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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left
Brian Raftopoulos a
a
Institute for Justice and Reconciliation,

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To cite this Article: Raftopoulos, Brian (2006) 'The Zimbabwean Crisis and the
Challenges for the Left', Journal of Southern African Studies, 32:2, 203 - 219
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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 32, Number 2, June 2006

The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges

for the Left*
Brian Raftopoulos
(Institute for Justice and Reconciliation)

The Zimbabwean crisis has generated a great deal of academic and political debate, not the least of
which has been conflicting perspectives from the Left. While the politics of land redistribution has
been characterised by some as a key marker of anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal politics, others
have been equally concerned about the authoritarian politics that has been the modality for the land
interventions of the Mugabe regime. This article undertakes a broad analysis of the theoretical
questions underlying the Zimbabwe debate, pointing to particular problems relating to the legacies
of political economy, nation and race, and the challenges of developing democratic alternatives in
the current global context. The article also situates these problems within a broader, critical
historiographical reading of the Zimbabwean crisis. Finally, central to the argument of the article
is the concern that issues relating to democratisation and human rights, as well as historical
agency, are not peripheralised by the necessary demands for economic reconstruction, which can
often lead to an overwhelming economism in political analysis.

Introduction
In the journalistic world, the Zimbabwean crisis since 2000 has been constructed through the
dichotomy of either a radical nationalist redistributive project carried out as historical redress
in the face of neo-liberal orthodoxy, or a breakdown of the norms of liberal governance
through the machinations of an authoritarian political figure. The first position has been the
dominant message in the Zimbabwean state-controlled media1 and some African voices in the
diasporas,2 and has been articulated as a pan-Africanist project. The opposition media inside
Zimbabwe and the liberal and conservative press in South Africa and the west have largely

* This article was first presented as a Public Lecture at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, on 23 June 2005. I am grateful to
Patrick Bond and David Moore for their joint invitation to present the lecture and for their comments on the article. I also
received valuable input from other scholars who attended the event, including Norma Kriger, Blair Rutherford, Bill
Freund and Gillian Hart. Jeremy Cronin made some useful theoretical observations on the text and provided me with two
working papers of his own thinking on some of the theoretical and political problems facing the South African Left.
Linda Freeman and Kirk Helliker sent me their insightful reviews of the Left debate in Zimbabwe. Finally, I would like
to thank the anonymous reviewers of JSAS for their helpful comments and suggestions.
1 W. Willems, ‘Peasant Demonstrators, Violent Invaders: Representations of Land in the Zimbabwean Press’
(unpublished paper, 2004); W. Willems, ‘Remnants of Empire? British Media Reporting on Zimbabwe’
(unpublished paper, 2005). See also a collection of Mugabe’s writings in R. Mugabe, Inside the Third
Chimurenga (Harare, Government of Zimbabwe, 2001).
2 In the words of George Shire, a prominent ZANU-PF supporter in the UK: ‘Another world is possible in which
the ownership of land and economic resources in the region are deracialised – and are put to use for the benefit of
the people. This economic strategy is what is at the heart of the policies being pursued by ZANU-PF and its allies
in the region. This is why Mugabe is seen as a “threat”, a “dictator”, a “tyrant” and worse by those whose real
interests are not compatible with the interests of the majority in Africa’. G. Shire, ‘Sinner or Sinned,’ African
Business (April 2003), p. 15.

ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/06/020203-17

q 2006 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies DOI: 10.1080/03057070600655988
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204 Journal of Southern African Studies

presented the second position.3 It is on this rupture that the major ambiguities of the Left have
arisen around analyses and solidarities regarding the Zimbabwean crisis. In what might be
referred to as a Left nationalist tradition, the emphasis has been placed on the legitimacy of
the ZANU-PF’s ‘anti-colonial’ agenda, downplaying the importance of the democratic deficit
and human rights abuses of the process. As an example, a leading political commentator in
Zimbabwe has criticised
. . . the leaders of the opposition parties (in Zimbabwe) who have placed primacy on issues of
‘democracy’, ‘good governance’ and ‘human rights at the expense of addressing the National
Question and all its ramifications’.4
According to such a position, the democratic political questions can only be understood as a
sequential product of first resolving the structural issues of the ‘National Question’ in a
mechanistic deployment of the much abused base – superstructure metaphor in Marxist
thought. A more general position along these lines can be found in Issa Shivji’s critique of
human rights discourse. Shivji observes that:
Human rights discourse has succeeded in marginalizing concrete analysis of our society. Human
rights ideology is the ideology of the status quo, not change. Documentation of the human rights
abuses, although important, in its own right, by itself does not help us to understand the social and
political relations in our society. It is not surprising that given the absence of a political economy
context and theoretical framework, much of our writings on human rights, rule of law,
constitution etc. uncritically reiterate or assume neo-liberal precepts. Human rights is not a
theoretical tool of understanding social and political relations. At best it can only be a means of
exposing a form of oppression and, therefore, perhaps, an ideology of resistance.5

