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This paper is about a 'place' that effectively no longer exists - in the sense of being a recognisable unit of territory. 'Chishanga' has always been a term of contestation, referring more or less tenuously to a stretch of ground across which struggles for authority, power and identity have taken place. In tracking and examining these struggles using oral history techniques, the paper draws attention to the fallacies of a chiefdom-based approach to pre-colonial African history. At the same time, it emphasises the significance or the real and imagined geographies around which identities revolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the politics of landscape ideas, and the relationship between landscape, identity and memory. It explores these themes through the history of the Victoria Falls, and the tourist resort that developed around the waterfall after 1900. Drawing on oral and archival sources, including popular natural history writing and tourist guides, it investigates African and European ideas about the waterfall, and the ways that these interacted and changed in the course of colonial appropriations of the Falls area. The tourist experience of the resort and the landscape ideas promoted through it were linked to Edwardian notions of Britishness and empire, ideas of whiteness and settler identities that transcended new colonial borders, and to the subject identities accommodated or excluded. Cultures of colonial authority did not develop by simply overriding local ideas, they involved fusions, exchanges and selective appropriations of them. The two main African groups I am concerned with here are the Leya, who lived in small groups around the Falls under a number of separate chiefs, and the powerful Lozi rulers, to whom they paid tribute in the nineteenth century. The article highlights colonial authorities' celebration of aspects of the Lozi aristocracy's relationship with the river, and their exclusion of the Leya people who had a longer and closer relationship with the waterfall. It also touches on the politics of recent attempts to reverse this exclusion, and the controversial rewriting of history this has involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, in the midst of a deepening political-economic crisis, Zimbabwe's ZANU(PF) government introduced 'Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment' as a policy framework to guide the domestication of foreign firms then dominating the formal economy. At the same time, debates around resource nationalism were emerging in the country's extractives sector, which was booming in the wake of a global surge in minerals prices. The intersection of indigenisation and resource nationalism as two powerful poles of policy-making established the terrain for key extractives-sector reforms in the 2000s under the banner of indigenisation. Drawing on case study evidence from the indigenisation of a large foreign-owned mine and the experiences of community trusts set up to manage mining assets, the paper argues that indigenisation was primarily tailored to accommodate the needs of local elites and foreign-owned mining companies. While indigenisation offered opportunities for elite participation and enhanced ruling party legitimacy, it abjectly failed to transform ownership stakes in the large-scale mining sector. In contrast, local mining communities for whom indigenisation promised a stronger decision-making role were largely marginalised from participation in local mining. Five years after the 2018 scrapping of its enabling laws, indigenisation is seen as having fulfilled a performative political function benefiting the ruling ZANU(PF) at a time of political crisis. The paper concludes that any alternative, inclusive resource nationalist strategy will need to look beyond indigenisation's narrow framing to be transformational and sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates spillover effects from the interlinked transactions arising from smallholder tobacco farmers' participation in contract farming arrangements in the Mazowe district of Mashonaland Central. The case study is based on data from a household survey conducted in the district and includes both tobacco farmers and households that do not produce tobacco. Interviews, participant observation and a review of statistical data and grey literature helped trace dynamics of production, intra-household relations and changing communal relations. The study explores how social relations and power imbalances shape the distribution of benefits, costs and losses resulting from the adoption of contract farming in the production of tobacco. The paper argues that the adoption of contract farming leads to a range of interlinked transactional outcomes, such as the diversification of agricultural production and new investments into non-farm activities by the poorer members of the community. In turn, these interlinked transactions generate jobs and increase food consumption and effective demand for services at the community level. However, it is also the case that the gains from these interlinked transactions are highly skewed against the poorer people in the district and that wealthier and better-connected farmers gain more from adopting tobacco than their less wealthy and less well-connected peers. This could lead to increased inequality in the community. The paper shows how agricultural dynamism generates spillover and multiplier effects that benefit communities in an unequal and poorly understood manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast-track land reform programme in Zimbabwe radically transformed the country's agrarian structure from one dominated by white-owned, large-scale farms to one dominated by a large group of black family farmers. Since 2017, a set of explanations has emerged that attempts to explain processes of social differentiation in the countryside. These explanations are predominantly informed by a materialist approach and conceptualise this process as accumulation from below, whereby the resettled farmers become internally differentiated through their own agricultural production resulting in different 'class formations'. This materialist approach focuses on relations of production on the farm but does not pay close attention to the role of wider state practices and political processes involved in shaping accumulation dynamics in highly politicised agrarian landscapes. This paper argues that processes of social differentiation in Zimbabwe cannot be adequately studied in isolation from the political developments of the post-2000 period, when the state increasingly became reconfigured as a site of violence and patronage legitimated by patriotic history narratives. Based on new evidence on the 2007–08 state-led farm mechanisation scheme that was intended to distribute farm equipment to resettled farmers, I argue that the processes of differentiation largely took the form of preferential access to farming equipment both at the national and local levels. I term this 'accumulation from above' by patronage clients of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU[PF]). These clients include grassroots and senior party members or those linked to it, cabinet ministers, judges, members of the security sector, civil servants, national election administrators and traditional leaders who in turn sustain ZANU(PF)'s political hegemony in an unstable political agrarian landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of outgrower areas linked to large lowveld sugar estates has been an important component of Zimbabwe’s land reform since 2000. This has involved the transfer of nearly 16,000 ha to over 800 resettlement farmers on irrigated ‘A2’ plots of around 20 ha each. These farmers now produce around a quarter of the sugar output linked to the Triangle and Hippo Valley mills. Tongaat Hulett, a large South African conglomerate, is the dominant shareholder in Zimbabwe’s sugar industry, and its Zimbabwe operation represents a crucial part of the overall multi-million-dollar business. The new outgrowers are a mix of former civil servants, sugar industry professionals and business people, with some politicians and security service personnel also with land. Through a detailed analysis over 12 years of the changing fortunes of a group of new outgrowers linked to Hippo Valley estate, the paper explores the patterns of production, employment and wider livelihood contexts of outgrowers and their workers. In particular the paper examines the tensions and conflicts that have arisen, particularly between the new outgrowers