Rhodes, Mugabe and the Politics of Commemorative Toponyms in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on former Zimbabwean President Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s ninety-third birthday celebrations. It uses and goes beyond the said ceremony to interrogate the politics of commemorative toponyms in post-independence Zimbabwe. The event took place on 25 February 2017 at a school whose name Rhodes Estate Preparatory School (REPS) was changed to Matopos Junior School prior to the celebrations. The methodological framing of this discussion consists of a critical reading of the media’s representation of the name change and the debates that followed. Reference is specifically made to two Zimbabwean newspapers, The Patriot, which featured the story on 2 March 2017 under the heading “Rhodes ‘legacy’ finally put to rest” and the ZimEye’s story of 26 February 2017 headlined “Mugabe removes Rhodes.” Theoretically, the paper is framed within the critical approach to toponymy that interprets commemorative place-nomenclature as political arenas which could be used to think through issues of history and memory. In particular, it is argued in this paper that in post-independence Zimbabwe, place names, especially commemorative toponyms, are political spaces par excellence which we can use to study not only the country’s colonial history but also its postcolonial realities.

Notes

1. Gukurahundi refers to the massacres of mainly Ndebele people in the 1980s by the Zimbabwe National Army’s Fifth Brigade which was trained by North Koreans.

2. Both 18 April 1980 (when Zimbabwe got its independence from British rule) and 18 November 2017 (when people in Zimbabwe took to the streets to force Mugabe to resign from power) have become important dates in Zimbabwean history. Both have been labelled independence days (although in the second case, this is an unofficial label).

3. However, the NewsDay of 16 December 2017 carried a story headlined “Rename Robert Mugabe Road to Emmerson Mnangagwa.” It is reported in this story that in contributing to a debate on the naming of streets in new suburbs in Harare, a Glen Norah councillor, Wellington Chikombo suggested that since Mugabe had streets and an international airport named after him, it would be “fair if the street in Harare was to be named after President E. D. Mnangagwa” (Ncube 2017b). This was just a suggestion that has not yet been considered.

4. In the same speech, Chipanga also proposed making Mugabe’s birthday a national holiday as another way of honouring him. On 27 November 2017, it was announced that 21 February was added to what Mbembe elsewhere describes as the “state’s liturgical calendar” (2001, 119), as Robert Gabriel Mugabe National Youth Day. This day was first commemorated in 2018.

5. An interesting highlight of this controversy was shown recently in a BBC interview of Jonathan Moyo (former Zimbabwean cabinet minister) by Zeinab Badawi on 11 January 2018. Moyo argued that “Mugabe is Zimbabwe’s Castro” (BBC Hardtalk, 11 January 2018). And Zeinab reacted by highlighting that Mugabe’s legacy includes that three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s population live on less than $5.50 a day; 27% of children under five experience stunted growth; 90% unemployment rate and unaffordable university fees” (BBC Hardtalk, 11 January 2018). Moyo dismissed Badawi’s observation, arguing that “that is not the legacy, that is what you are calling legacy. You are identifying certain challenges that the republic of Zimbabwe has, and you say that is legacy. No. That is a strange definition of legacy” (BBC Hardtalk, 11 January 2018). Badawi’s and Moyo’s versions of Mugabe’s legacy conflict and call attention to his controversial political standing in Zimbabwean history.

6. Related questions were raised elsewhere. See (Palmbeger 2018; Duminy 2018; Adebanwi 2018).

7. In 2001, Aneas Chigwedere, the then Minister of Education and Culture, led a government campaign to urge schools to drop colonial names. Main targets then included Queen Elizabeth Girls High, Churchhill Boys High, Cecil John Rhodes Primary School. In some circles, this was contested. The witticism of some of the contestations included the fact that, Chigwedere himself had an English first name “Aneas.” So, calls were made for him to drop his English name as an exemplary act before the schools could do the same.

8. In an audio clip that went viral on social media, Kudzanai Chipanga deified Mugabe as an angel of both ZANU-PF and the Zimbabwean nation by drawing on the significance of his first name Gabriel, adopted from the biblical Gabriel.

9. See also (Light and Young 2018; Vuolteenaho and Puzey 2018; Marin 2018) who give examples of “spatial unevenness of toponymic change” in other parts of the world (Rose-Redwood, Alderman and Azaryahu 2018a, 11).

10. Another interesting example of how people may choose to use different names to refer to a single place in the Zimbabwean context is that of an open space opposite the Rainbow Hotel in Harare. ZANU-PF calls it Robert Mugabe Square, while the opposition MDC refers to it as Freedom Square. And none of the two names are considered legitimate by the City Council of Harare (NewsDay 16 December 2017).

11. The Zimbabwean Defense Forces (ZDF) launched an operation dubbed “Operation Restore Legacy” on 13 November 2017. The army’s intervention led to Mugabe’s resignation from power on 21 November 2017. Significantly, on 18 November 2017, Zimbabwean Army barracks were renamed. The renaming of the barracks was announced at a time when the army was in control of the country. Clearly the timing was not coincidental. While it is possible to argue that the army “championed a commemorative agenda” that differs from that of the colonial administrators (Rose-Redwood, Alderman and Azaryahu 2010, 460), the major issue seems to be that army barracks belonged to marginalized spaces in Zimbabwe whose colonial names were not renamed as soon as the country attained its independence.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.