One could certainly agree with Shivji about the limitations and dangers of the neo-liberal
constructions of human rights discourse, without falling into his derivative notion of the
marginality of human rights questions. Once again, within such a framework there is a
secondary position designated for issues of democratic process that, in my view, has been a
serious weakness in the Left nationalist position on Zimbabwe, and within a particular African
tradition of political economy. More will be said on this below. Other scholars have tried to draw
attention to the forms of politics constructed through the Zimbabwean crisis, setting out a more
multi-layered view of the issues at stake. This perspective includes a discussion of the structural
legacies of the settler colonial period, the specificities of the authoritarian nationalist content of
the Mugabe regime and the effects of the complex and difficult legacies of the liberation
movements on contemporary politics. Henning Melber has referred to the latter as the process
through which the political elite in the region, by employing ‘selective narratives and memories
relating to their liberation wars, has constructed or invented a new set of traditions to establish an
exclusive postcolonial legitimacy under the sole authority of one particular agency of forces’.6
Thus, in the Zimbabwean context, in particular, there has arisen a very deep divide among
what can loosely be called ‘the Left’, which refers to individuals whose analyses emphasise
various aspects of the issues noted above and who have taken a stand either alongside the
current regime, or with the opposition and a large part of the civic movement. Yeros has
referred to this divide along the following schematic lines:

3 See also journalistic biographies of Mugabe such as: M. Meredith, Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the
Tragedy of Zimbabwe (New York, Public Affairs, 2002); and D. Blair, Degrees in Violence (London, Continuum, 2002).
4 The Scrutator (believed to be Ibbo Mandaza, former editor-in-chief of the Mirror Group of newspapers in Zimbabwe,
and currently involved in a legal battle over the ownership of the Group with the state’s Central Intelligence
Organisation).
5 I. Shivji, ‘The Life and Times of Babu’, Review of African Political Economy, 99 (2003), p. 115.
6 H. Melber, ‘Introduction’, in H. Melber (ed.), Limits to the Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa: The
Unfinished Business of Democratic Consolidation (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2003), pp. xiv–xv. Also see the
various chapters in A. Hammar, B. Raftopoulos and S. Jensen (eds), Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking
Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Harare, Weaver, 2003).
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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left 205

. . . one takes the side of civil society and concerns itself with ensuring free and fair party
elections remaining cognisant of the bourgeois nature of the ‘civil’ electoral platform; the other
takes the side of the ‘uncivil’, endorsing the radical land acquisition programme of the ruling
party, while remaining cognisant of the latter’s democratic deficit.7
At the outset it is useful to provide a brief historical overview of the context in which the
various elements of the Left have emerged in Zimbabwe. In broad terms, ‘the Left’ has
emerged through two major historical processes. The first relates to the period of the
liberation struggle. Several intellectuals who were themselves part of the liberation struggle,
developed leftist affiliations in the course of the struggle, while others who were in
universities in sites of exile came into contact with various forms of leftist thought. The
liberation movements were themselves occasionally the arena of fierce ideological battles, as
in the struggles over the March 11th Movement in ZAPU and the Zimbabwe People’s Army
(ZIPA) in the mid-1970s. The leaders of the latter movement became casualties of the
internecine conflicts within nationalist politics during this period, and would only re-emerge
in national politics in the late 1990s when the postcolonial state faced its most severe
challenge. In both these cases, attempts by younger militants to inject a more formal Marxist
content into the ideology of the liberation movement were quickly defeated by what David
Moore refers to as the ‘authoritarian militarism’ of old guard nationalists. Additionally, in
Moore’s assessment, the ‘fatal weakness’ of both these radicalised movements was their ‘lack
of links with Zimbabwe’s fundamental classes’.8 Often the leftist thinking that emerged from
this period was influenced by official Sino-Soviet ideologies given that China and the Soviet
Union supported ZANU and ZAPU respectively. Commenting on this influence, Jeremy
Brickhill notes that while relationships with the Soviet-aligned socialist regimes
had their strategic and even opportunistic aspects, there is no doubt that direct exposure to
socialist regimes and parties of various types, including for the first time political training in
socialist ideas, had a profound and meaningful impact on political debate within the ranks of
the liberation movement.9
Notwithstanding the uneven influences of such exposure on cadres of the liberation struggle,
it is evident that nationalism, as a mobilising ideology, was more far reaching in its influence
on the course of the liberation struggle and the politics of the postcolonial state. This was
despite the formal commitment of the party to ‘Marxism-Leninism’ in the 1980s.10 The
shallow internalisation of the latter in the ruling party in the independence period indicated
more a tactical use of socialist ideology in the period of the Cold War than any far-reaching
commitment to such an alternative project.
Many of the intellectuals who emerged out of this period became part of the postcolonial
state and played a key role in developing its structures. In addition, some of the major
interventions in developing public debate during the first decade of independence were

