Originally posted on Material Culture of Politics in Africa:
In a previous blog, I talked about why material culture matters in terms of conservation: political ephemera — especially from opposition groups — is particularly vulnerable to loss. This matters because we then only tell part of a story, we fail to fully grasp how contestation…
Originally posted on Material Culture of Politics in Africa:
This picture comes from my first visit to Zimbabwe in 1991. I was fascinated by the omnipresent President. A friend ‘rescued’ this picture from an office where it had been abandoned, folded up and in tatters, replaced by a newer, shinier, framed portrait. Even though it…
Originally posted on Material Culture of Politics in Africa:
As the images in our Flickr group show African political life is vibrant, colourful and intense. In recent decades we have seen the emergence of powerful political reform movements, NGO campaigns speaking both to world and local audiences, and much exhortation aimed at voters, drinkers, and…
An intriguing press release issued after the referendum result was announced. Surprisingly little about land, quite a lot about ‘governance’.
On the 12-13th of February 2000, Zimbabwe underwent a novel experience – a constitutional referendum. Even more astonishingly, the government lost. The story of the referendum has been told many times (including in my book). But the imagery tells its own story. Here are some of the newspaper adverts:
Another miscellaneous collection of articles, mainly from the mid-2000s. I hope more students seek to write on traditional authority and politics in Zimbabwe. Such an important and complex topic that we need to understand better. https://www.dropbox.com/s/089kj9mzwgrn13j/chiefs%20mid%202000s%20newspaper%20articles.pdf?dl=0
Zimbabwe’s ‘Matabeleland crisis’ is now well documented in academic sources as well as primary reports, plays, novels, poetry and the visual arts. But debate rages about its significance and how Zimbabwe should deal with this trauma. At the same time, an odd myth persists, that people at the time ‘didn’t know’ what was happening. But…
In 1994, Oxfam UK published a slim but glossy booklet outlining the costs of liberalisation and structural adjustment in Zimbabwe – a policy known as ESAP, introduced in 1991. In particular, the report raised concerns about the impact of health user fees on vulnerable Zimbabwean groups, which drew media attention and an angry response from…
The 2018 election saw a number of candidates running as ‘independents’ but this was not the first time that this had happened in Zimbabwe. A number of Independent candidates also ran in elections in the late 1990s. I wrote about this at the time, and in my book, but here I attach some primary documents. …
I got to know Arnold Payne via ZimRights in the mid-1990s. He was a lovely man. Utterly committed to his country. I learned about the MZWP through him – and without him, it might well have dropped entirely off the political agenda. But despite being talked about since 1912 (!), it has not materialised. I’m…
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