Missionaries, migrants, and the Manyika: The invention of ethnicity in Zimbabwe

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 2 April, 1984Over the last twenty years there have been all too many conflicts in Zimbabwean African politics - conflicts between and within African parties and guerrilla movements, divisions amongst voters, strains within the cabinet of the government of independent Zimbabwe. There have also arisen a number of schools of interpretation of such divisions. Some see them in terms of class conflicts; others however see them in terms of ethnicity. They invoke not only the allegedly 'traditional' hostility of 'the Ndebele' and 'the Shona', but also an asserted conflict between Shona sub-ethnicities, the so-called 'Korekore', 'Zeruru', 'Karanga', 'Kalanga' and 'Manyika’…. Analyses such as these raise two main questions in an historian's mind. The first question, to which I shall return briefly at the end of this chapter, is whether they provide an accurate explanation for recent conflicts. The second question, to which most of this chapter will be devoted, is from where the idea of such entities as the 'Manyika', the 'Zezuru' and the rest has come. These entities certainly do not represent pre-colonial 'historical fact', nor can they in the present be properly described as 'tribes' or 'clans', no matter that both Africans and European commentators employ these terms. Yet they evidently have come to possess a subjective reality in the minds not only of commentators but of participants. How has this come to pass

Chingaira Makoni's Head: Myth, History, and the Colonial Experience

Discusses the construction of history in the Makoni district of Zimbabwe. Explains his approach by juxtaposing it with his earlier publication, _Revolt in Southern Rhodesia_

The Dualism of Contemporary Traditional Governance and the State

In many parts of the world, people live in “dual polities”: they are governed by the state and organize collective decision making within their ethnic community according to traditional rules. We examine the substantial body of works on the traditional–state dualism, focusing on the internal organization of traditional polities, their interaction with the state, and the political consequences of the dualism. We find the descriptions of the internal organization of traditional polities scattered and lacking comparative perspective. The literature on the interaction provides a good starting point for theorizing the strategic role of traditional leaders as intermediaries, but large potentials for inference remain underexploited. Studies on the consequences of “dual polities” for democracy, conflict, and development are promising in their explanatory endeavor, but they do not yet allow for robust conclusions. We therefore propose an institutionalist research agenda addressing the need for theory and for systematic data collection and explanatory approaches

"A country with land but no habitat": women, violent accumulation and negative-value in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins

In the work of Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, land is shown to be a complex and contested resource to which the typically abject fates of her female protagonists are inextricably bound. As she put it in a 2001 interview shortly before the publication of her final novel, “the connection between women and land in Zimbabwe is negative”. This article situates Vera’s work in the context of debates over Zimbabwean land reform, and considers examples of how the “negative” connection between women and land is articulated in her fiction through contrasting leitmotifs of abjection and habitat, culminating in the cautiously redemptive conclusion of her last published novel, The Stone Virgins (2002). The discussion draws on Silvia Federici’s work on women, the body and primitive accumulation and on Jason Moore’s theory of negative-value in the capitalist world-ecology, to account for why, in Vera’s work, the female body is invariably positioned, abjectly, at the nexus of colonial governance and what David Moore has described as Zimbabwe’s postcolonial regime of “violent accumulation”