40 Zimbabwe Independence

Zimbabwe @ 40 is a celebration of the country's four decades of independence and statehood. Forty years is a relatively short period in a nation's life, but it is a formative period: what lessons can be learnt from the successes and failures, challenges and opportunities of the last 40 years? What should be avoided in the next 40? Lloyd Sachikonye and David Kaulemu have assembled a distinguished team of scholars to address these questions, and the book focuses on issues that characterise the country's development trajectory: the linkage between values and institutions; defects in its democracy; the 'curse' of mineral and agricultural endowment; the impact of migration; and the social exclusion of women and young people. The book is written from a depth of commitment to a just, peaceful and prosperous Zimbabwe, and represents a 'work in progress', reflecting the continuing research, evaluation and dialogue that each of the authors is engaged in, and signalling the nature and direction of future such work. As the editors conclude: 'None of the chapters are pessimistic, nor are they negative about the country. They are realistic about the gravity of the historical moment the nation faces and the high moral, political and economic mountains we must climb before we can see the Promised Land. Yet they are full of hope - they are convinced that we have not come to the end of history.'

Zimbabwe celebrated its independence just over 40 years ago. While the nation is no longer young, its population certainly is: over 60% are under the age of 35. Understanding youth perspectives and experiences is therefore vitally important. Fending for Ourselves reviews the recent histories and realities of youths in Zimbabwe, offering a distinguished range of authors exploring issues of education, employment and work, the urban experience, involvement in the informal economy, mental health, and political activity. Importantly, the collection examines successive generations of youth in Zimbabwe to show how ideas, experiences and reactions to the social, political, and economic context have shifted over time. Many of the issues affecting youth over the past 40 years have been traumatic and distressing physical and mental abuse, declining employment and educational opportunities, poverty, ill-health and loss of hope but this collection underlines the agency and resilience of Zimbabwes young people, and how they have found ways to navigate the political, social, and economic terrains they occupy.

This book explores religion-regime relations in contemporary Zimbabwe to identify patterns of co-operation and resistance across diverse religious institutions. Using co-operation and resistance as an analytical framework, the book shows how different religious organisations have interacted with Emmerson Mnangagwa’s "Second Republic", following Robert Mugabe’s departure from the political scene. In particular, through case studies on the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference and Pentecostals, African Traditional Religions, Islam, and others, the book explores how different religious institutions have responded to Mnangagwa’s new regime. Chapters highlight the complexities characterising the religion-regime interface, showing how the same religious organisation might co-operate and resist at the same time. Furthermore, the book compares how religious institutions co-operated or resisted Mugabe’s earlier regime to identify patterns of continuity and change. Overall, the book highlights the challenges of deploying simplistic frames in efforts to understand the interface between politics and religion. A significant contribution to global scholarship on religion-regime interfaces, this book will appeal to academics and students in the field of Religious Studies, Political Science, History and African Studies

Examines Zimbabwe's pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial social, economic and political history and relates historical factors and trends to more recent developments in the country.

A truly satisfactory history of Rhodesia, one that takes into account both the African history and that of the whites, has never been written. That is, until now. In this book Luise White highlights the crucial tension between Rhodesia as it imagined itself and Rhodesia as it was imagined outside the country. Using official documents, novels, memoirs, and conversations with participants in the events taking place between 1965, when Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from Britain, and 1980 when indigenous African rule was established through the creation of the state of Zimbabwe, White reveals that Rhodesians represented their state as a kind of utopian place where white people dared to stand up for themselves and did what needed to be done. It was imagined to be a place vastly better than the decolonized dystopias to its north. In all these representations, race trumped all else including any notion of nation. Outside Rhodesia, on the other hand, it was considered a white supremacist utopia, a country that had taken its own independence rather than let white people live under black rule. Even as Rhodesia edged toward majority rule to end international sanctions and a protracted guerilla war, racialized notions of citizenship persisted. One man, one vote, became the natural logic of decolonization of this illegally independent minority-ruled renegade state. Voter qualification with its minutia of which income was equivalent to how many years of schooling, and how African incomes or years of schooling could be rendered equivalent to whites, illustrated the core of ideas about, and experiences of, racial domination. White s account of the politics of decolonization in this unprecedented historical situation reveals much about the general processes occurring elsewhere on the African continent."

Pasura proposes a framework for understanding African diasporas as core, epistemic, dormant and silent diasporas. The book explores the origin, formation and performance of the Zimbabwean transnational diaspora in Britain and examines how the diaspora is constituted in the hostland and how it maintains connections with the homeland.

Like Fela Kuti and Bob Marley, singer, composer, and bandleader Thomas Mapfumo and his music came to represent his native country's anticolonial struggle and cultural identity. Mapfumo was born in 1945 in what was then the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The trajectory of his career—from early performances of rock 'n' roll tunes to later creating a new genre based on traditional Zimbabwean music, including the sacred mbira, and African and Western pop—is a metaphor for Zimbabwe's evolution from colony to independent nation. Lion Songs is an authoritative biography of Mapfumo that narrates the life and career of this creative, complex, and iconic figure. Banning Eyre ties the arc of Mapfumo's career to the history of Zimbabwe. The genre Mapfumo created in the 1970s called chimurenga, or "struggle" music, challenged the Rhodesian government—which banned his music and jailed him—and became important to Zimbabwe achieving independence in 1980. In the 1980s and 1990s Mapfumo's international profile grew along with his opposition to Robert Mugabe's dictatorship. Mugabe had been a hero of the revolution, but Mapfumo’s criticism of his regime led authorities and loyalists to turn on the singer with threats and intimidation. Beginning in 2000, Mapfumo and key band and family members left Zimbabwe. Many of them, including Mapfumo, now reside in Eugene, Oregon. A labor of love, Lion Songs is the product of a twenty-five-year friendship and professional relationship between Eyre and Mapfumo that demonstrates Mapfumo's musical and political importance to his nation, its freedom struggle, and its culture.