7 P. Yeros, ‘Zimbabwe and the Dilemmas of the Left’, Historical Materialism, 10, 2 (2002), p. 4.
8 D. Moore, ‘The Contradictory Construction of Hegemony in Zimbabwe: Politics, Ideology, and Class in the
Formation of a New African State’ (PhD thesis, York University, 1990), p. 222. Stoneman and Cliffe also noted
that while these two tendencies ‘were overtly articulating views that clearly owed something to Marxism,
although of different brands’ they ‘became peripheral voices in the mainstream of their respective parties’.
C. Stoneman and L. Cliffe, Zimbabwe: Politics, Economics and Society (London and New York, Pinter
Publishers, 1989), pp. 39–40.
9 J. Brickhill, ‘A Brief History of Socialist Politics in Zimbabwe’, Southern African Political and Economic
Monthly, 12, 9 (September 1999), p. 35. In her recent autobiography Fay Chung argues that during the liberation
‘traditional religion, still very powerful amongst the peasantry, became the main ideology in ZANU’S struggle.
F. Chung, Reliving the Second Chimurenga: Memoirs from the Liberation Struggle (Uppsala and Harare, Nordic
Africa Institute and Weaver Press. 2006), p. 82.
10 I. Mandaza, ‘The State and Politics in the Post-White Settler Situation’, in I. Mandaza (ed.), Zimbabwe: The
Political Economy of Transition 1980–1986 (Dakar, CODESRIA, 1986), pp. 21–74.
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206 Journal of Southern African Studies

initiated by intellectuals from this tradition who, while working in the state, were located in
organisations such as the African Association of Political Science, the Zimbabwe Economic
Society and the Southern African Political and Economic Series Trust. Predictably for these
intellectuals, the primary affiliations were to the ‘legacy’ of the liberation struggle, a strong
commitment to a statist developmental project, and an anti-imperialist stance. It is fair to say
that this ‘Left nationalism’ was the dominant ideological framework for many intellectuals in
the 1980s. A great deal of the intellectual support for the ruling party in the political crisis that
emerged from the late 1990s emerged from this background, stressing, in particular, a loyalty
to selective ‘ideals’ of the liberation struggle, support for an ‘indigenous’ national economic
project, and a vehement anti-imperialism (though not anti-capitalism) in the context of the
‘New Imperialism’ of America and its allies.
The second major source of leftist thought emerged out of the struggles of civil society
against the postcolonial state, initially from the activism of students and workers in the late
1980s, and then with the more general mobilisation of civil society against state
authoritarianism from the late 1990s. As students, workers and some intellectuals developed a
growing critique of the postcolonial state, more critical attention was paid to rethinking the
legacies of the liberation struggles and placing more central attention on the struggles for
human and civic rights. It was, in particular, the issue of human rights that marked the critical
debates from the late 1990s, and the central role of lawyers in leading these debates.
A growing awareness of the human rights abuses of the Gukarahundi massacres of the mid-
1980s in Matabeleland was combined with increasing criticisms of the corruption and
undemocratic structures of the ZANU-PF state, to produce both a plethora of human rights
NGOs and a strong commitment to human rights concerns.11 Thus, the brief period of
political liberalisation in the 1990s was characterised by a combination of liberal democratic
critique,12 with its emphases on correcting the deformities of the electoral system and
addressing human rights issues, trade union struggles, and a peripheral Trotskyite Marxism.
The latter emanated from the student politics of the University of Zimbabwe in the aftermath
of the post-1989 demise of existing socialist models.
The amalgam of these trends coalesced in the broad politics of the constitutional
movement, the formation of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and the more
recent anti-globalisation politics of the Zimbabwe Social Forum. In the context of the ruling
party’s land ‘reforms’ and the authoritarian nationalist politics that characterised these
traumatic events, a growing tension emerged within the politics of the civic movement and
the opposition, over the relations between human rights issues and the necessity of redressing
colonial legacies. Such tensions continue to pose theoretical and political challenges for an
alternative politics in Zimbabwe.13 The remainder of this article will attempt to tease out

11 S.R. Dorman, ‘Inclusion and Exclusion: NGOs and Politics in Zimbabwe’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford,
2001).
12 J. Moyo, Voting for Democracy (Harare, University of Zimbabwe Publications, 1992). In the 1990s the writings
of Jonathan Moyo were pre-eminent in terms of a liberal democratic critique of the state. However, in 2000,
Moyo changed his political allegiance, was appointed a Minister in the government of ZANU-PF, and became a
key articulator of the authoritarian nationalism that marked the period after the constitutional referendum of that
year. In 2004, Moyo was one of the high-level casualties of the succession battle in the ruling party, and has since
reverted to his strong criticisms of ZANU-PF. In 2005, Moyo launched a new party called the United People’s
Movement advocating a purported ‘Third Force’ alternative to both ZANU-PF and the MDC. Following Moyo’s
political career brings to mind the words of Edward Said: ‘When individuals get in the habit of switching gods
whom they worship politically, there’s no end to the number of changes they make before they finally come to
rest in utter disgrace and well-deserved oblivion’. E. Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap (London,
Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 257.
13 For a very good discussion of this problematic in Zimbabwean civic politics see E. McCandless, ‘Zimbabwean
Forms of Resistance: Social Movements, Strategic Dilemmas and Transformative Change’ (PhD thesis,
American University, Washington, DC, 2005).
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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left 207

these issues in the Zimbabwean context, and raise the challenges they represent for the Left in
southern Africa. In order to do this, the discussion will look at three major areas: the
intellectual legacies of political economy; problematising nation, race and anti-imperialism;
and the problems of opposition politics.

