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Rwanda's mid 2021 military intervention meaningfully degraded the capability of the jihadist insurgents terrorising northern Mozambique. Rwanda's early battlefield achievements were due to a combination of factors, including a suitable operational concept and strong infantry skills and combat motivation. These qualities were more a function of institutional history and internal state building, however, than of foreign-provided equipment or training; outside aid helped make the intervention possible but did not instil the critical drivers of Rwandan combat effectiveness. Because similar circumstances do not pertain in Mozambique, the prospects that the Rwandan armed forces can transfer the capability to prosecute a successful counter-insurgency to their Mozambican counterparts are dim. The Cabo Delgado campaign provides only a qualified vindication of American security co-operation and suggests important limits for western counterterrorism strategies predicated on African proxies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fractious history of Mozambique's anti-colonial movement remains politically charged, just as in other post-colonial states where opposition movements have challenged the ruling party's exclusive claim to the legacy of national liberation. This article examines the debates over the legacy of the former Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) vice-president Uria Simango and the Catholic priest Mateus Gwenjere, who continue to be denounced as traitors by the current Frelimo government, and of the protests against the Frelimo leadership by student exiles at the Mozambique Institute in Dar es Salaam in 1967–68. I argue that, for critics of the current government, the figures of Simango and Gwenjere represent a vision that is opposed to the direction taken by Frelimo after Simango was ousted from the leadership in 1969. The events surrounding the protests provide a basis for a narrative about the supposedly exclusive and undemocratic character of the current regime. As Frelimo remains entrenched in power through violence and patronage, the opposition contestation of the official history can be seen as an appeal for a more inclusive imagining of the nation, valorising historic Frelimo figures denigrated by the official version of history, while not challenging the centrality of Frelimo in Mozambique's liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores state discourse on domestic security threats and the way the Mozambican party-state sought to counter them in the decade after independence. It analyses the ways in which government forces dealt with ideological enemies, crime and social disorder. It is argued that Frelimo's quest for hegemony and its obsessive aim of building a state-nation under the project of 'socialist revolution' led to harsh intolerance of all that was considered a hindrance to these objectives. As obstacles to the project arose from the outset, the party-state developed a political analysis of security that did not distinguish internal from external security threats. The result was the institutionalisation of a politics of punishment as a state instrument of power and social control aiming to repress, deter and educate party-state opponents and all individuals outside the realm of socialist and revolutionary principles defined by the party-state. The article demonstrates that much of this politics of punishment represented to considerable sections of Mozambican society a return to the 'old regime' insofar as the post-independence state reproduced some colonial mechanisms of punishment and social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apartheid's bantustans reflected extreme forms of territorial fragmentation and (neo)colonially-derived dependency. Whilst the bantustans have been dismantled, paradoxically, the imagery of dependency which they came to symbolize has been used recently to characterize other 'nation-building' situations. In order to provide a more thorough account of the complexity of bantustan nation-building, background to its subsequent collapse and ambiguous legacy, the paper re-examines one 'independent' bantustan, namely Bophuthatswana. Unlike previous approaches, the paper links apartheid's particularities and generalities: its explicit grounding within a wider generic Eurocentric framework and especially the manner in which ideas of progress and identity were played out locally within South Africa's periphery are explored. Under the guise of 'independence', marginalized groups sought power and influence through vigorous efforts to promote a new national identity in Bophuthatswana. Bophuthatswana's shifting strategies and regional discourses, however, must be seen in conjunction with the effects of the implantation of the modern facade of a 'nation-state' and its incursion into rural and urban society. Subsequent efforts towards nation-building by this pseudo-state were based upon evolutionary imagery of Bophuthatswana as a 'less developed' peripheral territory requiring modernization and maturation. This had severe consequences for any state-led efforts to mobilize cultural identity, 'invent tradition' and to implement 'national' development in Bophuthatswana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Durban and its harbour, the article discusses the importation of different kinds of transnational bonded labour into Natal in the last half of the 19th century, and examines the ways in which Southern African and Indian Ocean histories were