and the estate. The paper in turn explores the implications for sugar politics in Zimbabwe’s Lowveld. The new outgrowers were drawn from a range of previous occupations and, compared to land reform beneficiaries in nearby dryland smallholder areas, were richer, better educated and more well-connected politically. The paper asks how this new group negotiated a relationship with a large-scale South African capitalist enterprise, and with what outcomes. More broadly, the paper examines how outgrowers, the state and capital brokered a politically and economically acceptable post-land reform deal, suiting all parties. Based on the longitudinal case study insights, the paper concludes with an assessment of whether Zimbabwe’s very particular sugar outgrower model of land reform will work, and if it does, for whom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zimbabwe's resettlement programme is nearly twenty years old. The first families were resettled in 1980, just a few months after independence, and the programme has to date resettled over 70,000 families, well short of the target of 162,000 set in the early 1980s. A tension exists over where the programme goes from here. The rhetoric of the 1996 presidential elections, which presented land reform as an urgent task to be finished (the same rhetoric is conspicuous in the run-up to the 2000 parliamentary elections), is confronted by assessments, emanating both from within and outside government, that resettlement is a failure. However, this paper argues that negative assessments of Zimbabwe's land reform are both premature and have used inappropriate criteria. A long-term perspective is taken, incorporating experience from elsewhere in the region, that suggests that any attempt at comprehensive evaluation of the benefits of resettlement in less than a generation is ill-advised. The focus is not so much the programme as a whole but rather the households participating in it. In broad terms. the paper takes the original - largely political - objectives of the programme, which placed great emphasis on welfare and poverty alleviation, and assesses the extent to which these have been met, at least insofar as can be judged from a 15-year, 400-household panel study and comparison with a contrasting group of communal area households. The empirical core of the paper investigates the benefits from resettlement using a set of variables defining income, consumption and welfare at the household level. The paper also addresses a broader development issue: the possibility of simultaneously achieving economic growth and improving the distributional equity of the benefits of growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spontaneous resettlement in frontier regions of Zimbabwe has been a useful way of getting land on which to begin building a livelihood. Through this process, sparsely populated rural districts skirting the mid-Zambezi Valley have undergone long-term socio-economic change. In a case study of Rengwe in Hurungwe District, the paper shows that households that migrated and spontaneously resettled in Rengwe were able to double arable land-holding while gaining membership of a growing frontier community. In the absence of adequate institutional support from the state, however, resettled households were unable to secure key socio-economic services and infrastructure. The study shows that, once resettled, households pursued diversified livelihoods although the levels of diversity varied between households. Poor households showed the least diversity. Although more land provided immediate relief to livelihoods under stress and allowed some households to accumulate assets, a majority of households still had inadequate incomes to stay out of poverty. The study shows that spontaneous resettlement may provide land but, in the absence of public policy intervention to provide social services and infrastructure, it is not a viable alternative to planned settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the dynamic relations between Zimbabwe's opposition MDC-T party, civic organisations and western governments during the country's 2008 power-sharing negotiations. Because of the high stakes of the negotiations, civic organisations and western governments tried to influence their historical ally, the MDC-T; they wanted the opposition party to adopt an intransigent stance in its negotiations with ZANU(PF) in order to gain further concessions. The MDC-T largely rejected these influences, however, in part due to pressure from Southern African leaders. Aiming to gain regional legitimacy, the party felt compelled to actively reject western influences to counter its construction by ZANU(PF) as a ‘puppet of the west’. Yet the inability of western governments to affect the MDC-T's position during the negotiation period went beyond the opposition's desire to improve its standing within the region. Through the analytical lens of nested games, this article reconstructs how both the MDC-T and western governments view the relation between short-term divisions of power and long-term democratisation in Zimbabwe. This reconstruction demonstrates a disconnect between donor countries and the MDC-T in the assumptions, short-term priorities and long-term objectives driving their decisions. This article further discusses the MDC-T's decision to sideline civic organisations from the negotiation process, and demonstrates that this decision proved particularly harmful because of strategic errors made by the MDC-T in the process of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Urban planning bases its interventionist strategies on the reasoning that change has to be rationally managed and that control is necessary in the 'public interest'. In Africa, for various bureaucratic and political reasons, urban planning has often been notoriously lax. In the face of uncontrolled urban development, many urban governments have abandoned comprehensive planning and increasingly resort to ad-hoc 'sanitising' measures of various kinds. This paper explores the forces and rationales that lie behind the intensified use of such 'non-planning' strategies. It draws on examples from Harare and Maputo, where urban authorities applied forceful measures to remove unplanned settlements and market places. In these cases the forces at work behind the scenes included the political strategies of elites seeking to maintain and strengthen political control over urban areas, rationalising and legitimising such unpopular interventions by appealing to ongoing efforts at 'city marketing' through international events, and referring to the imperative of upholding a modern city image. We discuss the tensions that arose from these decisions and the subsequent political processes among the intended 'victims', and between them and the authorities. In comparing and contrasting the cases of Harare and Maputo, we bring out the dilemmas of planning resorting to 'non-planning' and the complex politics triggered by such interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980, Zimbabwe initiated a land reform programme intended to improve the welfare of the poor and the landless. Beneficiaries overwhelmingly came from the overcrowded communal areas, where successive rounds of discriminatory legislation had pushed them. Additionally, for more than a decade, resettlement planning 'models' called for them to utilise the land resource made available to earn their livelihoods exclusively from farming. The paper examines the ways in which the livelihoods of resettled households have evolved in response to the opportunities created by access to additional productive land. The analysis looks both at livelihood trajectories and outcomes in the resettlement areas and at selected contrasts between the communities of origin and the new communities. Recurring drought appears to lead to predictable patterns in the ebb and flow of certain rural economic activities. Policy shifts since 1990 – principally those under structural adjustment and an alteration to the regulation requiring household heads to reside locally – have, in contrast, had mixed outcomes in the relatively land-abundant resettlement areas in Zimbabwe. While men have largely retained a commitment to small-scale commercial farming, there has been a striking proliferation of non-farm income-earning activities, a very large proportion of which are carried out by women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fertility-stimulating effect of high rates of child mortality on reproductive decision making (RDM) is a central tenet of population studies, yet the effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on RDM have not been thoroughly explored in the literature. This paper investigates how RDM is articulated in the context of high HIV/AIDS prevalence in Zimbabwe. Using qualitative methods (35 focus groups and 46 in-depth interviews), we found that childbearing is extremely important in the lives of adult Zimbabweans and that children are needed to cement the couple's relationship, whether it is the first or subsequent marriage. Most respondents said that rates of both adult and child mortality were greatly increasing due to the AIDS epidemic. However, contrary to expectations based upon the insurance strategy, most respondents said that they would have fewer children as a result of the perceived increase in child mortality. They were also hesitant to continue childbearing after a child death, indicating only weak replacement motivation. Instead, many respondents expressed the desire to limit family size due to concerns about their own mortality and its negative effects on their children. Furthermore, new reproductive strategies seem to be emerging, which focus upon the health of parents and child and are based upon perceptions of 100 per cent maternal-infant HIV transmission. Adult HIV status is linked to child survival as respondents explained that having a healthy child who survives to age five indicates that the parents are also free of the virus and, at this point, they can safely continue childbearing. Additionally, couples who have experienced the death of a child are hesitant to give birth again because they believe future children would die. Finally, there was some talk of having children early in an attempt to avoid contracting HIV. This study presents evidence that Zimbabweans are altering their reproductive strategies in order to protect both parents and children from the threat of AIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why land reform beneficiaries maintain linkages with their communal areas of origin two decades after Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform programme (FTLRP). This is done by investigating the extent to which and the ways in which beneficiaries of the FTLRP are connected to their communal areas of origin, as well as the implications of maintaining their belonging. Studies of the FTLRP have paid insufficient attention to the importance of understanding linkages with places of origin. Thus, using empirical qualitative insights from Zvimba district, Mashonaland West province, I argue that belonging, even in the case of land reform, links people despite their physical relocation. The findings illustrate that the need to belong makes people maintain their links with their place of origin. The article concludes that land reform programmes should consider social elements such as belonging which are embedded in the social fabric of people's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new wave of resource nationalism washed through southern Africa in the 2000s, driven by rising popular demand for greater local participation in the mining sector value chain, more equitable redistribution of benefits from extractives and strengthened transparency and accountability on the part of local states and foreign-owned mining companies. In the context of heightened political contestation and improved commodity prices, a succession of policy innovations emerged in response to the interventions of diverse mining sector stakeholders and civil society activists. The results have often been disappointing, with the initial promise of an 'alternative' form of minerals-fuelled development promoted by non-state beneficiaries seemingly unrealised. To understand the challenges of current policy-making around resource nationalism we consider the case of Zimbabwe, a country which has been host to vibrant mining reform debates and experiments in new policy-making in the 2000s, but has experienced little transformation in resource governance practices. This article assesses the critical factors which have contributed to the generation and subsequent derailing of new approaches to resource nationalism during a period of exceptional growth in the country's mining sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ndau society in the Zimbabwe–Mozambique borderland has seemingly been neglected by colonial and post-independence governments. Exclusion from the mainstream economies of the region by the Zimbabwean and Mozambican governments has forced the Ndau to rely largely upon themselves to survive in the remote, poverty-stricken borderland. This survival practice means that many borderland residents embrace an economy of illegality in which trade in drugs, used clothes, game meat and fuel has become a coping mechanism against hardships in the borderland. Among other reactions, the Ndau people take advantage of the remoteness of the borderland to criss-cross the border to seek opportunities and resources to sustain themselves. Relentless cross-border transgressions have thus contributed to a virtual state of 'borderlessness' in the region, and this is manipulated by the Ndau to participate in a variety of informal cross-border survival pursuits. The discussion that follows provides a critical review of the lives and economic practices of the marginalised Ndau communities within an illegal borderland economy. It is the authors' contention that the borderland illegal economy has sustained the Ndau community's existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the insecurity challenges faced by irregular Zimbabwean immigrants as well as mitigatory strategies they deploy to survive in an informal settlement in Pretoria East, South Africa. Globally, immigrants (especially irregular immigrants) have been and continue to be viewed and treated as societal and state security threats in the host societies. In response to this perceived or real security threat, a raft of often punitive 'defensive' measures is implemented by the host state and society. By contrast, the insecurity experienced by the immigrants themselves at the hands of the host state and society is rarely highlighted, but rather glossed over or at worst played down as non-events. More so, their defensive survival strategies are heavily policed if not criminalised. This article analyses the range of short- to long-term individual and collective strategies deployed by the state, its agents, the host society and immigrants alike in navigating and negotiating insecurity. The article concludes by noting that the varied security strategies deployed are underlined by self-interest on the part of the many actors involved in the security–insecurity matrix, hence the recurrence of insecurity over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the interregnum between the announcement of the election results in March 1980 and the independence ceremony in April, approximately 16,000 workers staged wildcat strikes across Zimbabwe. While previous scholarly analyses have focused on the failure of these strikes to catalyse a sustained movement, this article reads them as timely enactments of the workers' vision of decolonisation during a fragile moment of transition. First, rather than reacting to state policy making, the strikes seized the brief opening to make demands to which the incoming government was forced to respond. Second, the strikes intervened in a broader debate about the speed at which political change ought to unfold in the new state. This debate was reflected through the terms 'reconciliation' and 'transformation', which circulated in public discourse and framed ZANU(PF)'s approach to governance. These terms captured two different approaches to the predicament that the party found itself in once it acquired power. Reconciliation centred on gradualism and moderation, while transformation emphasised the rapid change of extant colonial institutions. Caught in this bind, through the mechanism of the wildcat strike, workers refused the injunction to wait for the formal transfer of power to access the freedoms promised to them, enacting a sense of anticipation that made distinct claims on the future government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores agrarian labour relationships between the pilot Smallholder Gowe Irrigation Scheme, the contiguous dryland farming community and TILCOR/ARDA's core irrigation estate in Sanyati, Zimbabwe, from 1967 to 1990. It is an analysis of the emerging smallholder cotton irrigation agriculture and the contradictions between this process and the labour requirements of the estate sector. The article argues that, once the main irrigation estate