Reclaiming Zimbabwe


Book Description

"What really went wrong in Zimbabwe? The promise of liberation, human rights, democracy, development, and prosperity have been shattered by greed, state-sponsored violence, and tyranny. Yet the discourse on Zimbabwe has been polarized along racial and poli"




Great Zimbabwe


Book Description

Conditioned by local ways of knowing and doing, Great Zimbabwe develops a new interpretation of the famous World Heritage site of Great Zimbabwe. It combines archaeological knowledge, including recent material from the author’s excavations, with native concepts and philosophies. Working from a large data set has made it possible, for the first time, to develop an archaeology of Great Zimbabwe that is informed by finds and observations from the entire site and wider landscape. In so doing, the book strongly contributes towards decolonising African and world archaeology. Written in an accessible manner, the book is aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, and practicing archaeologists both in Africa and across the globe. The book will also make contributions to the broader field such as African Studies, African History, and World Archaeology through its emphasis on developing synergies between local ways of knowing and the archaeology.




Reclaiming the Nation


Book Description

This book compares the trajectories of states and societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America under neoliberalism, a time marked by serial economic crises, escalating social conflicts, the re-militarisation of North-South relations and the radicalization of social and nationalist forces. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros bring together researchers and activists from the three continents to assess the state of national sovereignty and the challenges faced by popular movements today. They show that global integration has widened social and regional inequalities within countries, exacerbated ethnic, caste, and racial conflicts, and generally reduced the bureaucratic capacities of states to intervene in a defensive way. Moreover, inequalities between the countries of the South have also widened. These structural tensions have all contributed to several distinct political trajectories among states: from fracture and foreign occupation, to radicalization and uncertain re-stabilization. This book re-draws the debate on the political economy of the contemporary South and provides students of international studies with an important collection of readings.




Land and Agrarian Transformation in Zimbabwe


Book Description

This book examines the dynamics underpinning the implementation of Zimbabwe’s fast track land reforms. By utilising ethnographic data gathered in central Zimbabwe, the book goes beyond the polarised debates which dominated scholarship in the earlier period to highlight the changing livelihoods occasioned by the land reform. The book argues that despite the challenges faced by the newly resettled farmers, the land reform has allowed landless and land-short peasants access to land and other natural resources which were previously enclosed to them under a bi-modal agrarian structure inherited from colonialism.




Rethinking and Unthinking Development


Book Description

Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa’s former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.




African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe


Book Description

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.




Suffering for Territory


Book Description

Since 2000, black squatters have forcibly occupied white farms across Zimbabwe, reigniting questions of racialized dispossession, land rights, and legacies of liberation. Donald S. Moore probes these contentious politics by analyzing fierce disputes over territory, sovereignty, and subjection in the country’s eastern highlands. He focuses on poor farmers in Kaerezi who endured colonial evictions from their ancestral land and lived as refugees in Mozambique during Zimbabwe’s guerrilla war. After independence in 1980, Kaerezians returned home to a changed landscape. Postcolonial bureaucrats had converted their land from a white ranch into a state resettlement scheme. Those who defied this new spatial order were threatened with eviction. Moore shows how Kaerezians’ predicaments of place pivot on memories of “suffering for territory,” at once an idiom of identity and entitlement. Combining fine-grained ethnography with innovative theoretical insights, this book illuminates the complex interconnections between local practices of power and the wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global discourses of development. Moore makes a significant contribution to postcolonial theory with his conceptualization of “entangled landscapes” by articulating racialized rule, situated sovereignties, and environmental resources. Fusing Gramscian cultural politics and Foucault’s analytic of governmentality, he enlists ethnography to foreground the spatiality of power. Suffering for Territory demonstrates how emplaced micro-practices matter, how the outcomes of cultural struggles are contingent on the diverse ways land comes to be inhabited, labored upon, and suffered for.




Reclaiming American Virtue


Book Description

The American commitment to promoting human rights abroad emerged in the 1970s as a surprising response to national trauma. In this provocative history, Barbara Keys situates this novel enthusiasm as a reaction to the profound challenge of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans on the right and the left looked outward for ways to restore America's moral leadership. Conservatives took up the language of Soviet dissidents to resuscitate the Cold War, while liberals sought to dissociate from brutally repressive allies like Chile and South Korea. When Jimmy Carter in 1977 made human rights a central tenet of American foreign policy, his administration struggled to reconcile these conflicting visions. Yet liberals and conservatives both saw human rights as a way of moving from guilt to pride. Less a critique of American power than a rehabilitation of it, human rights functioned for Americans as a sleight of hand that occluded from view much of America's recent past and confined the lessons of Vietnam to narrow parameters. From world's judge to world's policeman was a small step, and American intervention in the name of human rights would be a cause both liberals and conservatives could embrace.




Rights After Wrongs


Book Description

The international legal framework of human rights presents itself as universal. But rights do not exist as a mere framework; they are enacted, practiced, and debated in local contexts. Rights After Wrongs ethnographically explores the chasm between the ideals and the practice of human rights. Specifically, it shows where the sweeping colonial logics of Western law meets the lived experiences, accumulated histories, and humanitarian debts present in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Through a comprehensive survey of human rights scholarship, Shannon Morreira explores the ways in which the global framework of human rights is locally interpreted, constituted, and contested in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Musina and Cape Town, South Africa. Presenting the stories of those who lived through the violent struggles of the past decades, Morreira shows how supposedly universal ideals become localized in the context of post-colonial Southern Africa. Rights After Wrongs uncovers the disconnect between the ways human rights appear on paper and the ways in which it is possible for people to use and understand them in everyday life.




Zimbabwe in Transition


Book Description

Zimbabwe's Transition to Democracy in the post-independence era has been a very difficult one. To date, there have been a number of sustained efforts by various local, regional and international actors to move Zimbabwe towards democracy as well as attempts to find a lasting solution to the political and economic crises that seriously affected the country's progress from the late 1990s. However, these attempts have been less successful mainly because Zimbabwe has complex political and economic problems, with interlocking national, regional and international political and economic dimensions rooted in both historical and contemporary factors and developments. To understand the complexities of the challenges to Zimbabwe's transition to democracy as well as prospects for political change and democracy in the country, Zimbabwe in Transition critically examines both the historical and contemporary dynamics shaping political and economic developments in the country, taking into account voices from a broad spectrum of Zimbabwean society, including civil society, faith-based communities, the diaspora, women, community leaders, the media, youth, and regional actors such as SADC and the AU. Book jacket.