intertwined in the processes that built the colonial state. The institution of the Protector of Indian Immigrants is highlighted as a central ingredient in state building, which served to give legitimacy in regulating the supply of labour. The early history of the Protector’s work in the 1870s is given special attention as regards the introduction into Natal of freed slaves from the Indian Ocean coast, of indentured labourers from India, and of ‘Amatonga’ migrant workers from Mozambique. An 1877 murder case is discussed, which led to the forced resignation of a Protector, as it threatened to undermine the respectability of the institution. The article shows the continuities that existed between forms of servitude from slavery and forced labour through the recruitment of ‘liberated Africans’ and indentured Indians to more recent types of migrant and voluntary wage labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the workings of public authority in post-war Angola through an analysis of the history and current functioning of residents' committees at neighbourhood level in peri-urban Luanda, based on case-study research in the Zango housing project. While recognising that power in Angola is highly centralised, and the autonomy of regular state structures limited, it argues that, when power is studied from below, state officials and those they engage with can be seen to produce, recognise and negotiate public authority in multiple ways that are embedded in the country's political history. In doing so, the article aims to bring a sense of history and agency to what is commonly seen by scholars as a top-down and repressive project of state-building. Yet the twilight existence of residents' committees – as institutions that function, but are not officially recognised, as part of the state – also illustrates the deeply ambiguous nature of this endeavour as one that, although formally aimed at building a democratic state that follows the rule of law, continues to be deeply entrenched in informal practices that ultimately serve to preserve the ruling party's hold on power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The role of violence in sustaining the political projects of state ruling elites in Mozambique and, more broadly, sub-Saharan Africa, remains under researched. In Mozambique, many of the authors of the literature produced in the 1980s avoided writing about the issue of Frelimo's use of violence and the numbers and identities of the victims. This article aims to fill this gap. It focuses on the continuities in Frelimo's anti-colonial and post-independence violent trajectories, and the party's efforts to depart from the practices of the preceding regime and eradicate alleged enemies from society. In the early period of independence, Frelimo depended on the politics of memory as well as on mobilisation of Mozambicans through and to violence, transitional and revolutionary justice. This culminated in 1982 with the realisation of a week-long, complex political event known as the 'Meeting of the Compromised', under the leadership of the late Samora Machel. By examining Machel's behaviour at this meeting and the reactions of some of those who were compromised, this article reveals the political ambivalences of Frelimo's authority in postcolonial Mozambique, in that violence both enabled the Frelimo elite to rule officially but also seriously endangered their political project and brought great suffering to the people. These contradictions helped to show the fractures and increasing disarray of Frelimo's revolutionary project and fostered Machel's own political and moral collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of direct and indirect rule in Africa during late colonialism created a dual state where, broadly speaking, rural areas were under indirect rule through chiefs while urban areas were subject to direct rule. This article explores the developments that in Malawi have led to a state in which most individuals are exposed to both forms of rule simultaneously. Nowadays, people in most areas experience two parallel state organisations, and individuals are simultaneously citizens of the state and subjects under a state-enforced chieftaincy system. Recently indirect rule has also experienced institutional expansion: the chiefly hierarchy, which previously reached only to district level, now extends all the way to the president, making the choice between the two parallel organisations relevant at higher levels of the state hierarchy. For those able to straddle the two forms of rule, this means a wider scope of opportunities for interacting with the state. Yet, for others it means a dissonance between the rhetoric of civil, rights-based governance and the practice of chiefly rule. For state agencies, it makes available more options for effective governance, and the president in particular can choose between two separate institutional hierarchies in the execution of state power. For academic studies, the case of Malawi demonstrates that research on state building and governance should not equate bureaucratic capacity with state capacity. The chieftaincy, standing outside the bureaucracy, constitutes a key component of state power and everyday governance, and it is difficult to imagine it being replaced by any part of the formal government in the foreseeable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sowetan, a black readership newspaper established in the 1980s, grew to be the biggest circulation daily in South Africa in the 1990s. In the apartheid era, the Sowetan