Interrogating the Grand Narratives about Zimbabwe: the case of the Shamvu District

Terence Ranger and the Jagged Geometry of Zimbabwe

Percy Zvomuya, The Con

In 2004, after Terence Ranger had delivered a paper at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), I went up to him to greet him, make a few comments about his lecture and introduce myself as Zimbabwean. I know, he responded.

Ranger’s paper, “Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe,” was one in which he critiqued the use of history by Zanu PF. The lecture came at the moment when the arc of the social and economic crisis had taken a sharp, jagged turn into the unknown and Zimbabwe’s history, and Zanu PF’s principal role in it, had become handy and expedient.

Ethnicity vs tribalism: Interview with Dr Enocent Msindo

Reprinted from The Zimbabwean at Kalanga.Org

Dr Enocent Msindo, you were born in Zimbabwe, got your PhD at Cambridge and are now a Senior Lecturer in African History at Rhodes University, South Africa. What drew you to history in the first place?

My interest in History began over two decades ago when I was a Secondary school student, precisely in form two when a very engaging teacher taught us in our first term about the transition from feudalism to capitalism (that old piece of World History!) and the ensuing class struggles.

The privatisation of the Zimbabwean state

By Mike Mavura, Thought Leader

There is consensus that safety, security, justice and the rule of law are core functions of the state as well as basic service delivery, financial and macro-economic management, inclusive growth and job creation, the protection of human-rights and so on and so forth. These are state responsibilities stipulated in the constitution of Zimbabwe and they shape societies expectations of the state.

Is bypassing the state the best way to push for land reform?

by Aman Sethi, Kafila

Last month, I visited Harare to cover the Zimbabwe elections but found myself fascinated by the controversial fast track land reform process. This story was first published in The Hindu, but – as always – I am happy to take questions here. A thought worth considering: In the context of the discussion around the Land Bill in India, does Zimbabwe’s experience suggest that questions of land are best resolved outside of the ambit of the state?

Zimbabwe is a Victim of Outsiders’ Fantasies

by Percy Zvomuya, The Con

In 2008 or so, I registered for a Masters degree at Wits University with a rather interesting research component that I never got to finish. My thesis was to be an examination of the coverage of Zimbabwe in South Africa’s Sunday Times; the use of the prism of Zimbabwe to debate local issues. The idea was to look at opinion and comment pieces on the Times’ pages and show these as not really looking at Zimbabwe but, rather, using the country to the north as a touchstone to critique the local.

Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism

Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism 1957-1967, by Terence Ranger. James Currey, 2013., Reviewed by Duncan Money, New Left Project

Terence Ranger is best known for co-editing The Invention of Tradition with Eric Hobsbawm, but his first book Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97, on the first Chimurenga uprising against British colonial rule, was a landmark work of African history. Revolt was a careful reconstruction of how spirit mediums and other religious figures drew on the shared histories of the Ndebele and Shona peoples to organise one of the most widespread and serious challenges to colonial rule in this period. The book quickly became the seminal text for the nationalist movement which fought white minority rule in Rhodesia in the 1970s, with copies dispatched to leaders incarcerated in Rhodesian prisons and to military camps in Zambia and Mozambique. While its specific arguments that the first Chimurenga was inspired and directed by spirit mediums and that the risings were co-ordinated at all have been challenged and largely discarded by later historians,[1] Ranger's more general claims that African societies had a history that was recoverable and significant, and that they themselves had a sense of that history, proved a fatal blow to existing colonial historiography.

Podcast: Enocent Msindo on his recent book 'Ethnicity in Zimbabwe'

Enocent Msindo

Africa Past & Present

Enocent Msindo (History, Rhodes U.) on his recent book Ethnicity in Zimbabwe: Transformations in Kalanga and Ndebele Societies, 1860-1990. He explores chiefly politics, class, language, and local sources to show the creation of ethnic identity in southwestern Zimbabwe was not solely the result of colonial rule or African elites. Ordinary Africans created and shaped an ethnic consciousness based on precolonial histories and 20th-century innovations, while much-neglected Kalanga identities resisted both colonial and Ndebele hegemony.

Interview with Tafadzwa Choto on Repression in Zimbabwe

Power and Pitfalls of Historical Fiction

Mavuso Dingani, Solidarity 

We are All Zimbabweans Now

by James Kilgore

Cape Town, South Africa: Umuzi, 2009,

Swallow Press, 2011, distributed in the United States by Ohio University Press, $22.95 paper.

WHEN JAMES KILGORE’S We are all Zimbabweans now first came out in 2009, the world economy was facing a deep recession. My first impression was that the book’s title referred to the globalizing of Zimbabwe’s 10-year economic crisis. In fact, Kilgore’s novel was referring to Zimbabwe’s attempt at reconciliation between white and black Zimbabweans after a brutal liberation war that killed 30,000 people.