was established, the Gowe plot-holders, who until 1974 had existed as a quasi-autonomous unit (overseeing their own labour needs), then served as the estate's major manual labour repository. At the core of the article is the interesting tripartite tension between a state-run cotton estate, a group of associated plot-holders (later outgrowers) benefiting from land and irrigation arrangements and a farming community at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The largely cordial relationship between Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, established in the 1890s, instantly turned hostile at Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. This reconfiguration, marked by Harare's termination of diplomatic contact with Pretoria, was due to divergent ideologies between apartheid South Africa and the black majoritarian Zimbabwean government. Shying away from the orthodox approach that emphasises the security and military dimension of the breakdown of relations, the article utilises the lens of diplomacy and everyday interstate engagements to explore Zimbabwe's anti-apartheid posture and its campaign against South Africa's occupation of Namibia. It considers how South Africa attempted to exploit Zimbabwe's overwhelming economic reliance on its trade and transportation networks and infrastructure to assert its power and force its northern neighbour to abandon its hostile stance. Relying largely on recently available archival material, I argue that Zimbabwe terminated political contact in order to force South Africa to change its domestic and regional politics while Pretoria adopted trade and transportation diplomacy as a stick with which to beat its obstinate neighbour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on two key questions that have been central in debates following the Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Oxford in 2015–16: whether Rhodes supported and contributed to racial segregation in the Cape Colony, and how to characterise the violence in the conquest of Zimbabwe in the 1890s. With respect to the Cape, the evidence shows that Rhodes supported developments that intensified racial segregation in the late 19th century, including restrictions on the franchise, punitive racially based masters and servants legislation and a labour (poll) tax for African people only. He was involved as an employer in the beginning of coercive compounds for black workers and other racially restrictive practices. In respect of Zimbabwe, 1890–97, Rhodes and his British South Africa Company were responsible for extreme violence against African people. Unbridled use was made of the Maxim gun; cattle were looted by the Company and its agents on a large scale; grain stores and crops were appropriated or destroyed over a sustained period as a deliberate strategy; over a period of nine months in 1896–97, African men (including armed men), women and children sheltering in caves were blown up with dynamite. Rhodes was aware of these practices, at times participating or present while they were taking place and involved in strategic discussions. The article is based on published sources, and some of this is established in the historiography, but I do not know of an attempt to assess and quantify deaths in Zimbabwe. The material supports the argument that a celebratory statue of Rhodes at Oriel College is inappropriate and that it should be moved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the pre-independence era, commercial tobacco growing remained an exclusively white enterprise in Zimbabwe. The situation did not substantially change with the advent of majority rule in 1980. Commercial agriculture in general, and tobacco growing in particular, continued to be dominated by a few large-scale white farmers. However, the situation was to change drastically following the adoption by the Robert Mugabe regime of the fast-track land reform programme (FTLRP) in 2000. This resulted in nearly all white farmers losing their farms, leading to a near collapse of the tobacco farming industry in Zimbabwe. The country's tobacco farming industry has now been resuscitated, in part due to the successes of contract farming operations, both small-scale and commercial. The collapse of white farming in Zimbabwe following the FTLRP resulted in the movement of white farmers and their families into other areas of the tobacco industry. This article seeks to explore what happened to white tobacco farmers after the FTLRP. Many ex-farmers and their children are now working in the subsidiaries of the large leaf buying companies, on tobacco auction floors, and in small-scale contract farming operations. This article explores the history of the white farming community in Zimbabwe as a background to understand the new roles and positions that former farmers occupy as part of the new boom in tobacco production in Zimbabwe, and southern Africa in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform programme has led to the adoption of new patterns of land use by its beneficiaries. Tobacco farming is a case in point. By virtue of the crop's export viability and driven by changes in land tenure brought about by the reform, investors and resettled farmers are entering into a new generation of land leases and joint-venture agreements. To varying degrees, these agreements are attempts by resettled farmers to mobilise the working capital they need for farming and attempts by investors - mostly white former farmers who lost land to the land reform programme - to regain access to land in order to apply their capital and know-how to farming. The very emergence of these arrangements suggests that Zimbabwe's land reform programme, although radical, was not backed up by a corresponding financial strategy. The growing control of investors over land through these arrangements is also suggestive of a land reform reversal. This article draws on evidence of joint ventures in tobacco farming in the Zvimba district of Mashonaland West to argue that what are presented on the ground and in the literature as joint ventures are best characterised instead as land rental arrangements with asymmetrical power relations that favour investors. Despite the existence of national policy frameworks aimed at attracting investment in agriculture, there is no legal basis for the regulation of these joint ventures. Through examining the limitations of land reform, this article argues that the lease agreements, widely presented as joint ventures, constitute a certain reversal of the transformation attempted by the land reform programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the historical and contemporary landscape of tobacco production and marketing in Zimbabwe. It highlights patterns of boom and bust dependent on global demand, trading frameworks and degrees of government support to the industry, which are reminiscent of cycles of tobacco production elsewhere in the region. It illustrates at the national and farm level the importance of diversified marketing channels: how the Zimbabwean tobacco industry has twice been at the intersection of two distinctly different global tobacco markets and has, with varying degrees of success, managed to survive and thrive by balancing the competing demands of buyers in these different domains. At the farm level, peasants now also have diversified marketing channels and are able to select between the auction floors and a range of contracting companies. The article outlines a case study of contracting practices in Mashonaland East and highlights that there is currently a lack of functional organisational platforms that can help to redress power imbalances between peasants and contracting companies. It concludes by outlining an incremental approach to setting a regulatory framework that can set sufficient checks and balances for producer associations to hold contracting companies to account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tobacco has been central to the agrarian economy of Zimbabwe since the early 1900s, when it became the backbone of the new settler economy following colonisation. Since the land reform of 2000, tobacco has taken on a new impetus, with production now often exceeding that generated by white commercial farming in the 1990s. Today, tobacco is being produced predominantly by smallholders, with those on resettlement land being especially important. Tobacco production is supported by a range of buying companies, auction houses, transporters and contract arrangements, and small-scale farmers are thus tightly connected to a global commodity chain. This article explores tobacco production