served disenfranchised urban black communities and promoted their interests in a society in which they were not democratically represented. The project was not simply oppositional to apartheid policies, but also engaged in and encouraged certain kinds of community endeavours, which it dubbed nation building. Led by its editor, Aggrey Klaaste, the newspaper engaged in an ongoing process of social re-imagining under this flag of nation building, partly through its editorial columns and partly by initiating and reporting on community projects. The Sowetan thus allowed a collective re-imagining of black public life that formed a counterweight to apartheid representations of black Africans and facilitated public engagement with questions of citizenship and nationhood long before the inception of South Africa's constitutional democracy. The story of the Sowetan illustrates the ways in which a newspaper can become an influential institution of public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through fictional portrayals of events that, though based on historical fact, have either been forgotten or marginalised by Frelimo's process of nation building in the aftermath of the Civil War, Licínio Azevedo's films Virgem Margarida (2012) and Comboio de Sal e Açúcar (2016) engage with political tensions that are rooted in the past yet continue to affect contemporary Mozambican society. Both films examine the ways in which authority figures, whether explicitly representing the government or not, attempt to control the thoughts and actions of those whom they consider subordinate to them. Specifically, Azevedo casts a critical eye on the ideological training of both citizenry and soldiers that Frelimo considered fundamental to the creation of a new Mozambican society. This study contends that, through these films, Azevedo is engaging in the politics of memory by contesting the official historical version of events. In some cases, this involves presenting a vision of the past that contradicts official history, while, in others, this involves focusing on aspects of the past that official history has chosen to forget. In doing so, Azevedo engages with a discourse concerning the manipulation of official history by those in power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The island of Mauritius, situated in the southwest Indian Ocean region, is an integral part of southern Africa. A significant majority of its population, known locally as Creoles, are the descendants of African and Malagasy slaves who were forcibly relocated by European colonisers over a period of 300 years. This article discusses the situation of the Creoles living in two villages on the west coast of the island, focusing on the juncture between attempts to reconstruct Creole identity and the state's desire to encourage heritage tourism on the island. The article argues that efforts to emphasise the black, slave aspects of Creole identity and history risk the suppression of ethnic diversity and hybridity in Mauritian society. Currently, the dominant classes on the island are keen to articulate a homogeneous identity and history for Creoles as a means to obtaining a space of value and power in a society in which ethnicity is highly politicised. Some see this as a means to achieve national reconciliation and nation building. Heritage preservation, narrowly conceived, may actually undermine nation-building processes and essentialise Creole identity and history, however, unless the diversity of Creole experience is represented in a broad-based approach to heritage preservation and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the ending of apartheid, the state, political parties, civil society and ordinary people in South Africa have attempted to deal with the traumatic legacies of the past to engender a common sense of nationhood. This paper examines this process of dealing with the past through the theoretical lens of post-colonialism, focusing, in particular, on attempts to establish historical truth and collective memory for black women, who have often been most marginalised by colonialism and apartheid and excluded from dominant accounts of history. It argues that if black women are denied a presence and agency in the construction of collective memory, their belonging and citizenship is consequently mediated in the process of nation building. It considers how exclusionary and discriminating patterns are reproduced through attempts to construct national memory-archives, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It then explores the measures being taken to create a more inclusive process of restoring collective memory. In particular, it discusses the importance and possibilities of creating a postcolonial archive, where the voices and texts of historically marginalised people can be incorporated into national projects of remembering and notions of belonging. The paper focuses specifically on recent attempts to archive black women's pictorial and written testimony in a memory cloths programme. It concludes that representations of the past by women are a valuable tool in tracing the ways in which the legacy of their belonging and social standing shapes their contemporary citizenship. The radical potential of postcolonial archives lies in the fact that they can work against more sanitised representations of contemporary South Africa and towards the requirements for social justice (especially for black women) that are embodied within, but were arguably not met by, the TRC and broader nation building processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period between Union in 1910 and the inception of apartheid in 1948 was an important stage in building a South African nation and national identity. In the context of racial segregation, this South African nation and national identity was white: ‘Boer and Brit’, to be more precise. Film was an important component of building English–Afrikaner national identity and unity. Black people in general and Africans in particular stood outside this nation-building project, on and off screen. In fact, cinema for Africans positioned them in such a way that their exclusion from any putative South African ‘nation’ seemed a ‘reasonable’ decision. Through the widespread and effective control of cinematic production, exhibition and censorship, Africans were framed simultaneously as visually unsophisticated, mischievous and criminal, and therefore unable to assume the role of responsible citizens of a modern nation. State control of all three aspects of cinema was never fully centralised; instead it was widely dispersed throughout the various provinces and state departments which exercised a degree of autonomy in the granting or withholding of exhibition licences to private operators. It is precisely this decentralisation and dispersion, however, that made control so much more effective, because the ideological framing of Africans as criminally credulous audiences remained a consistently shared vision among the key players in the state and among the white citizenry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the discourse of popular science - and particularly that of genetics and evolution - as it has been used in the democratic South Africa to develop and articulate a shared 'African' national identity. Analysing speeches by politicians and academics, as well as sites of popular culture ranging from television shows to the Maropeng centre at the Cradle of Humankind, I explore how a new 'evolutionary family narrative', in which all humans are understood to have an African 'mother', has been harnessed in an attempt to guarantee 'belonging' to citizens of all races. I further show how this specific genetic family narrative is one of a larger network of 'genealogical fictions' that have been fabricated and produced in part for the purpose of redefining the national community in the post-apartheid era, and which tend to reiterate the basic tropes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation-building projects in the new millennium. Finally, I analyse two novels - Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life - that debate the continuing usefulness of such genealogical fictions in the work of building a contemporary democratic nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1967, the government of Tanzania announced the Rural Water Supply Programme, an ambitious plan to provide piped water to the Chagga-speaking peoples of Mount Kilimanjaro. One of many development projects conceived during the period of Ujamaa socialism, its proponents claimed that it would fuel economic and social development by providing 'more and better water' to the people. This article contends that while projects such as the Rural Water Supply Programme were often couched in the values of Ujamaa, they also were crucial to the nation-building strategy of the majority party, the Tanzania African National Union (TANU). Political leaders, notably President Julius Nyerere, hoped to use water as a means of establishing a national presence inside rural communities in a way that would touch the daily lives of nearly everyone. This presence, in turn, would help to guide rural development, undermine 'traditional' forms of authority, and solidify the position of the national party in local affairs. On Kilimanjaro, the Rural Water Supply Programme promised to provide clean, reliable water to a growing population. At the same time, it challenged the centuries-old system of mifongo, or water furrows, and the clan-based societies that managed them. By introducing an alternative system controlled and managed not by locals but by government agencies, TANU in essence proposed a new understanding of water, as a 'national' resource rather than a local one. This article examines the development of pipeline systems under the Programme, and assesses the extent to which they both succeeded and failed in their objectives. In the process, it provides a unique window for analysing how local people interpreted and negotiated development projects of the period and, in turn, Ujamaa itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-reliance features prominently in the development strategies of many post-independence African governments. This article explores the role of rhetorics of self-reliance in the founding of a national university in Botswana, following the unceremonious break-up of a three nations' University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland in 1975 (UBLS). It tells the story of the Botswana University Campus Appeal, which was launched to solicit donations from the public. The story reveals how the political leadership of the day raised significant funds through the appeal, rewarded generous donations with publicity, and carefully moulded the campaign into a broader, coherent strategy of nation building. The article is based on archival research in the Botswana National Archives and interviews with those who were involved in the national appeal. It explores why people from different backgrounds were prepared to make sacrifices to support the university campaign, even