Reflections on Human Rights Discourse and Emancipation in Africa in the Twenty-first Century

by Michael Neocosmos, Solidarity Peace Trust, Zimbabwe (undated)

At the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism – a humanism made to the measure of the world (Aimé Césaire).

Whoever is engaged in popular struggles for democratic emancipation in Africa today is confronted with an immediate problem concerning human rights.  While on the one hand a discourse of rights is seemingly necessary for thinking democratisation, given that the state regularly flouts these, on the other human rights seem to refer to a discourse mainly propounded by neo-liberal interests whether local or foreign.  Several repressive regimes in Africa and elsewhere (Zimbabwe, Sudan, maybe Cote D’Ivoire, Iran) oppose a discourse of nationalism to one on human rights.  As an activist, one finds oneself in a seemingly irresolvable discursive contradiction between human (predominantly individual) rights and national (or group or identity) rights.  At times this contradiction is central to government itself.  For exampling in Thabo Mbeki’s South African government, a central contradiction appeared in the form of a commitment to neo-liberal conceptions of rights on the one hand along with a sensitivity to national and racial oppression in Africa on the other. This was reflected in government reactions to a number of different issues including Zimbabwe. In fact this contradiction is arguably constitutive of the subjectivity of the new South African bourgeoisie itself.  On the one hand their private accumulation is premised on an adherence to neo-liberal precepts including human rights, on the other a sensitivity to racism and to a lesser extent to Western hegemony in African affairs is also evident.  The manner in which the vagaries of this contradiction were navigated explains much regarding Mbeki’s presidency (Neocosmos, 2002).

Yvonne Vera interviewed by Jane Bryce

Interview with Yvonne Vera, 1st August 2000, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Weaver Press

When I recently met Yvonne Vera, I had read her earlier works, Nehanda and Without A Name, only because the publisher had given them to a mutual friend in London. To date, all her novels have been produced by the highly respected Zimbabwe publishing house, Baobab Books, Harare. It is the fate of African writers who choose to publish their work on the continent to be less well-known internationally than those whose work is taken up by metropolitan publishers. Yet what I had read of Yvonne Vera’s work had left me with a burning desire to find out more about her, and this was a major part of my decision to attend the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, fifteen years after my last visit to the country in 1985.

African Leaders Hide Political Woes Behind Homophobia

In late March, Sam Nujoma, President of Namibia, ordered apurge of homosexuals, stating that “The Republic of Namibia does not allow homosexuality or lesbianism here. Police are ordered to arrest you, deport you and imprison you.” The Namibian Society for Human Rights countered that the “attempt to turn a personal dislike into ad hoc national policy is entirely unconstitutional and misguided.”

The Black Radical Congress joins those who have strongly condemned the Namibian president’s assault on same gender loving people in his Southern African nation. Namibia, a former German colony that was administered as a mandate and later annexed by South Africa, gained its independence in 1990 after a more than 20-year long anti-apartheid war. Given that he is a former freedom fighter and a head of state, Nujoma’s homophobic, discriminatory actions are particularly repugnant. His actions and rhetoric come on the heels of similar rhetoric and repression in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe has campaigned to imprison and expel same gender loving people.

Only Protected on Paper

Richard Pithouse

by Richard Pithouse, Behind the Mask

It’s now almost three months since David Kato, a former teacher and a leading Ugandan gay rights activist, was beaten to death in Mukono Town in Uganda.  Kato was living in Johannesburg in the salad days of our new democracy and, inspired by the progress made here in recognising the legal right of gay people to an equal humanity, he became a key figure in the Ugandan movement when he returned home in 1998.

Homosexuality was first criminalised in Uganda in the 19th century under the British colonial occupation. That criminalisation of a mode of expressing love and desire that is part of all human communities across space and time was sustained and updated after independence in 1962. As the new century unfolded there were active attempts, often driven by senior politicians and clerics with the support of an increasingly rabid tabloid press, to create a popular moral panic about homosexuality.  Public vilification escalated and there were threats, calls for further state repression, censorship of gay people and organisations and a further tightening of a legal regime already so repressive that it carried a sentence of life imprisonment for certain forms of gay sex.

Liberation Movements as Governments in Southern Africa: On the limits to liberation

by Henning Melber, 2010

Click here to download this paper which develops a strong critique of national liberation movements in Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: The Women's Press, 1988; reprinted 1997)

a review by Raj Patel, Voice of the Turtle

Word has spread about Tsitsi Dangarembga's first novel. Its popularity in, and pertinence to, discussions of poscolonial fiction have led to its recent fourth printing. Dangarembga (which, curiously, means 'doghouse' in Shona) in her semi-autobiographical debut novel has fused an adolescent coming-of-age tale with an awakening to the full consequences of colonialism. Nervous conditions follows the first fifteen years in the life of Tambudzai, a young girl who grows up in a village near Umtali (now Mutare), near Zimababwe's Eastern Mozambique border. In its sensitive treatment of sexism, of the pain of hybridity, of the dark comedy of childhood and the bitter violence of colonialism, Nervous Conditions is an exemplary novel.