in A1 (smallholder) resettlement schemes in Mvurwi area, Mazowe district, a high-potential area to the north of Harare. The article is based on a combination of surveys and in-depth interviews with farmers carried out between 2017 and 2019. The article explores who are the winners and losers in the changing dynamics of smallholder tobacco production in these land reform sites and how different groups of farmers combine tobacco with other crops and with off-farm enterprises. Drawing on a simple typology of producers derived from the analysis of survey data from 310 A1 farmers, we examine the role of tobacco in complex patterns of accumulation and social differentiation, looking at class, gender and age dynamics. The conclusion discusses how the tobacco boom is reshaping the agrarian economy and its underlying social relations. This is a highly dynamic setting, influenced by how tobacco production is incorporated into farming systems, how its production is financed, how and where it is marketed and how it is combined with other crops and other income-earning opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have emphasised the role of the colonial state in explaining the development of white settler agriculture in general and the tobacco industry in particular in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Indeed, through a plethora of laws, ordinances and extrajudicial interventions, the colonial state provided both direct and indirect support, mostly to white farmers at the expense of African interests. More recently, studies have broadened this analysis by foregrounding the post-war global economic climate in seeking to understand the rapid growth of the colony's tobacco industry in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, in underestimating white farmer agency in the remarkable expansion of the Southern Rhodesian tobacco industry during this period, both strands of literature share a common shortcoming, a gap that this article hopes to fill. Drawing mainly on archival material from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, industry magazines and newspapers, the article reinserts white tobacco growers in conversations on the post-war growth of Southern Rhodesia's flue-cured Virginia tobacco industry beyond the role played by state support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilising oral history interviews with black ex-Rhodesian soldiers and archival sources, this article contributes a new understanding as to why, at the moment of independence, the Zimbabwean government opted to retain black troops from the old Rhodesian Army, the wartime foe of its liberation forces. That these soldiers were integrated into the new Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) was striking for, although relatively small in number, they had proven militarily efficacious during the long liberation war. Furthermore, leaders of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), including Robert Mugabe, had previously made numerous threats of post-war retribution against them. This article contends that Mugabe's government sought to utilise these erstwhile enemies, in particular the battalions of the Rhodesian African Rifles, to ensure that it would not face a military challenge from rival nationalists. It also provides evidence that, despite proclamations to the contrary at the time, former Rhodesian soldiers from even the most notorious, and widely loathed, unit, the Selous Scouts, were quietly retained in the ZNA, and formed the bedrock of one of its elite units, the Paragroup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on media and propaganda in Zimbabwe has focused on media politics in the contemporary crisis. Most of these studies do not examine the circumstances that created the propaganda or the responses of the recipients. Some commentators have created the impression that government propaganda easily supplanted alternative opinions. This article analyses the development of Rhodesian propaganda from 1962 to 1970. It argues that far from being a sign of the strength of the Rhodesian Front (RF) regime, government propaganda was a response to political paranoia and insecurity in the face of an uncertain future. Smith's propaganda was not as successful as sometimes assumed and was not effective enough to fully counter alternative opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on language policy in Zimbabwe and argues that both the colonial and post-colonial governments advocated a unitary language policy in which English and the two major indigenous languages – ChiShona and IsiNdebele – were adopted as national languages. For the post-colonial government, this language policy was influenced by prevailing ideas about linguistic unity as a prerequisite for economic development and the construction of a cohesive national identity. This approach led to the marginalisation of minor languages and their associated cultures in education and the wider public sphere. The article shows how one marginalised linguistic community, the Kalanga of south-western Zimbabwe, responded to the government's exclusionary policies. It traces the resistance to such government policies and the promotion of the TjiKalanga language and culture by two organisations – the Kalanga Cultural Promotion Society, relaunched in 1980, and the Kalanga and Language and Cultural Development Association, founded in 2005. It also engages with the various activities and interventions carried out by the two groups, leading to the introduction of TjiKalanga in schools, among other achievements. Furthermore, the article argues that the rise and development of the two TjiKalanga language and cultural promotion organisations illustrate the pitfalls of centralising and unifying tendencies in both the colonial and post-colonial governments in Zimbabwe. It also demonstrates the agency and resistance of minority groups in relation to these flawed policies. By assessing the performance of the two organisations, the article views their activities as a form of cultural resistance to the hegemonic and exclusionist policies of post-independence Zimbabwean government. Cultural resistance is used as a conceptual approach through which the limits of the impact of hegemonic monolithic language policies on minority groups, such as the Kalanga in the post-colonial Zimbabwean context, are illustrated and illuminated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid expansion of mobile money technologies in Zimbabwe has substantially altered the monetary ecology and the payment landscape. This article examines the ways in which the adoption, usage and meanings attached to mobile money (re)configure social relationships in the rural community of Chivi. We demonstrate the ways in which mobile money technologies mediate the politics of everyday social relations and shape local social relations in profound ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore the complex ways through which mobile money makes and unmakes social relations between transacting parties and between the agents themselves. Our main finding is that the impact of mobile money on social relations in the community is predominantly ambivalent. We observed that mobile money triggers contestation, hostility and conflict while simultaneously fostering social solidarity and convivial relationships. The main sources of contention in mobile money transactions in Chivi involved space, currency conversion exchange rates, identification and charges. These are, however, unintended consequences of mobile money usage in Chivi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the complex interplay between authority, land rights and belonging in new resettlement areas as revealed through relationships between 'landed' beneficiaries and 'landless' farm workers living on farms a decade after Zimbabwe's land reform programme. Land beneficiaries and farm workers shared ambiguous moral bonds: land beneficiaries relied on farm workers to make their land productive, but the two groups were also closely connected socially and shared complex relations of dependency. However, in moments of conflict, land beneficiaries reconfigured farm workers not only as 'ethnic others' but as unrighteous beings, lacking in moral substance. Working through a land-cum-labour dispute between a small-scale land beneficiary and a group of farm workers that was taken to a local chief's court, I argue that such discourses of moral lack can be read as attempts by land beneficiaries to assert and naturalise their authority over farm workers. Despite having been largely excluded from state