This article explores the varied role of violence in Zimbabwe’s two recent polls. Crucial to the first elections was the relative lack of state-led violence; crucial to the second was the extreme violence orchestrated by the ruling party.... more
This article explores the varied role of violence in Zimbabwe’s two recent polls. Crucial to the first elections was the relative lack of state-led violence; crucial to the second was the extreme violence orchestrated by the ruling party. Comparisons have been drawn with Kenya, but we argue that these are misleading: Zimbabwe’s electoral violence was not ethnic, and it was not driven in any significant way by forces outside the state. The legacy it has left for state institutions, political parties, and popular notions of citizenship will profoundly shape the nature of any future power-sharing agreement.
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... 19 Munro, The Moral Economy of the State. 20 Tshuma, A Matter of (In)justice. 21 Alexander, The Unsettled Land. 22 See Eric Worby's discussion, in A Redivided Land?. 23 Moyo, Land Reform under Structural Adjustment;... more
... 19 Munro, The Moral Economy of the State. 20 Tshuma, A Matter of (In)justice. 21 Alexander, The Unsettled Land. 22 See Eric Worby's discussion, in A Redivided Land?. 23 Moyo, Land Reform under Structural Adjustment; Yeros, The Political Economy of Civilisation.. ...
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The Unsettled Land: State-Making and the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe, 1893-2003. By Jocelyn Alexander. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Pp. 230. $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. A growing historiography of state formation in Africa... more
The Unsettled Land: State-Making and the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe, 1893-2003. By Jocelyn Alexander. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Pp. 230. $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. A growing historiography of state formation in Africa stresses the persistent instability of agrarian institutions as a confounding factor. Jocelyn Alexander's rich and nuanced historical account of local land politics in Zimbabwe makes a noteworthy contribution to this literature. The trick of state making is to embed the state's administrative and political authority in those institutions that promote social order, well-being, and identity among citizens. In rural Zimbabwe, as elsewhere in Africa, this process has been substantially conditioned over time by state efforts to manage the settlement, control, and use of land. Conversely, the quality of citizenship for rural Zimbabweans has been intimately linked to their ability to secure access to land. This is Alexander's starting point. She notes that all state-making initiatives are national, extending from the center, or from "on high"; yet "[i]t is in local struggles over power and authority that states must take root" (p. 5). Her book offers a fine-grained analysis of such struggles in two quite different rural districts. In each case, Alexander argues, struggles over land and authority have played out in a dynamic interaction between several key factors that shaped local experiences of settlement, eviction, and resistance. One factor is the successive state interventions in the local organization of agrarian life-especially "high modernist" technocratic strategies-to manage small-scale farming populations on too little land. Another is the structure of the local agrarian system itself, which determined citizens' livelihood strategies and their particular experiences of land shortage (arable or grazing). A third factor comprises locally forged meanings of traditional leadership and nationalism, both constructed in dynamic state-subject struggles over domination, resistance, and African attempts to get ahead economically. A final factor is the local play of party politics after independence. In each phase of state-making efforts, Alexander shows, these factors interacted to produce changing and contradictory mixes of domination, repression, development, and legitimation that created chronic patterns of institutional instability in local governance. Agrarian negotiations and conflicts over authority played out differently in different locales. In the south-central district of Insiza, where cattle play a key role in the agrarian system, the state intervened early and extensively through directive development projects to manage agrarian livelihoods, including stringent stock control. Local communities experienced shortages of grazing rather than arable land, and resistance politics played out in a nationalist idiom. After independence, local politics involved intense party rivalries between Zapu and Zanu(PF), driven partly by ruling party efforts to displace the locally legitimate nationalism of Zapu-oriented chiefs. Frequently, citizens found themselves caught between stringent technical approaches to social management through land use planning and intensely conflictual party politics. In the eastern district of Chimanimani, different development strategies (irrigation schemes) and labor markets (Mozambique and white plantations) created different opportunities for rural citizens to negotiate land pressure and state-driven management initiatives. Here Zanu(PF) established absolute party dominance after independence, yet local leaders rapidly rejected the primacy of either party or state and asserted the authority of customary leaders over all others. …
