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Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Zimbabwe was beset by militarised politically-inspired violence between 2000 and 2008. How that violence has been imagined in terms of its causes, memorialisation and impact has been far from conclusive. As a derivative of this huge question that forms an important component of the framing for this dissertation, and to“visibilise” the subaltern, so to say, and to visualise “history from below”, I ask how the women of Shurugwi conceptualise it. This question has also polarised Zimbabweans into two, broadly the human rights and the redistributive, camps. But I ask, what do either of these frameworks enable or eclipse in the further understanding of the violence? Deploying genealogical and ethnographic approaches centred on the rural communities of Shurugwi that analyse the historical, socioeconomic and political factors that have engendered human rights abuses from pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial moments, the dissertation problematizes both discourses and invites a much more troubled analysis.As a way to complicate the reading and to attempt to open the analysis of the violence further, I draw on the theoretical insights from Michel Foucault’s theory on the relationship between power and war. Inverting Clausewitz’s aphorism of war as politics by other means, Foucault argues instead that politics is war by other means. This inversion allows for a nuancing of the connections between the violence and the Chimurenga trope in Zimbabwe. In this way, the labelling of farm takeovers and other force-driven indigenisation modes in the new millennium as the Third Chimurenga, I demonstrate, was not a mere emotive evocation, but was meant to situate the violence as the final stage in a sequence with, and in the same category of importance as, the earlier zvimurenga, that is the First and Second Chimurenga that targeted to uproot the colonial project. I thus argue that the violence represented, in a significant way, the continuation of war for ZANU-PF to retain power amid dwindling electoral returns. This mode further illuminates the deployment of the spectacles of punishment for the public disciplining of citizens to achieve their passivity. Throughout the dissertation the central and animating question is to what extent were women the invisible victims of the violence? This question attempts to interrogate the political role of women in the violence. I attend to this question by privileging the narratives of women. Also, by articulating an Africanist feminist discourse that contests the dominant western one which atemporalises, universalises and fixes victimhood with females, this dissertation invites a re-looking of the violence in a way that locates agency at the site of performance. In this way I show that women were not perpetual victims, but were also important political actors whose actions, however small, greatly extended the violence. To conclude, I propose the adoption of the “traditional” Shona practice of kuripa ngozi as a transitional justice mechanism to help stamp out the culture and cycles of violence and impunity that have scarred Zimbabwe especially from the late colonial to the post-colonial eras.

The core question of the study is why, after 28 years of being in power, has the ZANU-PF liberation movement failed to effectively make the transition to a democratic ZANU-PF political party. The study adds to the debate on the role of liberation movements in the furthering of human rights and democratisation in Africa by tackling the much ignored perspective of a blocked transition that the movements such as the ZANU-PF are culpable for. Looks at what internal factors (within Zimbabwe) have contributed to this blocked transition, examines how the behaviour or response of Zimbabwe’s regional neighbours (SADC), been a contributing factor to this dilemma and questions the extent to which the wider African continent been party to this mayhem of the ZANU-PF’s stalled transition. / A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Gilles Cistac, Faculty of Law, Universidade Eduardo Modlande, Maputo, Mocambique. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / This study examines the challenges of coordination in Zimbabwe’s power sharing government (2009 to 2013) between ZANU PF and the two MDC formations in the implementation of policies that cross ministerial jurisdictions under ministers from different political parties. The analysis was done through the theoretical lens of Shepsle and Laver (1996) that a cabinet minister as the political head of a major government department have the formal discretion of any policy issues under his jurisdiction and uses his or her own power to influence the substance of any specific proposals that matters within his or her own jurisdiction. I empirically examined the restructuring of the Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company and the Green Fuel Project where the outcome of the projects required joint working between ministries controlled by different political parties. Green Fuel is a large scale ethanol producing factory constructed at a cost of US$600 million as a partnership between the Ministry of Agriculture and a private investor, but for the blended fuel to be consumed as an end product needed collaboration from the Ministry of Power and Energy Development to put out legislation enforcing mandatory blending. The Minister of Energy and Power Development ruled out mandatory blending of petrol and ethanol that left the US$600 million Green Fuels ethanol projector ground its operations and imperilled 5000 direct jobs the company had created arguing that the government does not make public policy for individuals and that the project was started without the consultation of the MDC. He also argued that the bio ethanol project affected communities in various ways including dispossession of their land, the slashing of their crops, killing of their cattle and the dispossession from their land. The restructuring of ZISCO entailed the partial sale of the government owned entity spearheaded by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. It went through a bidding process and 54% of shares were transferred from the state to EAHL and it was renamed New Zim Steel at a ceremony presided over by the head of state. Critical to ZISCO resuming operations was the transfer of mineral rights and the Minister of Mines Obert Mpofu refused to do so arguing that he did not know about the ZISCO deal, was excluded from the negotiation process of the agreement deal despite that the agreement was concluded by cabinet. In both instances, policies that emanated from a ministry controlled by a minister of another political party did not achieve their horizontal objectives.