land allocations, farm workers maintained a sense of entitlement to live on farms and own land left to them by their previous white employers. Land beneficiaries' distancing of farm workers was used to try and delegitimise this sense of entitlement, contributing to the production and reproduction of a rural underclass of farm workers excluded not only from land, but also from basic citizenship rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores white-settler notions of hygiene and debates over the subaltern body, by using dairy farming in colonial Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) in the 1920s and 1930s as a lens through which to look into the bio-politics of farming and its effects on the political economy of race and accumulation. Dairy farming is a highly specialised industry: it requires comparatively more capital, organisation and expertise than most agricultural enterprises. Owing to its highly perishable nature, the handling and processing of milk requires specialised care and transport. The system is stacked against new entrants and independent producers. Moreover, in Zimbabwe during the 1920s and 1930s, the 1925 Dairy Produce Act, predicated on the 'unsuitability' of Africans for commercial dairy farming and the pathologising of black bodies, was part of a strategy to bar black African producers from the dairy market. Yet, despite the inherent precariousness of the industry and the socio-economic system designed to discriminate against indigenous African agricultural enterprise, black dairying met with surprising success in the early years of the industry. However, for both white and African farmers, there was a terrible cost to the state's institutionalised racism: crude production methods among white dairy farmers and the efforts to keep African producers out meant that the industry struggled to break into the international market until the late 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Centred on the nexus between people and the environment, this article examines contestations over the ownership and use of resources from Chirinda Forest in eastern Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2000. During this period, a parastatal body, the Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe, managed all state-owned indigenous forests. As a conservation measure, this parastatal denied communities within the immediate vicinity of state-owned forests any access to forest resources. A case in point was Chirinda Forest. Being 'equatorial' in nature, but situated in a predominantly savannah climate, Chirinda Forest was a unique piece of natural heritage. While the state's conservation policies were inspired by aesthetic, scientific and educational considerations, the surrounding communities treasured it for practical purposes. This study demonstrates that the approaches characteristic of state-centred conservation and development marginalised large numbers of those living in the surrounding communities, who, in response, resorted to clandestine acquisition and use of forest resources and, in the process, created enduring conflicts with the Forestry Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the pre-colonial history of African societies, the fragility of food production in Africa and the status of gold mining in Zimbabwe.

This article explores the interaction of settler farmers, miners, and the state in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1895 to 1923. The governing authority, the British South Africa Company (BSAC), was a private commercial mining entity, which sought to maximise its earnings through mining, particularly gold extraction. Its mining bias set the stage for subsequent friction between the country's miners and the fledgling settler farming sector over the control of labour, land, wood and water resources in the new state. The end of BSAC rule in 1923 and its replacement with settler government has often been explained in economic terms, as an indication that farming had become more economically important to the state than mining. This article suggests, rather, that mining interests continued to be economically powerful, even when political power shifted towards the farmers. We show that the farmers' struggle (post-1910) for recognition, for fairer resource allocation and other rights, especially through the 1912 tax strikes and other political actions, set in place developments that eventually led to the end of Company rule in 1923. However, although this farmer-led activism transformed the political landscape, the politically combustible issue of miners' privileged access to resources in the Great Dyke (where Gold Belt Titles were mainly tenable) remained unresolved until 1961, when the Mines Ordinance was finally amended to give farmers some share of the environmental resources with miners on farms in the Gold Belt areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) emerged from the smouldering ashes of the intra-party violence that followed its break away from the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) in 1963 and the clampdown by Rhodesian authorities. Its structures were barely consolidated when it was banned in 1964, and its efforts in exile suffered a crisis of recognition, as the key sponsors of African liberation movements continued to view it as an ‘inauthentic’ and ‘separatist’ movement. This article traces the structures and strategies that ZANU used to manoeuvre through these obstacles to become a fully-fledged liberation movement by the mid 1970s. It pays particular attention to the work of individuals and organisations that facilitated this transformation by tracing a wide range of regional and international networks, including military, financial, humanitarian and diplomatic roles. The main sources are the growing corpus of oral reminiscences and published memoirs of the main players. It argues that ZANU was a beneficiary of the contradictions in the international solidarity movement. As it grew in stature, however, its own internal contradictions as a movement threatened to consume it and render the efforts and sacrifices of its exiles worthless. Yet, as the war escalated, these exile networks were the very basis on which an effective diplomatic offensive was launched, which complemented the successes that ZANU had in the battlefield. This aspect of the ZANU war effort is often conveniently omitted by ZANU itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is one of a pair of unusual contributions to this special issue offered by Dumiso Dabengwa and Vladimir Shubin. They are unusual, in that they offer personal views and interpretations, shaped by the authors’ own involvement in the southern African struggles of liberation. Dabengwa and Shubin were key participants in ZAPU and in Soviet support respectively, and they at times interacted directly with one another. Based on presentations originally made to theJournal of Southern African Studies’ Conference, titled ‘Southern Africa Beyond the West’, held in Livingstone, Zambia in August 2015, their accounts explore the relationship between the USSR and ZAPU in particular, reflect on personal encounters and careers, and also range much more widely. Accounts such as these provide an important resource for developing new insights into the transnational histories of liberation movements. — The Editors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A growing literature has shed new light on interactions between the Soviet Union and Africa, notably through studies of the large numbers of African students who arrived in Moscow from 1960. Scholars have, however, largely ignored the many thousands of African military trainees who arrived in the same period. Here we begin to explore soldiers’ experiences through a focus on intelligence cadres of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). We ask how their Soviet sojourns shaped their lives and ZAPU’s struggle, and consider the strengths and limits of oral histories in going beyond questions of strategy and Cold War binaries. ZAPU trainees depicted themselves as men of education and political sophistication, who were able to shape the content of their training and make efficacious use of it. Their most abiding political lessons came from the understanding they gained of Soviet history – particularly the sacrifices of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ – and their experiences of ‘living socialism’. What these cadres depicted as Soviet egalitarianism, anti-racism, and state provision for basic needs held a powerful appeal due to the dramatic contrast to settler-ruled