'Progress' in Zimbabwe?

The Past and Present of a Concept and a Country

David Moore, Norma Kriger, Brian Raftopoulos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317983088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Zimbabwe's severe crisis - and a possible way out of it with a transitional government, and the new era for which it prepares the ground - demands a coherent scholarly response. 'Progress' can be employed as an organising theme across many disciplinary approaches to Zimbabwe's societal devastation. At wider levels too, the concept of progress is fitting. It underpins 'modern', 'liberal' and 'radical' perspectives of development pervading the social sciences and humanities. Yet perceptions of 'progress' are subject increasingly to intensive critical inquiry. Their gruesome end is signified in the political projects of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF. John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia indicates this.

It is expected that participants will engage directly in debates about how the idea of 'progress' has informed their disciplines - from political science and history to labour and agrarian studies, and then relate these arguments to the Zimbabwean case in general and their research in particular.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Progress, power, and violent accumulation in Zimbabwe

David Moore

Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Zimbabwe's recent travails have challenged the concept of progress as it is popularly conceived, as they have forced social scientists to revisit many of the verities of nationalist history and the initial euphoria of Zimbabwean ‘liberation’. Critics of ‘fast-track’ land reform and patriotism, however, have been as simplistic as the regime's academic praise singers, and often simply turn celebratory scholarship upside down. Historically rooted and specifically applied concepts of primitive accumulation can assist the understanding of the development of Zimbabwe's coercive networks of accumulation and their more recent manifestations, but they do not solve the problems of how to lessen violence and deepen democracy in the short term.

As Roger Southall raised the idea for this special edition of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies many years ago, the popular political theorist John Gray's gloomy reflections on the idea of ‘progress’ seemed to be very relevant to Zimbabwe. Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007) spoke of theories of ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ — surely ‘scientific’ syntheses of liberal philosophies of ‘progress’ in ‘lesser developed’ places such as Africa — as dreams. For Gray they are ‘not scientific hypothesis but theodicies — narratives of providence and redemption — presented in the jargon of social science’. As such they are part of the economistic (sometimes ‘neo-liberal’) ‘beliefs that dominated the last two decades… residues of the faith in providence that supported classical political economy’ (2007, 75). Perhaps the political, economic and social collapse of Zimbabwe amidst the ability of its rulers to maintain — and perhaps even to gain — power, buttresses Gray's pessimism. Closer than Gray to Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin wrote that events in his homeland moved him to wonder if ‘the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion’ (2006, 51–2).

It was in such a context that this issue's theme — and that of the approximately 150 person November 2010 Bulawayo conference that was its prelude¹ — came to be. A society in which the economy had plummeted to such an extent that the state no longer had a currency in its name, and even the thinnest form of democracy (elections) seemed still-born in the form of a ‘transitional inclusive government’, might have been a good place to test the optimism of believers in progress.

Aside from those who received middling or large plots of land in the ‘fast-track’ reform process,² a small elite within the accumulation networks within and beyond the ZANU-PF party, state and society complex benefitting from the tacky triumvirate of ‘fast-tracked’ land, finagled forex and bloodied diamonds (eg Mawowa and Matongo 2010), and perhaps a few in the top echelons of the diaspora, by late 2011 for whom in Zimbabwe had ‘progress’ unfolded? Very few indeed, it would seem. The vast majority had lost their jobs to ‘work’ in the informal sector if they were lucky, had migrated to South Africa and further abroad to work — often informally too — if they were somewhat luckier (although leaving Zimbabwe for South Africa put migrants at risk of xenophobia), while a significant minority who kept up their political opposition in Zimbabwe (or were even suspected of voting against the ruling party) and its counterpart in civil society (see Helliker in this edition for important theoretical considerations) suffered violent abuse or death (Sachikonye 2011; Staunton 2009; Orner and Holmes 2011). Many died from easily avoidable illnesses, such as those in the cholera epidemic of 2008–9, or ones that can be kept at bay in ‘normal’ circumstances. To be sure, the secular celebrants of the ‘land to the poor’ litany maintain their beliefs (Scoones et al. 2010; cf Rutherford in this edition³) but the statistical rebuffs to what appears to be their positivist rectitude are incubating. In general, even the most sanguine of those following the varied dicta of the ‘national democratic revolution’ — such as South Africa's former president Thabo Mbeki (2001; Moore in this issue) — could not apply the laws of deferred socialism to Zimbabwe easily, while John Hoffman in these pages (perhaps with post-NDR as well as post-liberal lines) can only offer us the hope that the momentum of progress, albeit stalled, has taken root in Zimbabwe and will appear more obviously again: but even in a post-Mugabe era there will be ‘tremendous problems to overcome’, needing a ‘hard headed notion of progress, rooted in painful and complex realities’.