The Intellectual Legacies of Political Economy

In a study of the history of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS) from 1973 –
2003, the Nigerian scholar Adele Jinadu noted that the period 1975– 1985 ‘witnessed the
popularity, if not the dominance of a Marxist political economy approach in African political
science’.14 Mahmood Mamdani has also written that for the first generation of postcolonial
intellectuals the major assumption of their political consciousness was that the impact of
colonial rule on African societies was ‘mainly economic’, and that following this the tools of
political economy were the ‘most appropriate to come to analytical grips with the colonial
legacy’.15 This position repeats an earlier insight by Stuart Hall who, attempting to
understand the dominance of economism in both numerous Marxist and non-Marxist
accounts of post-conquest societies, wrote that ‘perhaps the weight of imperialist economic
relations has been so powerfully visible, these formations have virtually been held to be
explainable by an application of “imperialism” as essentially a purely economic process’.16
A primary locus of this influence was what became known as the Dar es Salaam debate.
Reading through the various contributions to this debate it is clear that in addition to the
important insights provided on imperialist constraints on African development, many of the
interventions were marked by a strong economism and instrumentalism in attempting to deal
with questions of class and state, as well as a lack of strong historical analysis and a penchant
for arid Marxist exegesis. In addition, much of the discussion focused on the role of the state,
with very little attention to popular democratic processes.17 For many progressive
intellectuals in, or supporting, the liberation movement, who became part of the early
Zimbabwean state and led intellectual debates in the country in the 1980s, the influence of
political economy and of the intellectual afterglow of the ‘Dar Debate’ was immense.
It is significant that the first major work of political economic analysis on Rhodesia was
carried out by two scholars who had also had contact with the ‘Dar Debate’. The work of
Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul spawned a series of radical analyses of the Rhodesian
Economy.18 Arrighi’s work, in particular, influenced a radical revision of the analysis of the
settler political economy and the process of proletarianisation under settler colonialism,
debunking the assumptions of dualism and modernisation theory.19 It also provided a critique
of the dominant nationalist historiography of the time. The work still stands as a milestone in
Zimbabwean studies and paved the way for future political economy studies of the country.

14 L. Adele Jinadu, ‘African Intellectuals, Democracy and Development: History of the African Association of
Political Scientists (AAPS), 1973–2003’, AAPS Occasional Paper Series, 7, 1 (2003), p. 35.
15 M. Mamdani, ‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of
Colonialism’ (paper presented at the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora, Dakar, 6–9
October 2004).
16 S. Hall, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’, in UNESCO, Sociological Theories: Race
and Nationalism (Paris, UNESCO, 1980), p. 333.
17 Y. Tandon, University of Dar es Salaam: Debate on Class, State and Imperialism (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Publishing House, 1983).
18 G. Arrighi and J.S. Saul, Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York and London, Monthly Review
Press, 1973).
19 Arrighi, ‘Labour Supplies in Historical Perspective: A Study of the Proletarianisation of the African Peasantry in
Rhodesia’, and ‘The Political Economy of Rhodesia’, in Arrighi and Saul, Essays on the Political Economy of
Africa, pp. 180–234 and pp. 336– 77, respectively.
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208 Journal of Southern African Studies

It was therefore not surprising when the first collection of essays assessing the first five years
of independence was called ‘Zimbabwe: The Political Economy of Transition’. This study,
edited by prominent Zimbabwean academic, Ibbo Mandaza, bore the major hallmarks of the
political economy tradition, concentrating on the international and regional determinants of
Zimbabwe’s independence, as well as focusing attention on the new ‘post-white settler
colonial state’. Much of the analysis of class was heavily economistic and the collection
provided little attention to democratic and human rights issues. Significantly, there was no
analysis of the state repression then taking place in Matabeleland. The collection did,
however, make an interesting start in problematising the assumption of a protracted struggle
leading to a more radical content of the liberation struggle, by analysing the ambiguities of
the petty bourgeoisie.
Two other influential volumes in this tradition appeared in the late 1980s, an edited collection
by Colin Stoneman20 and a joint book by Stoneman and Cliffe,21 both dealing with similar
questions to the Mandaza volume. However, in the latter volume, Stoneman and Cliffe attempted
to set out a more clearly articulated Marxist analysis of the postcolonial Zimbabwean political
economy by pursuing certain key questions first formulated in Arrighi’s work.22 As with other
work in this tradition, the strength of this volume was in posing important broad structural
questions around class and the economy, while also indicating an early awareness of the threat of
the ruling party to democratic processes. However, the book was also characterised by the
weakness of attempting to read off politics in unmediated ways from economic class positions.
A final example of political economy analysis produced in the 1980s was the work of André
Astrow.23 Astrow’s book, covering similar ground to the other work discussed in this section,
was, however, a much more formalist and ‘deterministic prejudging of many of the issues’24
around postcolonial politics. The author set up an a priori model of the difference between a
national and class struggle, and then postulated the absence of the leading role of the working
class in the Zimbabwean struggles as the defining feature of the ‘neo-colonial’ Zimbabwean state.
There is little sense in Astrow’s work of what Gavin Williams refers to as ‘historical
explanations’ which should be ‘open-ended, always allowing for complexity and contingency’.25
This first generation of left-oriented intellectuals in Zimbabwe was also marked by its
emphasis on the role of the state as the central fact of development and transformation. Even
early liberal critiques of the state such as those given by Jonathan Moyo did not question this
assumption, however much they criticised particular applications and abuses of state power.26
In his later career as ruling party ideologue between 2000 and 2004, Jonathan Moyo was even
more unequivocal on the central role of the state:
The first people who started selling out are the intellectuals. They are no longer engaging in
critical debates that help our people. They made the simplistic definition of State as Government
and the rest as civil society. Everyone left the state and created civil society. Those who have
abandoned the state need to rethink. They need to come back home and home is the state.27

