Performing Power In Zimbabwe

Challenges depictions of law as a façade for political repression by examining political trials in Zimbabwe after 2000.

Focusing on political trials in Zimbabwe's Magistrates' Courts between 2000 and 2012, Susanne Verheul explores why the judiciary have remained a central site of contestation in post-independence Zimbabwe. Drawing on rich court observations and in-depth interviews, this book foregrounds law's potential to reproduce or transform social and political power through the narrative, material, and sensory dimensions of courtroom performances. Instead of viewing appeals to law as acts of resistance by marginalised orders for inclusion in dominant modes of rule, Susanne Verheul argues that it was not recognition by but of this formal, rule-bound ordering, and the form of citizenship it stood for, that was at stake in performative legal engagements. In this manner, law was much more than a mere instrument. Law was a site in which competing conceptions of political authority were given expression, and in which people's understandings of themselves as citizens were formed and performed.

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.

A fresh and interdisciplinary study of faith and social culture in Nigeria, Abimbola A. Adelakun uses extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork to explore how Nigerian Pentecostals use performance to mark their self-distinction as a people of power. Available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Zimbabwe¿s July 2013 election brought the country¿s ¿inclusive¿ power-sharing interlude to an end and installed Mugabe and ZANU-PF for yet another¿its seventh¿term. Why? What explains the resilience of authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe? Tracing the country¿s elusive search for political stability across the decades, Michael Bratton offers a careful analysis of the failed power-sharing experiment, an account of its institutional origins, and an explanation of its demise. In the process, he explores key challenges of political transition: constitution making, elections, security-sector reform, and transitional justice.

Shows how global ratings and rankings shape political agendas and influence states' behavior, reframing how we think about power.

This collection of essays documents, conceptualises and theorises the ways in which Zimbabwean, in particular, and African practitioners, in general, creatively work and perform in contemporary Africa. It serves to consolidate the ways in which Zimbabwean and African performance is made and understood by Zimbabwean practitioners and theorists. The book examines this emergent, dynamic performance movement which transforms performances into acts of reflection, engagement, and/or discussion between the performer and spectator through various creative performative avenues, such as interjections, call and response, singing, clapping and use of communally identifiable everyday objects in design, which affirm and fuse the actors and spectators together. Finally, this book exposes the dominant exclusivity and Anglocentrism in critical pedagogies of performance in Zimbabwe through problematizing the “taken-for-grantedness” of the accepted ways in which performance and theory have been conceptualised.