though some of the donors did not have the slightest idea what higher education was all about. The campaign is significant for the insights it gives into the nature of Botswana's nationalism in the early days of independence, and the early history of higher education in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which music, together with cultural forms such as poetry, theatre and dance, was used to garner international support for the struggle against apartheid. It focuses on two of the African National Congress's most significant projects in this realm: Mayibuye, an agitprop group that achieved considerable success in Europe in the 1970s; and Amandla, which travelled widely as a party ambassador during the 1980s, offering large-scale performances incorporating music, theatre and dance. A central motivation for the article was documenting the work of these two ensembles, both of which made significant contributions to the development of cultural activity and yet remain virtually undocumented in the history of the movement and the struggle. The article's primary analytical interest is in how black South African popular culture came to play a role in the movement's work in exile, how it was recruited and re-packaged in order to appeal to foreign audiences, and the relationship between this and cultural activity that was more internally focused. The distinction between culture's role in external propaganda work as opposed to internally-focused nation-building - although not often clearly made in ANC discourse - helps to situate the contributions of these two groups within the larger context of culture and the struggle. Further, it helps to explain the difficulties faced by those trying to revive Amandla in post-apartheid South Africa, an initiative that ultimately has not come to fruition. In exploring how music was mobilised by the ANC in the international arena, the article seeks to understand the importance and distinctive value of propaganda-focused cultural activity to the movement, as well as its necessary and inevitable limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Namibia was the last nation in Africa to achieve independence from a colonial power in 1990. The new state's attempts to appropriate indigenous cultural practices into its project of nation building through the rhetoric of 'a national culture' has freed the notion of 'cultural heritage' from its prior association with apartheid divisions, and the ever-increasing stream of 'cultural tourists' willing to pay to witness the spectacle of Namibia's much proclaimed cultural diversity has provided new opportunities for the performance and display of indigenous heritage. Increasingly this spectacle is being performed by a young generation for whom, this article demonstrates, local cultural practices, understood as heritage, constitute a resource on which they can draw in their interactions with an increasingly de-localised world. Although the state seeks to include the cultural identities of its diverse subjects whilst at the same time subsuming them in a unified national culture, heritage performances, by providing opportunities for the production of 'style', can subvert or even contest dominant narratives. In this article, I argue that these performances have a far more complex role in the production of postcolonial subjects than simply reproducing colonial ways of organising experience, and foreground the role of the rapidly developing heritage sector in enabling young postcolonial Namibian subjects to negotiate the local, national and global contexts in which their identities are performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The build-up of inter-ethnic trust, partnerships and alliances by minority elites is a remarkable accomplishment, in the face of majoritarian fears of 'the takeover' and 'the hidden agenda' –the popular imagining of an ethnic conspiracy consciously directed by the few against the many. This article examines that inter-ethnic accomplishment and the entrepreneurship of nationally prominent Kalanga elites. Mainly former top civil servants turned entrepreneurs, originally from the north of Botswana, they are now the best-positioned minority elites in the capital in the south. The analysis resolves a linked set of apparent paradoxes. The first is that Kalanga elites merge urban cosmopolitanism with assertions of their ethnic identity, linguistic difference, distinct cultural heritage and ties to their rural homes. The second relates to the boundary-crossing legacies in the postcolonial present from the colonial and pre-colonial past: that Kalanga elites, coming from the borderland of Botswana and Zimbabwe, orient their ethnicity towards the nation and also beyond it, internationally. That super-tribalism and nation building in Botswana march ahead together, like moral comrades-in-arms, is the third paradox. More generally for postcolonial studies, the argument relates changes in ethnicity, inter-ethnicity and entrepreneurship to the transformation of the capable African state, tracing these changes through the administrations of Botswana's three presidents: from the heyday of assimilationist yet highly co-optive policy and One Nation Consensus under the first; through the second president's less co-optive rule, which appeared to foster the autonomy of the bureaucracy but, under a liberalisation policy, reduced the insulation between the civil service and the investment opportunities of business and high finance; and finally, under the current president, to the growing pressures for