20 C. Stoneman (ed.), Zimbabwe’s Prospects (London, Macmillan; Harare, College Press, 1988).
21 C. Stoneman and L. Cliffe, Zimbabwe: Politics, Economics and Society (London, Pinter, 1989).
22 These included an investigation into the economic relations between international capital, the settlers and the
emergent black bourgeoisie; the effects of property changes in the postcolonial era on the fortunes of peasants,
workers and the middle class; and the class configuration of new political developments, Ibid., p. 6.
23 A. Astrow, Zimbabwe: A Revolution that Lost its Way? (London, Zed Press, 1983).
24 Stoneman and Cliffe, Zimbabwe: Politics, Economics and Society, p. 6.
25 G. Williams, ‘Political Economies and the Study of Africa: Critical Considerations’, Review of African Political
Economy, 102 (September 2004), p. 577. Williams’s piece covers, in a broader sense, some of the issues I have
tried to raise in the Zimbabwean context.
26 J. Moyo, ‘State Politics and Social Domination in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 30, 2 (1992),
pp. 305 –30.
27 ‘Non-State Actors Doomed: Moyo’, The Herald, 14 October 2003.
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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left 209

This adherence to the centrality of the state complemented the liberation movement’s conception
of the state as primarily owned and controlled by the ruling party, the sole legitimate heirs of the
liberation movement. Any reference to liberal concerns with human rights and democratic space
that once informed the demands of the nationalist movement, was increasingly erased from the
selective history of nationalism espoused by ZANU-PF, and increasing emphasis was placed on
the commandism that had dominated liberation politics.
During the 1990s and the period after 2000, in the context of the growth of the civic
movement and the emergence of stronger opposition politics, there were significant
developments in the intellectual deconstruction of nationalism and the politics of the liberation
movement, about which more will be said in the next section. Significantly, however, in the
context of a polarised national politics, divergent trends developed in the application of a political
economy analysis to explain the politics of land occupations in 2000 and beyond. On the one
hand, intellectuals such as Sam Moyo, Ibbo Mandaza, and Paris Yeros have taken a position in
critical support of Mugabe’s land policy. Sam Moyo explains his position as follows:
Much of the negative fallout from the occupations movement, including its short term gain, has to
be weighed more seriously against the longer term gains to the broader democratisation process,
of creating space for awareness and participation in the basic social struggles hitherto dominated
by formal state structures and urban civil society.28
Similarly Mandaza judges that the rural struggles not only constitute a ‘land reform process of
no small proportion; but it will largely have resolved and democratised the land in
Zimbabwe’.29 Yeros largely approves the land reform process because ‘one cannot miss the
fact that 1 million rural poor are being resettled’. Responding to the violence that has
accompanied the occupations, Yeros reverts to a form of structuralist justification:
The argument that violence is being instrumentalised is correct. Yet again while terror cannot
be condoned and must be resisted, one must recognise that violence, whether it comes in the form of
‘infant mortality’ or ‘so called war vets’ or the riot police, is endemic in the neo-colonial situation and
cannot be extirpated in any permanent way unless neo-colonialism itself is.30

For those who have criticised the authoritarian nationalism of the Zimbabwe regime, tried to
unpackage the specificities of the Mugabe regime’s current anti-democratic politics and
human rights’ abuses, as well as laying bare the new processes of elite accumulation that are
currently underway in Zimbabwe,31 Moyo and Yeros have only a shrill response: such
intellectuals and their ‘oppositional’ politics have been co-opted.
. . . to the point where imperialism has become mystified, national self-determination demoted, the
state obscured, and the agrarian question abandoned. Such intellectual reversals have had real effects,
perhaps most clearly in relation to Zimbabwe, whose radical nationalism and land reform have
proved unpalatable to the ‘civic’ and ‘post’ nationalisms of domestic and international forces.32
Elsewhere, Phimister and Raftopoulos have responded to this position challenging such
optimistic characterisations of the land ‘reform’ process, as well as the serious lack of

28 S. Moyo, ‘The Land Occupation Movement in Zimbabwe: Contradictions of Neo-liberalism’, Millennium:

Journal of International Studies, 30, 2 (2001), p. 330.
29 I. Mandaza, ‘The Zimbabwean Crisis: Myths and Realities’, The Sunday Mirror, 22 September 2002.
30 Yeros, ‘Zimbabwe and the Dilemmas of the Left’, p. 212.
31 Hammar, Raftopoulos and Jensen (eds), Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business; P. Bond and J. Manyanya,
Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice (Scottsville and
London, University of Natal Press and Merlin Press, 2002).
32 S. Moyo and P. Yeros, ‘Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic
Revolution in Zimbabwe’, in S. Moyo and P. Yeros (eds), The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia
and Latin America (London, Zed Press, 2005), p. 166. For an interesting critique of this book and in particular the
Moyo/Yeros chapter on land struggles in Zimbabwe, see K. Helliker’s ‘Review Essay’ (unpublished mimeo,
2005).
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210 Journal of Southern African Studies

