Becoming Zimbabwe: A history from the pre-colonial period to 2008, edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo, Harare and Johannesburg: Weaver Press and Jacana, 2009; pp. xxxiv and 260. £22.95 (pb). ISBN 9781779220837.
This excellent single volume of Zimbabwean history is not only a major contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between history, nationalism and state power in post-colonial Africa. As a highly effective riposte to the use made by Zimbabwe's rulers of ‘nationalist’ or ‘patriotic’ history to justify their dictatorial rule, this study by eight of the country's leading historians (many of them now displaced, with millions of others, into the Zimbabwean disapora) it is also a successful intervention in the struggle for Zimbabwe's future, in which the power to write ‘history’ is an important weapon.
‘Becoming Zimbabwe’ succeeds through its scrupulous attentiveness to historical research and in presenting a coherent and accessible narrative that synthesises major historiographical debates and original research in a considered way. The authors constantly emphasise that ‘Zimbabwe’ is the result of an unpredictable process of historical change, arising from complex interactions between local and external forces. For example, Gerald Mazarire's exemplary summary of the pre-1880 period stresses the extent to which ethnic categories such as ‘Shona’, which later gained such political salience, had no meaning at this time. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni similarly stresses the ambiguities and contradictions in African reactions to the imposition of colonial rule. Although his chapter provides a useful summary of the classic debates on African resistance to colonialism, he strongly rejects the tendency of nationalist histories to suppress the diversity of African agency:
Thus, beneath what Ranger called the ‘African voice’ subsisted complex African reactions and responses ranging widely from outright resistance to taking full part in the colonial economy as labourers; deploying pre-colonial doctrines of political legitimacy, entitlement and inheritance to contesting colonial dispossession; imbibing colonial claims of civility and fighting for inclusion in the sphere of liberal rights and democracy that were a preserve of white settlers. (p. 69)
There is an instructive (generational) contrast between the younger Ndlovu-Gatsheni's ‘post-colonial’ approach and Alois Mlambo's more traditional narrative of the period between 1945 and Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965. Whilst stressing the diversity of social forces in black Rhodesian society, Mlambo critically assesses African leaders in terms of their contribution to the (ultimate) achievement of self-rule: those who flirted with multi-racial politics in the 1950s, spending time at ‘tea parties and public lectures featuring paternalistic whites’ (p. 96), are unfavourably compared to those dedicated to the proper business of struggle. More generally, ‘Becoming Zimbabwe’, whilst effectively discrediting crude nationalist historiographies, is itself torn between the wholesale deconstruction of a national meta-narrative and the desire to construct an alternative, more inclusive but still ‘national’ story.
For the UDI period, separate chapters are devoted to ‘social and economic developments’ and to the war itself, an understandable but rather artificial division, given the evident interaction between the two areas. The authors successfully incorporate recent historiographical work in, for example, their nuanced account of the divisions in the liberation movements and the diverse reactions to the conflict by both black and white Zimbabweans. At times however, more traditional hierarchies are evident, for example, in the claim that “… the idea of the ‘nation’ had to compete for loyalty with other more parochial interests related to class, gender, religion and ethnicity.” (p. 125) – for those involved, ‘class’ or ‘gender’ might well be of greater importance than the ‘nation’.
James Muzondidya's chapter on the period from 1980 to 1997 similarly suffers from this occasional tendency to assume the centrality of state-building and national development. Whilst ZANU-PF's achievements are worth recording, these were inextricably bound up with an authoritarian project in which the ruling party reserved to itself the right to define the pace and direction of development: as Muzondidya illustrates, attempts by landless rural peasants, urban workers or the Ndebele to pursue their own visions of ‘independence’ were ruthlessly suppressed. Nevertheless, one of the chapter's great strengths is to show that at no stage did ZANU-PF achieve hegemonic control over the country's direction. Here, as in many areas of the book, the analysis would have benefited from comparative analysis with the wider African experience of, for example, the contestation of the ruling party's vision of nation-statehood in the post-colonial period.
Muzondidya, like Raftopoulos in his chapter on the period since 1997, emphasises the extent to which ZANU-PF's adoption of economic liberalisation policies in the 1990s contributed to the further impoverishment of rural and urban Zimbabweans and strengthened resistance to its rule. At a time when the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is in unhappy coalition government with ZANU-PF, it is good to be reminded by Raftopoulos of the party's roots in the genuinely insurrectionary atmosphere of the late 1990s, when labour activists and new social movements providing a crucial base for its birth. The frustration of the MDC's rise to power, and the consequent sense of anti-climax with which the book concludes, indicates the challenge of writing the history of a country that is still in the process of ‘becoming’. This part of the story will only be concluded when the narratives of a defeated ZANU-PF, both archival and oral, become fully available to historians.