Geographies of terror, harvest of fear: chiefs, local administration and politics in Zimbabwe in the 2000s

ABSTRACT

The emergence of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, in 1999 radically reconfigured Zimbabwe's political landscape. MDC greatly challenged the electoral dominance the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front had enjoyed since independence in 1980. As literature on Zimbabwe's ‘crisis' has emphasised, throughout the 2000s ZANU-PF was predominantly preoccupied with repelling this challenge. Central to these efforts were violence and a patronage system involving all state institutions. However, the position of chieftaincy in the new politics has suffered scholarly neglect. This article examines how the government enlisted chiefs and lower-level traditional leaders, through intimidation and patronage networks, in its attempts to make rural areas an exclusively ZANU-PF vote bank. It utilises interviews, newspapers and Hansard, among other publicly available material, to argue that MDC’s hegemonic threat forced ZANU-PF to turn to the customary capital of the hitherto neglected chiefs, and that the consequent relationship became an impediment to democracy in Zimbabwe.

KEYWORDS:

• Chiefs
• patronage
• violence
• ZANU-PF
• MDC
• Zimbabwe

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank colleagues at the International Studies Group and members of the Zimbabwe Historical Association for their valuable comments on previous versions of this paper. I also wish to thank Ian Phimister, Clement Masakure and the anonymous reviewers for their input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Literature on the relationship between chiefs and government in the colonial and early post-colonial Zimbabwe is immense. It includes, among others, Holleman (1968); Weinrich (1971); Frederikse (1982); Ranger (1983); Lan (1985); Maxwell (1999); Alexander (2006); Nkomo (2020); Nkomo (2021). They have all demonstrated that the relationship was never static but evolved over the years. The colonial state enlisted chiefs as administrative and political agents. Administratively it tasked chiefs with ensuring villagers’ environmental and tax compliance, and with responsibilities over grassroots policing and judicial affairs. The political roles of chiefs were starker at the height of the liberation struggle in the 1970s. They were largely expected to report guerrilla activities. It is for this reason that ZANU-PF nationalists perceived chieftaincy as a ‘sellout’ institution that worked against the quest for independence. Upon gaining power at independence, the ZANU-PF government punitively placed chiefs at the peripheries of the state’s administrative and political processes and emasculated them largely by transferring their grassroots land and judicial powers to party-backed village development committees and ward development committees. Chiefs, without much change, petitioned for their enhanced recognition by the government up to the end of the 1990s.

2 MDC’s immediate electoral impact can be appreciated by looking at ZANU-PF’s performance in the 1990s general elections. Of the 120 parliamentary seats on offer, in 1990 ZANU-PF won 117 while in 1995 it got 118. As regards the presidential vote, in 1990 Robert Mugabe, its leader, got 83% and in 1996 received 92%.

3 This article has confined itself to an appraisal of chieftaincy’s political relationship with ZANU PF. It has not gone beyond signposting administrative and legalistic aspects of chiefs and chieftaincy in Zimbabwe, which have been comprehensively discussed by scholarship that includes, among others, Mutizwa-Mangiza (1991), du Toit (1995), Mapedza (2007), Karumbidza (2009), Makumbe (2010), Ncube (2011), and Kurebwa (2020).

4 Alexander and McGregor (2013, 751), observed that ZANU-PF’s fixation with state institutions had roots in Rhodesia’s centralised state, and was for their capacity for repression.

5 On two occasions, the researcher could not see both the Makoni DA and his deputy as they were said to be away on official business but managed to get hold of all the chiefs.

6 Ranger (2004) offered a pioneering review of how since 2000 ZANU-PF instrumentally interpreted the past to serve its interests, particularly to mobilise people against MDC.

7 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s chiefs often warned the government of the political/electoral consequences of neglecting chieftaincy (see also Nkomo 2020, 171).

8 Alexander and McGregor (2013, 758) contrasts with MDC, ‘which has had little or nothing in terms of material rewards to offer its supporters’.

9 The colonial state conveniently invented (and unmade) chiefs and chieftainships for administrative and political reasons. See Ranger (1983, 22–23).

10 In this context, ‘weaponisation of food’ is the use of food aid to manipulate the political behaviour of vulnerable sections of the society, particularly for votes, and was not limited to rural areas.

11 Scholarship on Zimbabwe’s 2000s crisis has appropriated the term ‘militarisation’ not to mean societal or troop mobilisation in conflict or war situations, but as a reference to the control or domination of public institutions by the military system and personnel. This article takes the cue from, among others, Masunungure (2011), Alexander (2013), Ruhanya (2020), Ndawana (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lotti Nkomo

Lotti Nkomo is a historian and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Studies Group, University of the Free State and a lecturer at Walter Sisulu University. His research interests are on Zimbabwe’s political relations with South Africa; the relationship between traditional leaders and government in Zimbabwe; and Zimbabwe’s post-2000 electoral violence.