analysis of the nature of the Zimbabwean state and the specificities of the authoritarian
regime currently being consolidated in Zimbabwe.33
Other commentators drawing on the insights of political economy have taken a more
critical view of the processes and politics currently underway in Zimbabwe. The voluminous
work of Patrick Bond has traced the flows of finance capital in both colonial and postcolonial
Zimbabwe, clearly setting out the circuits of this process and their determinations on politics
in both periods. More specifically, his work has tracked the destructive effects of neo-
liberalism on the Zimbabwean economy and the emergence of authoritarian politics in the
form of an ‘exhausted nationalism’. Bond has also linked the popular struggles in Zimbabwe
to broader global struggles against neo-liberalism, and shed some light on the ‘sub-imperial’
role of South Africa in the context of the ‘New Imperialism’.34
In a series of articles David Moore35 has located the Zimbabwean crisis in the context of what
he describes as the ‘unresolved processes of primitive accumulation, nation-state formation, and
democratisation’. The longue durée questions raised by Moore have helped to clarify the longer
term structural constraints facing developing countries like Zimbabwe, and to provide greater
depth to the problems facing the democratic struggles in the country. Moore has also provided an
important commentary on the debates within the Zimbabwean Left pointing to the strengths and
weaknesses of contending arguments, but also stressing the centrality of democratic struggles
and the avoidance of ‘authoritarian closure’, for the resolution of the Zimbabwean crisis.36
Thus, the central difference between some of the current generation of political economists,
like Bond and Moore, and earlier writers has been a greater emphasis on democratic questions.
This is true also of the work of Rob Davies, whose deconstruction of the radical pretensions of
the economic policies of the ruling party has clearly exposed some of the relations between
external constraints and the destructive economic choices made by the Zimbabwean ruling
elite.37 The analyses of these scholars have no doubt been influenced by the strong emergence
of postcolonial civic and opposition party struggles, and the discourse of human rights and
democratisation through which their struggles have been articulated. While such studies have,

33 B. Raftopoulos and I. Phimister, ‘Zimbabwe Now: The Political Economy of Crisis and Coercion’, Historical
Materialism, 12, 4 (2004), pp. 355–82.
34 Amongst the many writings of Patrick Bond, see Bond and Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge; P. Bond, Uneven
Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment (Trenton, NJ, Africa World Press, 1998);
‘Bankrupt Africa: Imperialism, Sub-Imperialism and the Politics of Finance’, Historical Materialism, 12, 4
(2004), pp. 145 –72; ‘US Empire and South African Sub-Imperialism’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds), Socialist
Register (London, New York and Halifax, Merlin Press, 2005), pp. 218 –38. See also D. McKinley, ‘South
African Policy towards Zimbabwe under Mbeki’, Review of African Political Economy, 100 (2004), pp. 257–364.
For a discussion of the new imperialism see D. Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2003).
35 D. Moore, ‘Is the Land the Economy and the Economy the Land? Primitive Accumulation in Zimbabwe’, Journal
of Contemporary African Studies, 19, 2 (2001), pp. 253 –66; ‘Zimbabwe’s Triple Crisis: Primitive Accumulation,
Nation-State Formation and Democratisation in the Age of Neo-Liberal Globalisation’, African Studies
Quarterly, 7, 2 –3 (2003), pp. 35 –47; ‘The Second Age of the Third World: From Primitive Accumulation to
Public Goods’, Third World Quarterly, 25, 1 (2004), pp. 87–109.
36 D. Moore, ‘Marxism and Marxist Intellectuals in Schizophrenic Zimbabwe: How Many Rights for Zimbabwe’s
Left?’, Historical Materialism, 12, 4 (2004), pp. 405 –25. L. Freeman, commenting on the Left debate in
Zimbabwe, has also criticised the democratic deficit of the so-called progressive politics of the Zimbabwean
state: ‘ . . . the state in Zimbabwe, with its extreme abuse of human, civic and political rights, has operated in
ways characteristic of a quasi-fascist state rather than a “socialist” state’. L. Freeman, ‘Contradictory
Constructions of the Crisis in Zimbabwe’ (unpublished mimeo, 2005). For a useful Gramscian analysis of the
crisis see S. Rich Dorman, ‘NGOs and the Constitutional Debate in Zimbabwe: From Inclusion to Exclusion’,
Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, 4 (December 2003), pp. 845 –63; also J. Saul and R. Saunders, ‘Mugabe,
Gramsci and Zimbabwe at 25’, in D. Moore (ed.), Zimbabwe: Crisis and Transition (Pietermaritzburg, University
of Natal Press, 2006, forthcoming).
37 R. Davies, ‘Memories of Underdevelopment: A Personal Interpretation of Zimbabwe’s Economic Decline’, in
B. Raftopoulos and T. Savage (eds), Zimbabwe: Injustice and Political Reconciliation (Cape Town and Harare,
Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and Weaver Press, 2005), pp. 19–42.
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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left 211

