Reconstituting the Cultural Geography in Zimbabwe: Place Renaming in Zimbabwe’s ‘New Dispensation’

ABSTRACT

Regime changes and power transfers usually engender an extensive reordering of the cultural geography. Incoming political regimes usually reconfigure commemorative landscapes to symbolically dismantle icons and landmarks of the previous political regimes and herald their arrival on the political scene. The new regime in Zimbabwe that assumes power in November 2017 reconstituted the commemorative space according to its sociopolitical logics, commemorative priorities, and assumptions of power. This article uses the textual approach to the politics of place naming to interrogate the varied ways the Mnangagwa regime used to reinscribe the cultural landscape producing a new memorial landscape in the aftermath of the upstaging of Robert Mugabe in November 2017. The new regime symbolically constructed the imaginative national geography in a relational manner that differed from the one instituted by the Mugabe regime. The main observation in this article is that place renaming is not merely as a reflection of, but also integral to, the politics of ‘transformation’ in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. The new place names are saturated with messages that indicate official versions that prescribe new rules on the reading of the past. The new toponymic order symbolically replaced the Mugabe political hegemony with the Mnangagwa one, increased the visibility of women, commemorated a new set of heroes, including those that had suffered systematic exclusion in nationalist discourses, and renamed ‘unusual’ places that the previous regime never considered in the process of recasting the cultural geography. The memorial project involved a highly politicised nomination process that served the interests of the ruling political elites. It is, therefore, problematic that most critical enquiries into this phase in the Zimbabwean political landscape have not focussed on these cultural transformations.

Acknowledgments

This postdoctoral research is fully funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Notes

1. Gamatox is a popular pesticide that farmers use to kill weevils and other pests in Zimbabwe.