'Kutonga Kwaro Gamba': Politics and the renaming of defence cantonments in the ‘Second Republic’ in Zimbabwe

Like Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa, Zimbabwe was one of the countries that the imperial mission had targeted to establish as a settler economy. The objective of creating a white settler colony was evident in the entire colonial system, including place naming. Generally, place naming served political functions of declaring power and authority over the entire colony. While white minority rule ended in 1980, it, however, left some symbolic imprints on the cultural landscape of the independent nation, Zimbabwe. Given that colonialism entrenched white identity on the cultural landscape, this article interrogates efforts by the Mnangagwa government, which assumed political office in November 2017, to dislodge Rhodesian memory from the cultural landscape. This article demonstrates that decolonisation is not an event but an ongoing process that political elites execute whenever they want to serve present political purposes. It interrogates the dialectics of political power and remembering the past in Zimbabwe during the aftermath of the military-induced political change of November 2017. The re-inscription of the landscape that the Mnangagwa regime executed specifically targeted military cantonments throughout the country. This decolonisation process was ostensibly done to dismantle white identities from the cultural landscape. However, this article argues that the place renaming exercise served to write back the liberation war legacy into mainstream history, symbolically declared the regime’s political power, and served to legitimise the political status quo. These political purposes had roots in the succession race and the internal party politics within the Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU- PF) that preceded the political transition.Peer Reviewe

‘Where Art Thou?’: Ethnocracy, Toponymic Silence, and Toponymic Subjugation in the Harare Commemorative Landscapes During the Mugabe Era (1980–2017)

This article explores the post-colonial national identity formation using place names that commemorate the nation’s past in Zimbabwe. Place name alterations that the new political elites implemented at independence in 1980 were aimed at disassembling relics of the deposed regime and craft a new national identity. The commemorative landscapes of Harare, as a national capital, constitute a strategic medium in the constitution of national identity. Ethnicity dominated the political landscape in Zimbabwe. The two main political parties, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), have been aligned with the two supertribes, Shona and Ndebele, respectively. The article explores how the ruling ZANU (PF) government whose leadership was largely Shona used a meta-narrative modelled around discourses of exclusionary autochthony and a partial presentation of the liberation war history that projected ZAPU as having made an insignificant contribution to the liberation war to construct a national identity. It concludes that the use of exclusionary definitions of belonging and a one-sided presentation of the war past that projected ZANU as having contributed more to the liberation war entrenched Shona ethnic chauvinistic tendencies and propagated ZANU (PF) political hegemony. Using the theoretical lens of critical toponymy, the article argues that politically motivated place renaming efforts usually select from the past aspects that serve present political purposes.Peer Reviewe

A sociolinguistics analysis of school names in selected urban centres during the colonial period in Zimbabwe, 1890-1979

This study analyses the different social variables that conditioned the naming of schools during the colonial period in Zimbabwe (1890-1979). The study collects and analyses the names given to schools in Salisbury (including Chitungwiza), Umtali and Fort Victoria the colonial period in Zimbabwe. The study adopts Geosemiotics, a theory propounded by Scollon and Scollon (2003), together with insights from Semantics, Semiotics and Pragmatics in the analysis of school names. Critical Discourse Analysis is used a method of data analysis. One of the main findings of the study is that place names are discourses of power which are used to express and legitimise power because they are part of the symbolic emblems of power. It was possible to ‘read’ the politics during the colonial period in Zimbabwe through the place names used in the colonial society. Both Europeans and Africans made conscious efforts to imbue public places with meanings. Overally, people who have access to power have ultimate control over place naming in any society. In this case, they manipulate place naming system in order to inscribe their own meanings and versions of history in the toponomastic landscape. The second finding is that place names are critical place-making devices that can be used to create imagined boundaries between people living in the same environment. Place names are useful discourses that index sameness and differences of people in a nation-state. Place names exist in interaction and kinship with other discourses in making places and imposing an identity on the landscape. Semiotics, Semantics and Pragmatics are instrumental in the appreciation of the meaning conveyed by school names. This study makes an important contribution to onomastic research in the sense that its findings can be generalised to other place naming categories during the colonial period in Zimbabwe. This study provides background information on how place naming was done during thecolonial period in Zimbabwe. This makes it significant because it provides insights on place naming in other states that went through the colonial experience, in Africa or elsewhere in the world.African LanguagesD. Lit. et Phil. (African Languages

African philosophy of development as expressed in Shona proverbs

The paper examined the African philosophy of development as it is expressed in Shona proverbs. It analysed the African people’s perspectives with regards to the question of development as expressed in their arts and beliefs. The proverbs analysed in this article candidly express perspectives on development among the Shona people of Zimbabwe. There has always been an intricate relationship between art and life and this paper is mainly based on the assumption that African oral art forms are used to formulate models of development. Particular reference is given to the socio-economic aspect of development and how this is emphasised and outlined in Shona proverbial lore. The Afrocentric theory is used in our analysis of the subject under study. The researchers argued that the aspects of Ubuntu and communalism that are emphasised in most of the proverbs to be analysed contribute a lot to development and we consequently argued that there is a lot to be drawn from Shona proverbs and that can be used to solve Africa’s numerous problems, the socio- economic problem being chief among them.Keywords: Proverbs, Shon

‘Let us make Zimbabwe in my own name’: Place naming and Mugabeism in Zimbabwe

This article adopts a scalar perspective to explore the social construction of cultural geographies that communicate a political ideology that the Mugabe regime created in Zimbabwe. It examines scale-related plitics as a governmental institutional political practice which the Mugabe regime executed in order to create and institutionalise a Mugabe personality cult in Zimbabwe, widely known in the literature as Mugabeism. In Zimbabwe, the name Robert Mugabe features the most in the cultural landscape when compared to any other Zimbabwean political actor. This cannot be politically innocent or neutral. Toponymic inscription is critical in creating politically charged linguistic landscapes which communicate intended political agendas. Place names are part of the linguistic tokens that constitute the linguistic landscape. The general public’s conceptualisation of reality is partly shaped by information that comes to them in visual form. This article deploys the three facets of scale, as they relate to the components of the built environment, namely size, level and relation. Through adopting a scalar lens, this article interrogates toponymic strategies that the Mugabe regime employed in order to spatialise Mugabe’s political power