Progress, power, and violent accumulation in Zimbabwe

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Zimbabwe
• Africa
• progress
• primitive accumulation
• democracy
• violence
• nationalism

Notes

1. The conference – of which this issue edition is a ‘product’ – was sponsored by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation, the Norwegian People's Aid and the Civil Society Monitoring Mechanism. Itai Zimunya must be thanked profusely for his long-term work as the OSISA ‘point-man’ in Zimbabwe, as must Eldred Masunungure's Mass Public Opinion Institute and especially Monica Munzwandi and her team for fine organisation and logistics. Showers Mawowa and Judith Todd deserve special appreciation too. Bulawayo Agenda assisted in its fair city. Patrick Bond emailed the proceedings to all and sundry, all over, every day. Kubatana's Amanda Atwood set up an audio and text archive, http://www.kubatana.net/html/archive/demgg/101108kub.asp?sector=DEMGG&year=0&range_start=1, and Edwina Spicer Productions filmed the event. Apparently about six scribes from Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organisation were also taking notes and discussing matters with the delegates. Finally but most gratefully, thanks to Norma Kriger and Brian Raftopoulos, who kept this boat afloat.

2. Not all of the larger plots of land went to ostensibly ZANU PF supporters; or not all recipients stayed ZANU PF supporters. Between February and June 2002 the state-run Sunday Mail published a list from the Ministry of Lands and Agriculture of those who received Model A-2 (Commercial Scheme) farms (Justice for Agriculture 2002). A Dr. Mtuli Ncube, then a lecturer at the London School of Economics, is listed as having received Sikumi Estate, nearly 8,400 hectares in size, near Hwange, Matabeleland North. As of late 2011 Ncube was Chief Economist and Vice President of the African Development Bank, after holding posts as Head of the Business School at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and for a few months thereafter Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at Wits. Before that, however, he was chair of Barbican Bank, which lost its licence in the early 2000s, but by 2010 was apparently opening once again (Mpofu 2011). While in Johannesburg Professor Ncube was involved in the organisation of at least two well-advertised public appearances by the president of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai, and at a Wits University public seminar on the Zimbabwean situation advocated the establishment of private property rights as the sine qua non of Zimbabwean progress.

3. Rutherford's review essay in the form of a conference paper came to the editors as they were starting work on this edition. In spite and because of Kirk Helliker's previous review in these pages, we felt the debate deserved even more comprehensive treatment; thus we asked its author to elaborate some more.

4. Another problem with the idea of ‘patriotic history’ is that it can be made much too powerful, approaching the status of a driver of Zimbabwe's modern history and political economy, accelerated and steered by a small coterie of ‘public intellectuals’ (Tendi 2010).

5. Thebe's article was submitted to JCAS independently of the conference, but its fine texture promised to illuminate much of the present and future discussion about how small commodity producers work and will work in rural Zimbabwe.