however, produced impressive insights into the Zimbabwean crisis, there are tensions in the
work in moving between broad structural analysis and more concrete levels of political
analysis. This also lays these studies open to accusations of reductionism. As Hall has pointed
out, drawing strongly on the work of Gramsci, Marx’s central concepts, such as ‘primitive
accumulation, were pitched at high levels of abstraction and were “epochal in their range and
reference”’. Setting out the Gramscian challenge, Hall argues that:
. . . until one has shown how ‘objective economic crises’ actually develop, via the changing
relations in the balance of forces, into crises in the state and society, and germinate in the form of
ethical-political struggles and formed political ideologies, influencing the conception of the
world of the masses, one has not conducted a proper kind of analysis, rooted in the decisive and
irreversible ‘passage’ from structure to superstructure.38
For intellectuals working within a historical materialist framework, this is an enormous challenge,
but one that has to be faced if the analysis of the specificities of a concrete political situation is not
to appear like a voluntarist addition to structuralist assumptions, with little organic basis in such
analysis. The work of Donald Moore has made an important contribution to grappling with these
theoretical problems. Drawing on Gramsci and Foucault, Moore’s study of the Eastern Highlands
of Zimbabwe has combined a sophisticated analysis of the ‘violence of political economic
relations, the discursive construction of interests as crucial to ruling relations, and an emphasis on
culture as a critical terrain of struggle’.39 Thus, Moore attempts to avoid the twin problems of
economism and culturalism by combining an analysis of both material and symbolic struggles.
Clearly there is a good deal more theoretical work to be done in this area to overcome the
weaknesses of economism. However, the failure to confront these issues will have serious
political effects, particularly the inability to understand the force of particular discourses and the
hegemonic reach of postcolonial elites in the region. This applies, for example, to constructions of
nationalism and race in the region, to which the discussion now turns.

Problematising Nation, Race and Anti-Imperialism

Historically, one of the major theoretical and political failures of the Left has been around
questions of nationalism and race. In South Africa, for example, commenting on the record of
the revisionist radical South African scholarship, Neville Alexander concluded that:
. . . although there were different emphases among the individual scholars, most of them tended to adopt
a dogmatic position in terms of which racial ideology was seen as a kind of ‘false consciousness’
originally, and a relationship of functional necessity was established between the development of
capitalism and racism in South Africa. This was related to the prevailing militant revolutionarism in the
broad liberation movement at the time. It was to prove to be the analytical Achilles heel of the revisionist
‘new history’ since, ultimately, . . . events themselves demonstrated the fact that the capitalist system is
able to survive and even thrive in South Africa without recourse to racial ideology.40

While it is clear that capitalist production relations do not require a racial political structure, it is
also clear that racism and issues relating to that imprecise construct ‘the National Question’,
remain alive and active in the postcolonial histories of former settler states. At state level these
issues have come to be centred on the challenge of ‘indigenisation’ or ‘black economic
empowerment’, and it is at the level of emergent elites that this issue has received the most

38 S. Hall, ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’, in D. Morley and K-H. Chen (eds), Stuart
Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 419.
39 D.S. Moore, Suffering for Territory: Race, Space and Power in Zimbabwe (Harare and Durham, NC, Weaver and
Duke University Press, 2005), p. 9.
40 N. Alexander, An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa
(Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 2002), p. 22.
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212 Journal of Southern African Studies

policy and ideological attention. In Zimbabwe, the ravages of neo-liberalism combined with
the loss of ruling party legitimacy and the emergence of a formidable opposition, brought these
issues of black empowerment and historical economic redress on to centre stage. The land, a
continuously unresolved problem in the postcolonial period, became the sole central signifier
of national redress, constructed through a series of discursive exclusions, among which race
became a central mobiliser and marker of outsider status. An important part of this discourse
was the selective telling of nationalist and liberation history, citing the ruling party as the only
legitimate agency of liberation and therefore the sole arbiter of the national interest, patriotism
and authenticity. Terence Ranger has referred to this as ‘Patriotic History’,41 and though there
is certainly an overlap with what used to be called nationalist historiography, the narrowness
and exclusivity of this latest product are qualitatively different from what was certainly a
greater openness of the nationalist historiographical trajectory.
One of the most disturbing features of the Zimbabwean crisis has been the manner in which the
Mugabe regime has articulated a repressive national politics to a broad anti-imperialist, pan-
Africanist appeal, with essentialist notions of race as the central markers of the conflict. This
process has been a reminder of the power of the idea of ‘race’, precisely – as Gilroy reminds us –
because ‘it supplies a foundational understanding of natural hierarchy on which a host of other
supplementary social and political conflicts have come to rely’.42 With great intensity in
Zimbabwe, but with increasing frequency in South Africa, the mobilisation of race as a legitimising
force has been used to justify the battle against historical inequities, while attempting to conceal the
structures that increase such inequality.43 The real broad appeal that such a discourse can invoke
can disable a Left that fails to come to terms with the lived realities of race in postcolonial settings.
For, as in Zimbabwe, where the legitimacy of nationalism has faced substantive challenge,
the resonance of aspects of Mugabe’s ‘race’ message has nevertheless been felt even within
opposition forces. Attempts to deal with white and other minority involvement in the MDC and
the civic movement have faced difficulties, both because of Mugabe’s characterisation of the
MDC as a foreign white creation, and as a result of complaints about the predominance of whites
in certain leading positions in both movements. This clearly strikes at the heart of issues around
representation in national politics, and the ‘naming’ of who has the right to speak for the ‘nation’
and its liberation history. Given the weak history of non-racial opposition in Zimbabwe, this is not
surprising, but it has been disturbing to observe the ease with which opposition activists slip into
such narrow nationalist positions, under the strain of trying to develop different modes of
operation. Critical intellectuals and social movements have yet to develop sufficient popular
practices and disseminating structures that allow them, in Erasmus’s words, to ‘find ways of
recognising race and its continued effects on people’s everyday lives . . . while at the same time
working against practices that perpetuate race thinking’.44 An important part of this process
involves a clearer understanding of the role of race, as well as ethnicity, in the mobilisation
practices and leadership structures of liberation movements, ruling parties and opposition parties.
Interestingly, the emergence of this narrow official nationalism emerged against the
background of an increasingly critical historiography and ethnography from the 1990s. Studies
carried out were concerned with an overall revisionist assessment of nationalism and the
liberation struggle. Such assessments included a critical overview of the coercive and patriarchal