Rhodesia. Soviet support certainly influenced ZAPU, but these accounts indicate that it did so in negotiated, pragmatic and, at times, surprising ways, which were shaped by interactions with many other foreign hosts, the influence of a specifically Rhodesian history of discrimination and oppression, and ZAPU’s own assessment of its military needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits the history of the 1974–75 mutiny in the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). The mutiny was primarily led by field commanders Thomas Nhari, Dakarai Badza and Caesar Molife. Dominant accounts on the mutiny maintain that the colonial Rhodesian Security Forces (RSF) influenced Nhari and Badza to stage the revolt. The article traces part of the life history of Rex Nhongo/Solomon Mujuru (a ZANLA commander who interacted with the mutineers) in order to challenge these long-standing accounts of the mutiny. The article highlights the import of conflicting understandings of loyalty in the mutiny, arguing that the revolt was not an RSF scheme. Instead, the mutineers took advantage of the absence of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and ZANLA leaderships, which were abroad on various transnational diplomatic engagements in countries sympathetic to Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, to stage a revolt. The mutiny could have been avoided had the ZANLA commander, Josiah Tongogara, heeded Nhongo’s advice that ZANU’s transnational appointments be postponed in order first to address growing dissent among guerrillas at the war front. The article underlines that the revolt’s primary grievances did not originate from ZANLA camps but in the war zone. Focusing on the war front provides an important corrective to the exile literature’s emphasis on the space of the camp, which mistakenly gives a lower profile to the influence of war-zone dynamics in upheavals experienced by liberation movements. It is potentially more insightful to consider meticulously the ways in which war-front dynamics interact with camp politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Southern Rhodesian experiment with the alternative vote (AV) is not well known among electoral specialists. Yet this was the origin of the better known claim that such a preferential voting system might ameliorate ethnic tensions in deeply divided societies. AV was one among several institutional innovations deployed by a reformist white settler government in Southern Rhodesia in response to the emergence of the African nationalist movement. Despite its usage with a highly restrictive franchise, the system delivered a preference transfer-dependent victory for a centrist government that aimed to accommodate African political aspirations in 1958. Yet that outcome was not repeated in 1962 or 1965, when Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front instead obtained office, declared independence from the United Kingdom and – once freed of restraints from London – dismantled electoral devices aimed at encouraging inter-communal vote transfers. This article examines the debates about Southern Rhodesian electoral reform in the late 1950s and early 1960s, explores the working of accommodation-oriented devices at the elections of 1958, 1962 and 1965, and contests whether viable political settlements can be assembled in such contexts simply by institutional reform aimed at encouraging ‘moderation’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the Zimbabwean government launched the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 1999, an international outcry followed, with Zimbabwe described as an international pariah state. Zimbabwe entered a prolonged socio-economic and political crisis. While conventional opposition attacks the FTLRP for its negative impacts on agriculture, food security and economic growth, this article argues that the programme has also had widespread impacts on access to housing land. Over the years, the main political tool used by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU[PF]) was land, especially in rural areas. Later, especially in urban and peri-urban areas, ZANU(PF) used peri-urban farms to bolster its waning support in the urban constituencies. Through ZANU(PF)-aligned co-operatives and land barons, the party became a major player in deciding who had access to land for housing. On the other hand, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) tried to use its majority control of urban areas to give its supporters land for housing, albeit with limited success. MDC-controlled urban administrations were incapacitated, as most urban land was under a de facto ZANU(PF) administration. This article focuses in particular on the allocation of housing land between 2000 and 2012 in Zimbabwe’s major cities. The ZANU(PF) approach to housing bypassed urban planning regulations, with catastrophic effects on urban infrastructure planning. Further, the article explains developments in council-led housing and the role of non-council actors in housing provision. The Zimbabwean experience shows that it is not enough for a political party to be voted into power; rather, controlling resources such as land is a vital consideration in urban governance and development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The narratives of Zimbabwean soldiers who fought in the Democratic Republic of Congo war (1998–2002) have received scant attention, particularly at a time when the professionalisation of the Zimbabwean National Army (ZNA) is questioned by scholars and, largely, by the private media, in and outside Zimbabwe. This article explores accounts of soldiers who joined the ZNA in post-independence Zimbabwe: those without a liberation history. The article reveals these ex-soldiers’ accounts of their profound disappointment about the way in which the Zimbabwean army was ‘de-professionalised’ in its deployment in the DRC war. They felt that the army, particularly the commanders, became unprofessional in their practice. The men’s disappointment ranged from the poor conduct in war, lack of food and clothing, and the inability of the army to repatriate soldiers’ dead bodies from the war terrain. I argue that the accounts of de-professionalisation provide a vantage point from which to analyse the current politicisation of the Zimbabwe defence forces. The article is based on 44 life histories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU(PF) government's violent seizure of white-owned commercial farms in 2000 heralded the nadir of diplomatic relations with British Prime Minister Tony Blair's New Labour government. Britain objected to the ZANU(PF) government's human rights violations and state-orchestrated violence, and, through the European Union, subsequently imposed sanctions. This article maintains that, from 2000, mutual demonisation discourses became a distinct feature of the Britain–Zimbabwe diplomatic conflict. Yet the nature and drivers of these demonisation discourses, and their influence, have not received systematic treatment in the literature on Britain–Zimbabwe relations. Drawing on constructivist interpretations of international relations, I argue that New Labour engaged in demonisation for normative reasons, while ZANU(PF) demonised New Labour for more instrumental purposes. Demonisation discourses promoted non-engagement between the British and Zimbabwean governments. This non-engagement partly circumscribed foreign policy options to aggressive measures, as evinced in Blair's covert canvassing for British military intervention in Zimbabwe. Lastly, it is demonstrated that demonisation discourses affected the third-party mediation efforts of South African President Thabo Mbeki. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the Kariba dam project as a case study, this article examines some of the biases and interdependencies of development planning in 1950s Northern Rhodesia in order to consider Zambia's trajectory into independence. The Kariba dam, a highly controversial hydro-electricity scheme in the short-lived Central African Federation, crystallises the ambivalent practices of building nations – materially, politically and ideologically. Colonial imbalances of development planning, most notably its ‘urban bias’, were bound to have a profound effect on the postcolonial period. I illustrate this, first with regard to Kariba's materiality. Given that infrastructures remain long after the planners and decision-makers leave, one must explore their potential for pre-structuring social change, including some types of change and excluding others. Secondly, Kariba is a prime example of the priorities in development politics that characterised both the colonial and postcolonial eras, particularly the neglect of rural populations in remote areas. At a more ideological level, the final section discusses how the dam project was contested by nationalist leaders and the resettled Gwembe Tonga peasants, drawing out the intricacies and ambiguities involved in ‘resisting’ a large-scale development project that promised to bring ‘light and power for a nation’.