‘Who does the Mugabe regime say that I am?’ Dissecting the toponymic commemoration of Joshua Nkomo in Zimbabwe’s cultural geography

ABSTRACT

Political power is negotiated in the cultural geography when state actors exclude some names in toponymic commemoration or assign them to less visible places. Places that are more visible to the public carry more ideological significance than those found in the background. This article explores the state’s representation of Joshua Nkomo in the toponymic commemorative landscapes in Zimbabwe. The discussion unfolds against the realisation that existing scholarship on the commemoration of Joshua Nkomo argues that the populist state commemorative practices done after his death in 1999 projected him as a national hero. However, the patterns of immortalising Nkomo’s name in the cultural geography were informed by the Mugabe’s political culture of framing reality in exclusionary terms. They indicate the state’s conscious efforts of portraying him as a regional leader, not a national hero. The Mugabe regime did not want to honour Nkomo in landscapes with a high political significance, such as the Central Business District in the capital Harare. Instead, there is a high concentration of Nkomo’s namescapes in Matabeleland. The article underscores the significance of toponymic commemorative landscapes in propagating and sustaining dominant political ideologies because they are relatively enduring and can naturalise the socio-political order.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural geography
• toponymic commemoration
• overt silences
• covert silences
• collective forgetting

Acknowledgments

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

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The party was called Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) throughout the liberation war era. It only rebranded after independence. The same applies to the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which became ZANU-PF after independence.

2. Chimurenga is a Shona word for an uprising, loosely referring to the liberation struggle. The word gained wide currency in the Shona speech community during the liberation war. The Ndebele equivalent is Umvukela.

3. A Shona word for the rain that washes away the chaff before the summer rains (Masunungure, 2006, p. 5).

4. Soja rakabata mwana was the 1980 ZAPU’s election symbol. This symbol was honest in all its intentions. It indexed prosperity through hard work and family values (Zwangendaba, 2008, p. 200).

5. Matabeleland (land of the Ndebele people) designates that the region is predominantly Ndebele-speaking.

6. Umdala Wethu (Our revered old man) was one of Joshua Nkomo earned nicknames for his role during and after the liberation struggle by his supporters.

7. In terms of the provisions of the Unity Accord, the united party, ZANU-PF, was supposed to have two vice-presidents. The first vice-president should come from the former ZANU-PF party with the second vice-president from the former PF-ZAPU party.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zvinashe Mamvura

Zvinashe Mamvura is a Senior Research Fellow in the African Languages Research Institute, University of Zimbabwe. Currently, he is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany. He is also a Research Fellow, Department of African Languages, University of South Africa. He holds a PhD in Onomastics from the University of South Africa. His research interests include Onomastics, Sociolinguistics, Language Planning and Policy, Gender studies, decoloniality, and African cultural studies.