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 2017 / In 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. / GR2018

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.

This comparative study analyzes two rebel groups that ended their respective civil wars through negotiations and came to power in the first post-war elections. The two cases being the African National Congress in South Africa and the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe. Specifically the thesis examines rebel institutions and behaviors during armed conflict to assess in what ways they were tolerant or intolerant. The reason for the focus on tolerance and intolerance is that it is viewed as an important factor in how these two parties have related to political opposition after the war. This study shows that there are several similarities in terms of the presence of intolerance in the two cases, which leads to the conclusion that levels of tolerance during the armed conflict can not, on its own, explain the diverging paths of the two cases in the post-war period.

In the early 2000 the government of Zimbabwe was targeted by sanction and restrictive measures imposed by the United States and the European Union. Sanctions have for decades been used as a method to delegitimize and isolate wrongdoers in order to promote democratic transitioning. Unfortunately, in many cases this foreing policy method has failed to transform authoritarian ruling into democracy as the intentions, purposes and outcomes of sanctions have not been aligned. With a methodological qualitative approach, this study will utilize a case study research design with an semi structured interview approach to investigate the effects of sanctions against the government of Zimbabwe. Does sanctions result in the desired outcome? What consequences are caused by the design of sanctions for third world states? Sanctions have challenged the Government of Zimbabwe’s response to economic crises, unemployment and polarisation of internal politics together with many other outcomes. However, the ZANU-PF leadership have surprisingly gained tremendous support in the south African region in their anti-imperialistic fight against the west. In addition, this study questions and criticizes the imposition of sanctions upon weaker states by wealthy and dominant nations in world politics. To support the argument that sanctions operate in contradiction to their intentions and purposes, a detailed empirical examination and analysis of these four categories will be presented: political effects, economy, internal conflict and policy making.

A lot of research on the Shona novel has focussed on the influence of orature and the Bible. It has also focused on the influence that the Southern Rhodesia Literature Bureau had on its development. This research has endeavoured to highlight the reliability and validity of the Shona novel as a historical document. The dependability of the novel as an alternative site from which history can be deciphered is corroborated by historical documents. The history that comes out in the Shona novels that have been studied covers the pre-colonial period right up to the post-independence period. Among the issues that come up in the research that relate to history are the Rozvi state under Chirisamhuru, the economic activities in pre-colonial Shona society that include raids for cattle and women as well as hunting and external trade. The Shona novel has also proved historically reliable in as far as it relates to the navigability of the Save River. It has highlighted the living conditions and the wages that Blacks got in colonial Rhodesia and exposed the land imbalances that came into existence because of the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which left Blacks living on the periphery and in overcrowded, hot and dry reserves that were hardly fertile. The Rhodesian authorities, as the novels have exposed, denied most Blacks access to education. When schools were provided, they were poorly staffed and those on farms functioned more as labour pools than schools. The novel has also proved its dependability when it highlights the early days of the nationalist movement and the unilateral declaration of independence of 1965. It has also brought to the fore the birth of the armed struggle and the Rhodesian responses to it. The Rhodesians responded politically and militarily. Politically, it was through the Internal Settlement Agreement of March 1978. Militarily they moved people into 'protected villages' in an effort to deny guerrillas access to food and clothing. The novel also highlights the post-independence period especially political intolerance. / African Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Zimbabwe as a country has successively been faced with a number of challenges that others argue to be a result of either poor governance or colonial imbalances. However, despite the contestation with regards to the cause of the crisis situation, several armed struggles continued to wreck the economy. This continuous collapse of the economy resulted in the ruling government slowly becoming unpopular to the people, thus it paved way to the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC); an opposition political party to the dominant Zimbabwe African National Union –Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). The formation of the opposition party then triggered tensions, which later saw the March 2008 elections’ tension calling for a power-sharing agreement. Therefore, it is against this background that the research critically examines the role played by Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in conflict transformation since the formation of the unity government. In addition, the study is also conducted against the background of scholarly interest to understand the relationship between CSOs and the Zimbabwean government, during the period that marked the introduction of the inclusive government 2009-2012. The study will also look at the key competencies of CSOs, which are complimentary to the process of conflict transformation and further outline the need for active participation from CSOs and other stakeholders to the process. In addition, it is worth noting that while CSOs make numerous attempts to vigorously participate in conflict transformation, factors such as restrictive government policies, lack of funding and government interference continually undermines their contribution. Autonomous and sustainable operations of CSOs in such limiting environments is virtually impossible hence, there is need for drastic measures to be employed in order to address this contradiction. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2013.