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A much neglected perspective on Zimbabwe's post-independence war is that held by its insurgents, the so-called dissidents. The experience of dissidents has been little explored, in part because of the difficulty of doing so until... more
A much neglected perspective on Zimbabwe's post-independence war is that held by its insurgents, the so-called dissidents. The experience of dissidents has been little explored, in part because of the difficulty of doing so until recently but also because scholars and journalists have analysed post-1980 violence primarily in terms of the political interests of either ZAPU or ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe's dominant nationalist parties, or the South African state. No account has sought to explore the motives, goals and organisation of the dissidents themselves; the how-and-whys of the turn to war have remained obscure. Though dissidents' views are often as partisan as those of their detractors, focusing on the perspectives of the dissidents allows a substantial reinterpretation of the war and its aftermath. From the dissidents' point of view, post-Unity politics is bitterly disappointing: they say Unity is meaningful only for the national leaders. Unity has not overcome the political tribalism of the 1980s nor has it brought an end to economic hardship. Though the dissidents' perspective on Zimbabwe's post-independence war is unique in many ways, the stress on the unresolved wrongs of the 1980s—continued developmental neglect, the lack of restitution or even recognition for losses and suffering, the failures to make peace with the High God of Njelele and the spirits—finds a much wider resonance within Matabeleland as a whole.
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This special issue is about politics, patronage and violence in Zimbabwe. These themes provide a means of exploring Zimbabwe's dramatic upheavals in the light of broader debates in African studies ...
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Since Terry Ranger’s death on 3 January 2015 in Oxford, there has been an outpouring of memorials and tributes to one of the founding fathers of African history. Writers and friends have celebrated...
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This article builds on Terence Ranger's pioneering work on Ndebele identity through an exploration of the everyday politics of naming as it occurred in the context of forced evictions into the remote Shangani Reserve after World War... more
This article builds on Terence Ranger's pioneering work on Ndebele identity through an exploration of the everyday politics of naming as it occurred in the context of forced evictions into the remote Shangani Reserve after World War Two. We argue that day to day ...
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This special issue is about politics, patronage and violence in Zimbabwe. These themes provide a means of exploring Zimbabwe's dramatic upheavals in the light of broader debates in African studies ...
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Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead: the Social Biography of an African Family (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 1991), xi, 211pp, £30Norma J. Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge University Press:... more
Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead: the Social Biography of an African Family (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 1991), xi, 211pp, £30Norma J. Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992), x, 303pp, £35K. Spink, Black Sash: the Beginning of a Bridge in South Africa (Methuen: London, 1991), xvi, 336pp, £14.99Vernon February, The Afrikaners of South Africa (Kegan
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Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead: the Social Biography of an African Family (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 1991), xi, 211pp, £30Norma J. Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge University Press:... more
Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead: the Social Biography of an African Family (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 1991), xi, 211pp, £30Norma J. Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992), x, 303pp, £35K. Spink, Black Sash: the Beginning of a Bridge in South Africa (Methuen: London, 1991), xvi, 336pp, £14.99Vernon February, The Afrikaners of South Africa (Kegan
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Studies of southern Africa's liberation movements have turned attention to the great importance of their transnational lives, but have rarely focused on the effects of the military training Cold War-era allies provided in sites across... more
Studies of southern Africa's liberation movements have turned attention to the great importance of their transnational lives, but have rarely focused on the effects of the military training Cold War-era allies provided in sites across the globe. This is a significant omission in the history of these movements: training turns civilians into soldiers and creates armies with not only military but also social and political effects, as scholarship on conventional militaries has long emphasized. Liberation movement armies were however different in that they were not subordinated to a single state, instead receiving training under the flexible rubric of international solidarity in a host of foreign sites and in interaction with a great variety of military traditions. The training provided in this context produced multiple “military imaginaries” within liberation movement armies, at once creating deep tensions and enabling innovation. The article is based on oral histories of Zimbabwe P...