a shift towards greater pluralism in the postcolonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks why it is so difficult to research the lives and experiences of urban women in Gwelo, an industrial town in Southern Rhodesia. It used to be said that African migrant workers in urban areas and mine compounds were predominantly male, and that women were left behind, unwaged, as an invisible 'rural subsidy' on migrant wages. The evidence from the first few decades of white occupation supported this interpretation. However, historians today acknowledge the presence of women in towns and on mine compounds from an early stage of white occupation and urbanization. Given the paucity of evidence, is this simply a reflection of feminist political correctness? Were women only present in such insignificant numbers as to have left little trace? Or is it rather something about towns which makes it harder to see women in the historical record? This paper demonstrates that there is evidence that women played an active role in the development of the new town. African women appear in court records and in the memories of old people. White women appear occasionally in newspapers, in old photographs and reminiscences, and again, in court records. They were there and probably reasonably visible to the eye; but they have a very low profile in the archival record. The paper draws two conclusions: first, that white women's experiences were obscured in the record because the reality of their experiences was at odds with the icon of a rural 'white womanhood' which was important for early white nation-building; and second, that African women's presence in town was obscured by African men claiming urban public spaces as 'male space'. Although women were there, they were not acknowledged as part of the urban environment and so we find it hard to see them now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the research on the demobilization and rehabilitation of fighters in Namibia. End of Namibia's struggle against German and South African rule; Low intensity and protracted war; Nation-building strategies; Containment strategies for unemployed fighters; Disabled veterans and ex-combatants in the community.

Tanzania has gone through two waves of resource nationalism since independence, with both having significant implications for the country's evolving approach to governing its resources. This article focuses on the second wave, which began during President Kikwete's administration (from 2005 to 2015) and was further strengthened under that of President Magufuli (from 2015 to 2021). This article draws on the case of negotiations between the government and Barrick Gold Corporation following mining sector reforms in 2017, which had a negative impact on Acacia Mining Plc, a Tanzania-based subsidiary of Barrick. In drawing on this case, this article analyses the political and economic dynamics associated with resource nationalism and argues that they produce outcomes which contradict the government's stated intentions as provided for in the 2017 legislation. Whereas the 2017 reforms introduced several progressive provisions relating to the fiscal framework, local content, state participation, resource sovereignty and contract transparency, the agreed framework between Barrick and the Tanzanian government effectively diluted and undermined many of these provisions. In effect, the Barrick case shows greater continuity between resource nationalist reforms under Presidents Kikwete and Magufuli, particularly in the challenges they faced in practice, even though the most recent legislative interventions were seemingly more aggressive, strategic and far-reaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the evolution of resource nationalism at a local level through the construction of infrastructure. It argues that, in Mtwara, resource nationalism was combined with local perceptions and demands that were shaped through the construction of different forms of infrastructure. The discovery of gas was accompanied by infrastructure in the forms of increased electricity generation and access, improved roads, and construction of new buildings. There were also plans and promises for industrial development utilising gas both as a raw resource in production and as fuel for electricity generation. These provided the confirmation that natural gas was to act as a modernising force for the region and boost economic and social development. Perceptions changed with the confirmation that a pipeline would be constructed to transport gas from Mtwara to Dar es Salaam for electricity generation, causing protests and riots. The completion of the pipeline, combined with the government's response to the protests, resulted in a change in the perception of what gas can provide for the region. With gas now going to Dar es Salaam, it has also symbolically removed the bedrock of a local gas-based developmental imaginary. Instead, gas has added to the historical grievances that many in the region perceive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of Chilapalapa, a colonial pidgin language, in Zambia. 