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"Zimbabwe -- Colonial influence"
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Imagining a nation : history and memory in making Zimbabwe
In Imagining a Nation, Ruramisai Charumbira analyzes competing narratives of the founding of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe constructed by political and cultural nationalists both black and white since occupation in 1890. The book uses a wide array of sources—including archives, oral histories, and a national monument—to explore the birth of the racialized national memories and parallel identities that were in vigorous contention as memory sought to present itself as history. In contrast with current global politics plagued by divisions of outsider and insider, patriot and traitor, Charumbira invites the reader into the liminal spaces of the region's history and questions the centrality of the nation-state in understanding African or postcolonial history today.
Using an interdisciplinary methodology, Charumbira offers a series of case studies, bringing in characters from far-flung places to show that history and memory in and of one small place can have a far-reaching impact in the wider world. The questions raised by these stories go beyond the history of colonized or colonizer in one former colony to illuminate contemporary vexations about what it means to be a citizen, patriot, or member of a nation in an ever-globalizing world. Rather than a history of how the rulers of Rhodesia or Zimbabwe marshaled state power to force citizens to accept a single definition of national memory and identity, Imagining a Nation shows how ordinary people invested in the soft power of individual, social, and collective memories to create and perpetuate exclusionary national myths.
Reconsiderations in Southern African History
eBook
African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe
In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.
eBook
The Rise of an African Middle Class
Offers an extremely sophisticated, nuanced view of the social and political construction of an African middle class in colonial Zimbabwe.\" -Elizabeth Schmidt
Tracing their quest for social recognition from the time of Cecil Rhodes to Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, Michael O. West shows how some Africans were able to avail themselves of scarce educational and social opportunities in order to achieve some degree of upward mobility in a society that was hostile to their ambitions. Though relatively few in number and not rich by colonial standards, this comparatively better class of Africans challenged individual and social barriers imposed by colonialism to become the locus of protest against European domination. This extensive and original book opens new perspective into relations between colonizers and colonized in colonial Zimbabwe.
eBook
Grappling with the Beast
This volume contributes rich, new material to provide insights into indigenous responses to the colonial empires of Great Britain and Germany (Namibia) and explore the complex intellectual, cultural, literary, and political borders and identities that emerged across these spaces.
eBook
Zimbabwe: liberation nationalism - old and born-again
In April 1980 Zimbabwe was born amid equal measures of celebration for the triumph over Rhodesian colonialism and expectation of the challenges that lay ahead. The prospect of a new progressive order under two avowedly leftist liberation movement parties pointed to opportunities for substantial redistribution and development, and the establishment of an inclusive, participatory government in place of white minority rule. Thirty years later, the last vestiges of that once inspiring project lie in ruins. Through successive cycles of economic and political restructuring inflected by unsettled and shifting class alliances in the political leadership, ZANU-PF unravelled the developmental power of the nationalist state, along with the prospects for its constructive and popular confrontation of renewed imperial power. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
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. Cet article adopte un point de vue historique pour affirmer qu'au Zimbabwe les terres communautaires sont un concept hérité de la période coloniale (avant 1980) que les gouvernements postcoloniaux du Zimbabwe ont jugé plus commode de conserver que de démanteler. Ce concept n'est pas seulement un cadre pratique de distribution de biens de consommation collective, il permet aussi au gouvernement d'utiliser subtilement les terres communautaires comme cadre de controle social, notamment en termes de gestión urbaine. Le maintien des terres communautaires et des droits afférents à ces terres soutient également les processus de controle social au niveau des ménages. Cependant, ces questions ne vont pas retenir l'attention dans les débats consacrés à la terre tant que le problème plus vaste de la redistribution des grandes exploitations agricoles commerciales n'est pas résolu.
Journal Article
Modernity and ethnicity in a frontier society: understanding difference in Northwestern Zimbabwe
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 interactions were critical in shaping the content of Ndebele identity. Evictees, whose communities and structures of leadership were systematically broken up by an administration intent on suppressing political activism, were nonetheless the principle agents in this process. They defined themselves as modern and Ndebele, and sought to establish their superiority over communities they encountered in the Shangani by asserting the moral weight of a civilising mission, and drawing on notions of hierarchy drawn from the nineteenth century Ndebele state. The colonial transformation of pre-colonial identities took the form of reinscribing old names with new significance. These names, though often dating from the nineteenth century and often 'tribal' in origin, conveyed ideas about status associated with twentieth century notions of modernity and primitiveness.
Journal Article
South Africa's Land Reform Crisis: Eliminating the Legacy of Apartheid
When apartheid ended, the new regime in South Africa promised to redistribute land that whites had stolen from blacks. Yet nearly two decades later, it has largely failed to do so—and the patience of the dispossessed is running out.
Magazine Article