‘Accumulation’ is a ‘hard-headed notion’ indeed, as are those of power and the violence that accompanies it when widespread consent and legitimacy disappear, to emerge again only with a combination of coercion and patronage (see Kriger in this edition). Thus this issue — veering somewhat from the more varied topics at the Bulawayo conference — has moved towards bringing together the ideas of accumulation and power. As the time of publication approached, so too did the mirage of elections to take Zimbabwe out of its inclusive government impasse, and thus the reality of ZANU PF's increased intimidation: this time, the new twist seemed to be that marauding urban youth gangs headed by ZANU PF affiliates sought to control the once laisser-faire informal marketers captured so well in Chagonda's contribution to this issue (Moyo 2011), as well as deterring activists and electors from their preferred party choices.

As the transitional inclusive government or the ‘government of national unity’ mired deeper into its deadlock while a parallel form of governance emerged (Kriger, this issue), the links between violence and accumulation — and lack of the latter for some: those without access to alternative accumulation possibilities are easily recruited to brutal enterprises such as the Chipangano, as are they to the National Youth Service (contrary to Shumba 2006, 2010 more akin to a recruiting ground for torturers than a relatively benign site for ‘identity construction’) and the longstanding Green Bomber militias — were tightening as never before. Yet even this connection — a ‘rational’ and ‘logical’ association between the meting out of cruelty and the gathering of often excessive wealth amidst extreme scarcity — may still lock us into the development theodicy of which Gray speaks. We can attempt to explain Zimbabwe's violence in terms of the original sin of primary or primitive accumulation if we are Marxists, or the painful transition to modernity if we are liberals: as Ahluwalia, Bethlehem, and Ginio (2007, 2) take it from Mamdani, the ‘notion of historical progress… ensures that our modern sensibility is not repulsed by the endemic violence that has marked the modern condition’, but when that violence seems senseless — if it ‘cannot be justified by progress’ — it is much more disturbing; it becomes explained away as ‘evil’, a category too often applied to the Third World ‘other’ by denizens of wealthy capitalist countries whose historical memories have disappeared. Perhaps explaining is a lesser evil — or a better religion — than explaining away, so social scientists continue in that attempt. In any case, explaining means teasing out particularities rather than resting on general platitudes such as ‘primitive accumulation is always violent’ (the ‘materialist’ social scientists), ‘Africans are always violent’ (the racists), and ‘liberation wars always lead to violent and predatory ruling parties and/or classes’ (a version of the liberal view). Perhaps too, the movement of ‘progress’ can only be measured by examining standards of life rather than whether or not humanity's spiritual essence has improved: saints are quite often poor.

Those who live in Zimbabwe and who study it once invested much ‘hope’ for its progress on the possibility of its settler-colonial heritage of relatively advanced forces and relations of production negating the need for more violence than that expended in the first phase of primitive accumulation (the settler conquest) and the struggle to spread its gains to a new generation of differently coloured politicians and citizens (the ‘liberation’ war). In 1980, many feared the supposedly ‘Marxist-Leninist Terrorist’ Robert Mugabe (although not a few ‘Marxist-Leninists’ were fooled too). Yet his kind, if stilted (and, in retrospect, not so soothing), words on the dawn of independence — ‘if yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you… the wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten… we are all Zimbabweans now’ seemed to dissipate those qualms as Mugabe was compared favourably with figures of Mother Theresa's stature (De Waal 1990; Kilgore 2009). When those dreams were dissipated during ZANU PF's ‘third chimurenga’, many were surprised. Robert Mugabe's bromides were remembered with a bitter nostalgia and he was turned quickly into a mendacious, if not mad, dictator. Some mourned the metamorphosis of ‘nationalist’ to ‘patriotic’ history,⁴ (see Ian Phimister's account in these pages: for him there was no metamorphosis, but a nearly natural evolution in nationalist history — and histories of nationalism as some define them — far too silent on class and contradictions that we all should have seen coming) while others with some sense of that discipline saw the roots of all the current problems in the violence of the national/patriotic war. Yet many of those who wrote against the celebratory nationalist current were prone to seeing a mirror image.

