Zimbabwean experience consists in unchecked political dictatorship and unprecedented economic regression. This contention derives from the fact that with the advent of independence in 1980, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) regime that replaced the Rhodesia Front (RF) in the corridors of power embarked on a campaign to achieve political hegemony through the entrenchment of patronage, violence and corruption. However, this is not all that there is to the post-independence Zimbabwean narrative. As this article makes clear, the post-independence Zimbabwean experience also speaks to a pro-democracy struggle in which the authors of the Zimbabwean debacle are confronted on various platforms, particularly the protest songs of musicians such as Thomas Mapfumo, Hosiah Chipanga and Leonard Zhakata. Since the late 1980s, these musicians have been relentless in their criticism of the ZANU-PF establishment, its strong-arm tactics and self-image as the indispensable guardian of Zimbabwean interests. This article maintains that through euphemism, ridicule and overt criticism, Mapfumo, Chipanga and Zhakata forge an aesthetic of resistance that exposes and contests the institutionalisation of patronage, violence and corruption in post-independence Zimbabwe.

Free and Fair? Rhodesians Reflect on the Elections of 1979 and 1980

ABSTRACTThe elections of April 1979 and February 1980 were the first in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe's history to permit universal adult suffrage, allowing for black majority rule. In the first election, Bishop Abel Muzorewa's United African National Council (UANC) won an overwhelming victory, while in the second, British-supervised election, Muzorewa's party was soundly defeated and Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) won over 60% of the vote. By interviewing present and former white Rhodesians, located via Facebook and the print magazine Rhodesians Worldwide, who were witnesses to these two critical elections, this study aims to shed light on which of them was more representative of the will of the people of Zimbabwe, at least in the eyes of the country's white minority.

Rebuilding the liberation war base: materiality and landscapes of violence in Northern Zimbabwe

ABSTRACTThis article examines how war veterans aligned to the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) serving in the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) attempt to use affective experiences at former guerrilla bases dating to the liberation struggle of the 1970s, in conjunction with highly charged but also highly tailored narratives about the war, to constitute certain kinds of political subjectivity and loyalty to the ruling party among trainee officers, and local communities in Bindura South. Yet the very efforts they put into controlling and rehearsing workshops organized at such sites speaks to their own awareness of the excessivity of affective experience, which ultimately denies efforts to control narratives of the past and to constitute particular kinds of political subjectivity. The past has a relationship with the present through affective experiences with landscape and its materials, but such experiences are difficult to contain and channel. Engaging with recent debates about materiality, and the agency, affordances, and affective qualities of objects and landscapes I argue that liberation landscapes of past violence are active and affective, but also not wholly controlled or control-able by war veterans and ZANU-PF leaders attempting to forge particular kinds of political loyalty. This excessivity of landscapes of past violence defies narrative closure, and allows space for other narratives, other performances and experiences of the materiality of milieu.

Making heroes, (un)making the nation?: ZANU-PF’s imaginations of the Heroes’ Acre, heroes and construction of identity in Zimbabwe from 2000 to 2015

This article explores the post-2000 national identity formation through the use of national heroes narrative and the Heroes’ Acre shrine in Zimbabwe. The Heroes’ Acre marks the country’s physical reminder of the past and acts as a tool for national identity and its symbolic maintenance through state-presided rituals that happen at the shrine. Attached to the Heroes’ Acre as a permanent physical symbol of nationhood are the people the burial site was built for – the heroes, that is, the ‘war’ dead and the living who participated in the country’s liberation ‘war’. The argument made in this paper is that the definition and usages of heroes and Heroes’ Acre has mutated over the years to suit Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front’s (ZANU-PF) shifting political agendas. Specifically, the article addresses questions around conferment of a hero’s status on the dead, access to the Heroes’ Acre and the meanings of these to the emotive issue of nurturing a monolithic Zimbabwean national identity as imagined by ZANU-PF. The article concludes that the elite’s uses of the Heroes’ Acre and heroes’ status which excludes democratic public participation have served to carve a skewed and narrow narrative on the meaning of Zimbabweanness meant to bolster ZANU-PF’s hegemony. National identities, the article argues, are transient and always changing.

“The one who controls the diamond wears the crown! The politicization of the Kimberley Process in Zimbabwe”

Why has Zimbabwe, a state that has been notorious for an utter disregard of international agreements, spent resources to implement policies that are in compliance with the Kimberley Process diamond certification scheme? In this research I explain variation in Zimbabwean regulatory policy in response to the Kimberley Process since 2003. This article contends that this variation can be best understood by tracing the political economy of factional rivalries within the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. This research demonstrates that although the behavior of international regimes and private economic actors matter, in Zimbabwe it is government factions within ZANU-PF that are the main decision makers in relation to Kimberley Process regulations. This explains both why compliance with the Kimberley Process has been lower than other states in Southern Africa and why Zimbabwe has raised its level of compliance with the regulatory regime overtime.

“The Lion Has Learnt to Speak?” The Novel A Fine Madness and Third Chimurenga Counter-Discourse in Contemporary Zimbabwe

Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised and operationalized the Third Chimurenga—a cache of anti-colonial, anti-West, and anti-opposition narratives that essentially re-constructs political power as inextricably bound up with the liberation struggle, for long an exclusive site of the party’s claims to political legitimacy. The Third Chimurenga often manifested in the form of political rhetoric by political leaders and reinforced by an array of cultural performances such as song and other forms of spectacular dramaturgy such as national commemorations. The literary text is the latest participant in the Third Chimurenga politics and aesthetics. In this article, I read Mashingaidze Gomo’s novel A Fine Madness as a Third Chimurenga literary narrative, centering on how its representations of the post-2000 political and economic crisis relates to the underlying counter-discourse of the empirical Third Chimurenga. This article dialogues with the nature of the connection between Gomo’s novel and the empirical Third Chimurenga. This reading reveals how the literary text exploits the affective and aesthetic dimensions of creative art to portray a vivid picture of the Third Chimurenga, which can move the reader to a new consciousness of issues around Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and the contemporary land politics.

English

THE FIVE-YEAR government of national unity tenure in Zimbabwe that brought together three leading political parties namely the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), and the two Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) parties came to an end when the country held successful parliamentary and presidential elections in July 2013. As was the case in 2008, the ruling ZANU-PF party won the 2013 election. Using the social-semiotics approach, this paper examines the representations and portrayal of President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai through editorial cartoons. Specifically, this paper assesses how, why and to what extent The Zimdaily.com editorial cartoons representations reflected the happenings on the ground. Key research methods used in this study are qualitative archival research, textual analysis, semiotics and content analysis. Based on the mass communication theories of gate-keeping, agenda building, representation, media and political economy theories, this paper argues that old fashioned conflict resolution and conflict prevention tactics and strategies need to be improved as the modern society becomes networked than ever. It was clear that peace building approaches such as those recommended by the 1992 United Nations resolution could not apply to Zimbabwe, but modern societies such as those found in Zimbabwe need a multi-task diplomacy approach such as the one employed by the then South Africa President Thabo Mbeki in resolving the Zimbabwean problem. The Zimbabwe conflict had become a sub-continental problem and could have spilled into an armed violence or even an insurrection but for the regional intervention and other multi-task diplomacy approaches, as manifesting through the editorial cartoons, the result was the government of national unity and not war. Key words: Diaspora media, inclusive government, agents of regime change.