“By what authority?” The contested politics of urban toponymic inscription in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

This article explores the contest over the naming of urban landscapes in Zimbabwe. The analysis unfolds from the realization that urban landscapes are significant in naturalizing political systems and ideologies. Political actors strive to control and configure urban landscapes in a way that popularizes their political ideologies. This study advances the argument that urban local government actors may contest the hegemonic place-naming system that ruling elites prescribe. State actors also block any efforts by subordinate groups to disrupt the harmony between official toponymy and the political ideology that the ruling regimes popularize. However, subordinate groups can be heterogeneous leading to a multi-layered nature of resistance. There can be relations of dominance and subordination among the constituent elements of subordinate groups. Preliminary findings indicate that there is legislative ambivalence within and between the Urban Councils Act (Chapter 29:15) of 1996 and the Constitution of Zimbabwe, Amendment No. 20 of 2013, that allows for conflicting interpretations of arenas and boundaries of authority over urban toponymic inscription between urban local government actors and the central state. This causes perennial conflicts between central government and urban local government actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical toponymy
• contested politics of toponymic inscription
• urban local government actors
• cultural arena
• toponymic hegemony

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The party was called Zimbabwe African National African Union since its formation in 1963. Mugabe rebranded it to Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) just before the general elections in 1980. On the other hand, the Nkomo-led Zimbabwe African People’s Party (ZAPU) contested the 1980 elections as PF-ZAPU. When the two parties merged after the signing of the Unity Accord in 1987, the united formation retained the name ZANU-PF.

² During that time, the MDC had split into two groups. The main political formation was led by Morgan Tsvangirai and assumed the name MDC-T with the splinter group led by Prof. Arthur Mutambara getting the name MDC-M. Later, Job Sikhala broke away to form MDC-99. After the death of Tsvangirai in 2018, there was a succession dispute among his deputies, Thokozani Khupe and Nelson Chamisa. Chamisa assumed the presidency of the rebranded MDC, that later mutated into the MDC-Alliance. He continued with the alliance that Tsvangirai had formed in 2018 with his former political allies- Job Sikhala, Welshman Ncube, Tendai Biti, among others. Thokozani Khupe retained the presidency of the MDC-T. Chamisa’s political outfit became a much bigger faction and won 64 House of Assembly seats in the 2018 harmonized elections and controlled most urban councils. We use the name MDC for the sake of consistency to refer to both the Tsvangirai-led main opposition (1999-2018) and the Chamisa-led MDC Alliance.

³ Ethnicity is exceedingly entrenched in the political terrain of Zimbabwe. Within the nationalist movement (ZANU and ZAPU), there has been a conflation of identities along the axis of ZANU/Shona and ZAPU/Ndebele that persisted throughout the liberation struggle and is visible right up to this day.