Sithole and Makumbe, for example, wrote that the when the liberation war's ‘philosophy of annihilation’ was ‘complimented [sic] with the monopoly of state power at independence’ it was only a matter of time until violence — especially against opposition forces — resumed (1997, 133; see others cited in Moore 2009). This is a rather simplistic explanation: Uganda did not have a war of liberation, but had lots of violence well after independence; the Democratic Republic of the Congo's continuing devastation and death is not a result of battles against colonialism — and has elections, for what they are worth, alongside the simmering war; Mozambique experienced an anti-colonial war against the Portuguese and Frelimo and Renamo fought tenaciously thereafter — but Frelimo now bears faint resemblance, at least in the way it dispenses its state's monopoly on force, to ZANU PF. Nor has South Africa's freedom struggle led to a Zimbabwean-style denouement. To be sure, there were many characteristics of the Zimbabwean nationalist war that veered it far away from the trajectory of a ‘just war’, with propensities carrying through to the present (Kriger 1992, 2003). However, these traits and tendencies were uneven, and contested — and they did not proceed to the next era inevitably.

Other currents critical of the nationalist-patriotic hegemony over history emphasise so many bizarre ideologies within what might be called ‘Mugabeism’ that even those who attempt to chronicle it get confused: is Mugabeism a pernicious blend of nativism and Stalinism, or has it reinvented the old tropes of tribalism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2006, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2011)? Perhaps these confusing complexities, however, were also embedded in the nationalist strain of historiography, which seemed to take any espoused ideology on face value: on Mugabe's rise to the pinnacle of power Terence Ranger said he was a radical ‘in the Castro fashion’ (1980, 83), just as far to the left as the young Turks in the Zimbabwe People's Army (ZIPA) he had thrown out to Mozambique's prisons a few years before (Mhanda 2011): they needed teaching, Ranger said (1980, 89), although how that was to take place under incarceration was never revealed. Just a few years earlier an American emissary to Mugabe's own place of restriction in Quelimane (a pleasant house, however, not a prison) was impressed with his commitment to democracy and his antipathy to war, Mozambican militarism, and Soviet-style rule (Solarz in Moore, forthcoming). Politicians and diplomats were bamboozled just as easily as nationalist historians.

It is clear one cannot understand the Mugabe mode of accumulation by attempting to read his ideological mutterings and discerning whether or not his party follows them. However, if one examines the ways in which a historically particular Zimbabwean blend of violence and accumulation came together during the anti-settler struggle, a strand of continuity can be perceived that takes us right into the zones of accumulation outlined in different but complementary ways in this issue by Kriger, Dawson and Kelsall, and Magure.

There is a section in Lloyd Sachikonye's understated but very powerful When a State Turns on its Citizens entitled ‘coercive accumulation’ (2011, 37–40) where links are established between the Zimbabwean elite's ‘propensity for acquisitiveness’ and a ‘regression to coercion and brazen expropriation and extortion of property in clear violation of existing law and practice’ in the post-2000 period. This concept could be extended to encompass the war of liberation and the violence between the parties and their predecessors in the 1960s to draw the lines historically and thematically. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the trade unions and nascent nationalist parties engaged in much violence, as Scarnecchia (2008) documents and Sachikonye notes. Scarnecchia, however, puts the propensity for acquisitiveness — for largesse offered by American union federations and, later, by the American state — close to the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Progress, power, and violent accumulation in Zimbabwe
• 2. ZANU PF politics under Zimbabwe's ‘Power-Sharing’ Government
• 3. Narratives of progress: Zimbabwean historiography and the end of history
• 4. Civil society and state-centred struggles
• 5. Anti-developmental patrimonialism in Zimbabwe
• 6. Foreign investment, black economic empowerment and militarised patronage politics in Zimbabwe
• 7. Teachers' and bank workers' responses to Zimbabwe's crisis: uneven effects, different strategies
• 8. ‘New realities’ and tenure reforms: land-use in worker-peasant communities of south-western Zimbabwe (1940s–2006)
• 9. Two perspectives on Zimbabwe's National Democratic Revolution: Thabo Mbeki and Wilfred Mhanda
• 10. Reflections on the concept of progress — and Zimbabwe
• 11. Shifting the debate on land reform, poverty and inequality in Zimbabwe, an engagement with Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities
• Index