'Prickly proximity' is used as a conceptual tool to understand the ways in which fraught yet intimate interracial relationships are managed by many of the white farming community of Zambia, who are at once privileged by their colonial past and bound by it. The article further discusses the history of the language before arguing that the patterns of linguistic learning among white Zambians, influenced by a frequent attempt to regulate emotional distance and hierarchy, created a situation in which Chilapalapa retained considerable prominence and power. This case study demonstrates the importance of language to ongoing processes of decolonisation, not only at the more widely researched national level, but also at the interpersonal one. This raises questions of inequality, belonging and race which are pertinent for other nations across southern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with discourses of public memory and heritage as constituted by the biography of David Livingstone to understand how the past is instrumentalised in present-day Malawi and Scotland. It discusses how in Malawi and Scotland, Livingstone's memory has influenced, and continues to influence, the making of bilateral relations between these two nations. Drawing on archival and documentary sources, interviews and exhibition analysis the article argues that the memory and mythology of David Livingstone have been preserved and reconstructed to enhance international co-operation between the two nations in what could be understood as 'heritage diplomacy'. This heritage diplomacy makes claims to a mutual relationship that spans from Livingstone's arrival on Malawian territory through the colonial period and into the post-colonial present. Moreover, this heritage diplomacy functions to create and strengthen strategic bilateral economic, cultural and political ties. At the same time, it promotes and solidifies Scotland's national identity and its aspirations to sovereignty, autonomy and to the status of a global player. Commemorations, memorials, museum exhibitions, state institutions and civil organisations have become the main sites through which Livingstone's memory is invoked or reconstructed as a shared heritage to facilitate international co-operation. The article contributes to our understanding of how heritage diplomacy is mobilised by nations to reinforce relations and promote their interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Zambian mine workers used the courts and a protest campaign to resist predatory lending by Stanbic Bank. Given that debt repayment was done directly from their salaries, these workers were not necessarily advocating debt refusal or default. Neither did they expect the courts to rule in their favour. Rather, they sought to resist the bank's arbitrary changes to the terms of the loan by naming and shaming the bank, highlighting the precariousness of their employment and taking advantage of the ruling party's desperation for miners' votes in order to advance their claims on the state. The article shows how debt resistance and citizenship claims upon the state can be combined by indebted workers in their struggles against finance capital. It draws on 36 months of ethnographic research conducted among miners and their families in Mufulira and Kitwe on the Zambian Copperbelt between 2016 and 2021. [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 examines changing attitudes to afternoon and evening meals during the Zimbabwean crisis between 1997 and 2020. It uses household food economics in Harare's high-density suburbs as an entry point into the historiography of the Zimbabwean crisis. By focusing on the management of household economics, the article analyses the affordability, typologies and naming of some meals or relishes that were eaten during the crisis period. It examines the vernacular concepts of tsaona meals that came to dominate afternoon and evening meals. It further analyses the ZANU(PF) government's authoritarian vegetarianism – in which it took a pseudo-decolonial stance as it attempted to re-teach Zimbabwean palates and bowels to consume traditional small grains and vegetables in the context of food shortages and the crisis. Overall, the article provides a sensorial history of meals in Harare's high-density suburbs during the Zimbabwean crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of religion in political parties has been under-researched in South Africa. This study develops a novel theoretical framework for analysing political parties' use of religion, which distinguishes between parties' orientation towards religion (that is, religious or secular; inclusive or exclusive) across three domains: state law, the institutional rules of the party, and the informal norms that govern the actions of the party and behaviour of the party members. It uses systematic review methods to apply this framework to the scholarship on religion and political parties in South Africa. The framework and review challenge the narrative that the religious rhetoric used by the African National Congress (ANC) in the last decade has been a break with the party's secular past. On the contrary, the ANC has historically used religious rhetoric while supporting secular legislation and party rules concurrently. The review draws attention to how the National Party (NP) exercised religion during apartheid; although it worked closely with the Dutch Reformed Church, the party pursued a religious nationalism that progressively usurped the authority to determine the boundaries of authentic religious practices. Despite the religiosity of the electorate, few parties in post-apartheid South Africa advocate religious legislation, and these parties perform poorly in elections. These findings illustrate the importance of a theoretical framework that distinguishes between political parties' diverse uses of religion and secularism rather than their 'essential' orientation towards religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]