The search for political legitimacy : ZANU-PF's mobilization techniques in contemporary Zimbabwe.

This research took an ethnographic view in understanding the relationship between rural people and ZANU-PF in post-2000 Bindura South electoral constituency in Zimbabwe. I seek to understand the complexity with which rural people come to make political choices through discussing ZANU-PF’s techniques in the maintenance of political power despite the loss of political legitimacy. The complicity between ZANU-PF and rural people is uncomfortably created through these techniques which include mobilizing historical claims, youth violence on villagers, partisan distribution of economic resources, surveillance and spying to create subjects who conform to ZANU-PF’s political will. I have argued that rural people’s circumstances should be understood through an analysis of their everyday lives and livelihoods. Findings have shown that rural people make political choices because they are life choices there are slight possibilities for alternative political action in rural Zimbabwe

Re-living liberation war militia bases: violence, history and the making of political subjectivies in Zimbabwe

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology), March 2017In this study, I explore the ways in which legacies of how and where the Zimbabwean liberation war was fought, the landscapes of the struggle, and the violence associated with it were invoked at district and village level by ZANU PF as it sought to instill loyalty, fear and discipline through its supporters and the youth militia. Although they were invoking memories of former guerrilla bases, and the violence often associated with them, the bases set up by ZANU-PF youth militia in 2008 were not established on the actual sites of former guerrilla camps. However, since then, ZANU-PF war veterans in the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) have been returning to the actual sites of the 1970s liberation war guerrilla bases in order to teach senior staff the history of the liberation struggle, drawing together former liberation war collaborators or ‘messengers’ who assisted guerrilla fighters during the war, as well as contemporary unemployed ZANU-PF youth. They used these often highly choreographed events to talk about battles during war, to perform liberation songs, and to explain how ancestors assisted them during the struggle. I examine these recent events, and argue that both the establishment of the new militia bases in the post-2000 period, and invocation of the old, former guerrilla bases dating to the Chimurenga period are deliberate efforts by ZANU-PF to make violence, geography and landscapes do political/ideological work by forging political subjectivities and loyalties that sustain its rule. In stressing these continuities between the 1970s guerrilla bases, and their invocation and reproduction in post-2000 Zimbabwe, I am interested in what the base enables and does in terms of the formation of political subjectivities. I aim to show through critical analysis of the political history and local accounts of the second Chimurenga why political subjectivity and the base are important in the re-examination of both the history and the literature on this history. The base allows for a sophisticated reading of political subjectivity in that it was the space through which the grand narrative of the liberation struggle hit the ground, entered into people’s homes, and constituted a complex relationship between political education, conscientisation, freedom and violence. The liberation war base was meant to make people inhabit subjectivities characterized by bravery, resistance, and resilience when fighting the might of Rhodesian army. In the post-colonial context, the base served the purpose of annihilating the kind of rebellious subjectivities inhabited during the liberation war and replacing them with those characterized by fear, pretense, and quietude. This substitution explains the subjectivities that exist in the post-independence rural population and reveals the purpose that electoral violence has served in Zimbabwe’s post-independence period, especially through the base. However people have also engaged with these landscapes outside of ZANU-PF politicking and this has produced critical subjectivities where people challenge ZANU-PF dominant narratives.GR201

Fake-talk and the Spaza Shop: A Fake Food Furore and the Spectre of Public Health Emergencies in South Africa

At the end of August 2018, a controversy erupted in South Africa. Accusations of potentially poisonous ‘fake food’ had been circulating on social media for a month or so, and by early September reports were common on South African news programmes. Accusations fell at the door of foreign-run spaza shops (convenience stores), some of which were looted and their shopkeepers harmed. Many commentators read these events as another outbreak of the xenophobic violence that has flared up across South African townships for more than a decade. Our reading is different. In this Research Article, rather than dismissing accusations of fake-ness as merely a pretext for popular protest and violence, we tackle the question of what work ‘fake-talk’ does. We show that in this instance, accusations of fake-ness brought a distinctive urgency to events, framing what might otherwise have been seen as concerns about inequality in the language of a public health crisis. In response, a state normally hesitant to act on citizens’ long-standing complaints about ‘the duplicity of foreigners’ intervened with a new speed and decisiveness. ‘Fake-talk’, we conclude, is an important site of inquiry because of how it may enable certain actions, regardless of whether suspicions are founded