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African migrants played a crucial role in the early history of Southern Rhodesia. A number of them were already literate and had converted to Christianity before they came to Southern Rhodesia. For example, a number of the members of the Basotho1 community in Victoria and Ndanga District had worked with missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church, Berlin Missionary Society and the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) and had acquired a level of education before they settled in the country. They had also adopted the plough, and were among the first Africans to own land on a freehold basis. As a result of this, colonial administrators often viewed them as progressive or ‘more advanced natives’ as compared to the indigenous Africans. This article seeks to show how, after helping Rev. A.A. Louw in establishing Morgenster Mission in Victoria District and spreading Christianity in the surrounding areas, Basotho evangelists settled and established themselves in the area. It analyses how these Basotho were incorporated into the colonial capitalist system and also why colonial administrators viewed them as ‘progressive Africans’. It also analyses the centrality of land, Christianity and the ideology of being ‘progressive Africans’ in the community's strategies for entitlement and prosperity in Southern Rhodesia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to integrate state practices and party politics into the analysis of agricultural production, through a study of rural differentiation on three small-scale resettlement schemes in Chipinge District, south-eastern Zimbabwe. In common with most agrarian scholars, my study shows that levels of crop production among small-scale farmers are related to differential access to land holdings, farming inputs, labour, tillage, extension services, income and social networks. However, the processes involved in gaining access to such resources are not adequately explored in most scholarly work: differentiation in crop production is explained from an agro-ecological and socio-economic viewpoint that glosses over the role of politics. I argue that state practices and party politics are important in explaining differences in crop production among resettled farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zimbabwe's post-2000 period has been characterised by a dramatic increase in artisanal small-scale mining (ASM), particularly gold mining. Economic decline and rising unemployment meant that ASM provided one of the very few opportunities for survival and capital accumulation. This article provides a contextual analysis of the growth of ASM, together with a detailed discussion of a case study of mining in Totororo, Kwekwe District in central Zimbabwe, based on field research and media reports. Totororo was initially the site of an intense gold rush, which was quasi-formalised through being registered as a small mine. The article situates the discussion of the growth of ASM in the context of the political economy of Zimbabwe's crisis decade and subsequent period of power sharing. It reveals both similarities and differences with the political economy of diamond mining in Zimbabwe, which has attracted greater attention from scholars and the human rights community. Artisanal gold mining in Totororo clearly provided significant survivalist livelihood opportunities. Yet the site was also highly politicised and contested, and the politics of controlling extraction and trade were part of a bigger story of elite accumulation and patronage. The article criticises those who approach ASM only through debates over grass-roots, informal survivalism, and also suggests some of the ways in which elite accumulation has provided not only lucrative opportunities for a broad network of lower ranking party or state agents but also work for locals and itinerant panners who would otherwise be jobless. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The July 31st2013 Elections in Zimbabwe ushered in a renewed period of political domination by ZANU(PF) and its President, Robert Mugabe. This election followed five years of a SADC- facilitated Global Political Agreement (GPA), which was put into place after a contested presidential run-off election in June 2008. The recent elections, which once again established ZANU(PF)'s mastery over the country's political domain, were passed as free and peaceful by SADC and the African Union but contested by both Movement for Democratic Change parties and the western countries.While there were clear problems in the process leading to the election, it is also apparent that this was not the only factor that determined ZANU(PF)'S ‘victory’. This article provides an analysis of the multiple factors that contributed to the current conjuncture including the different party strategies under the GPA, changes in Zimbabwe's political economy and interventions at regional and international levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is about a particular form of memory: heroism. Four years after his murder, MDC-T activist Tonderai Ndira remains a giant in his home township of Mabvuku-Tafara, on the outskirts of Harare. Known throughout Zimbabwe as the highest-profile casualty of the 2008 election violence, his presence is felt in every corner of the township, particularly among the youth activists who seek to emulate his socio-political legend. Rather than simply summarising Ndira's life or the MDC's politicised narrative of it, this article seeks the meaning of Ndira's memory by analysing the subjective personal reception of his heroism. When given the opportunity, youth activists in Mabvuku-Tafara recall a diverse collection of heroes in Ndira, varying across multiple axes from peacemaker to street-fighter, visionary to comedian. What these recitals share is a will by activists to use the story of Ndira's heroism to bring private, contentious imaginations of socio-political achievement into social relevance. From these findings, the article theorises a model of heroism beyond a simple dichotomy of hero and followers, towards a structure that is necessarily triangular: between hero, self and society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2002, many scholars and Zimbabwean politicians have argued that Zimbabwe's Joint Operations Command (JOC), which comprises the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) commander and heads of the army, prisons, police, air force and intelligence, increasingly poses a threat to civilian authority. A notorious statement made by the ZDF commander Vitalis Zvinavashe in 2002 is often cited as evidence of the JOC or military elites' partisan support for President Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front ZANU[PF]) party. This article argues that Zvinavashe's 2002 statement has been interpreted in selective ways, and that external factors that played a crucial part in precipitating his intervention in 2002 have been neglected. This has resulted in an impoverished understanding of the full import of Zvinavashe's 2002 statement. Using Zvinavashe as an example, the article also demonstrates that some military elites' allegiance to Mugabe and ideological commitment to ZANU(PF) rule must be seen as unstable and contradictory. Be that as it may, Mugabe retains effective control of military elites for a variety of reasons, namely power derived from his status as ZDF commander in chief and his high position in ZANU(PF)'s 1970s nationalist hierarchy; his shrewd use of prebends to maintain loyalty; and the staunch ideological commitment of sections of the military elite to ZANU(PF). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses internal debates within the Zimbabwean opposition political party the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) among the party's technical team and its political candidates during the 2013 harmonised elections. It discusses MCD-T political leader Morgan Richard Tsvangirai, the technical team put together by MDC-T secretary general Tandai Biti, and the leadership of MDC-T national organising secretary Nelson Chamisa.