41 T. Ranger, ‘Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle Over the
Past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30, 2 (June 2004), pp. 215–34.
42 P. Gilroy, After Empire, Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon, Routledge, 2004), p. 9.
43 F. Barchiesi, ‘Class, Social Movements and the Transformation of the South African Left in the Crisis of
“National Liberation”’, Historical Materialism, 12, 4 (2004), pp. 327–53.
44 Z. Erasmus, ‘Race and Identity in the Nation’, in J. Daniel, R. Southall and J. Lutchman (eds), State of the Nation,
South Africa 2004–2005 (Cape Town and Michigan, Human Sciences Research Council Press and Michigan
State University, 2005), p. 30.
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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left 213

structures of the liberation struggle,45 as well as an analysis of the tensions between nationalist
parties and other African organisations,46 in the context of broader human rights issues.47
Moreover, an emerging urban historiography mapped out a more heterogeneous picture of urban
culture and politics,48 while nationalism and ethnicity, particularly in the Matabeleland region,
received more critical attention.49
Critical work also looked at the nature of the land and political crisis that emerged from the late
1990s, laying bare the class-based, patriarchal and authoritarian nationalist content of the politics,
but seeking also to provide a historical context for its emergence.50 Additionally, important work on
‘race’ contributed to the deconstruction of the binary positions that became an essential part of
Mugabe’s revived nationalist rhetoric, and pointed to more complex interrelationships between
racialised identities.51
Some of these studies moved away from a political economy framework and sought to
understand issues of identity, culture and politics by drawing on the insights of postcolonial

45 N. Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992);
J. Nhongo-Simbanegavi, For Better or Worse? Women and ZANLA in Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle (Harare,
Weaver Press, 2000); N. Bhebe and T. Ranger (eds), Soldiers and Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, Volume 1 (Harare
and London, University of Zimbabwe Press and James Currey, 1995); and with the same editors Society and
Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, Volume 2 (Harare and London, University of Zimbabwe and James Currey, 1995).
46 B. Raftopoulos and I. Phimister (eds), Keep on Knocking: A History of the Labour Movement in Zimbabwe 1990–
1997 (Harare, Baobab Press, 1997); I. Phimister and B. Raftopoulos, ‘“Kana sora ratswa ngaritswe”: African
Nationalists and Black Workers – The 1948 General Strike in Colonial Zimbabwe’, Journal of Historical
Sociology, 13, 3 (September 2000), pp. 289 –324; B. Raftopoulos and L. Sachikonye (eds), Striking Back: The
State and the Labour Movement in Zimbabwe (Harare, Weaver Press, 2001); F.B. Schiphorst, ‘Strength and
Weakness: The Rise of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions and the Development of Industrial Relations
1980– 1995’ (PhD thesis, University of Leiden, 2001).
47 T. Ranger (ed.), The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe (Harare, University of
Zimbabwe Press, 2003).
48 B. Raftopoulos and T. Yoshikuni (eds), Sites of Struggle: Essays in Zimbabwe’s Urban History (Harare, Weaver
Press, 1999); T. Barnes, ‘We Women Worked So Hard’: Gender, Urbanisation and Social Reproduction in
Colonial Harare, 1930–1956 (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 1999); M. West, The Rise of the African Middle
Class: Colonial Zimbabwe 1898– 1965 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2002);
T. Ranger, ‘Urban Violence and the Colonial Experience: Bulawayo, Rhodesia, 1893–1960’, Journal of Cultural
Studies (forthcoming); also his ‘Reclaiming the African City: The World and the Township’ (lecture to be
published by the Berlin Institute of Oriental Studies, 2005).
49 T. Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Motopos Hills of Zimbabwe (Oxford, James
Currey, 1999); J. Alexander, J. McGregor and T. Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark
Forests’ of Matabeleland (Oxford, James Currey, 2000); K. Pohjolainen Yap, ‘Uprooting the Weeds: Power,
Violence, Ethnicity and Violence in the Matabeleland Conflict 1980–1987’ (PhD thesis, University of Helsinki,
2001).
50 H. Dashwood, Zimbabwe: The Political Economy of Transformation (Toronto, University of Toronto Press,
2000); A.S. Mlambo, The Economic Structural Adjustment Programme: The Case of Zimbabwe (Harare,
University of Zimbabwe Press, 1997); S. Moyo, Land Reform under Structural Adjustment: Land Use Change in
the Mashonaland Provinces (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2000); H. Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe:
The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation (Cape Town, David Philip Publishers, 2003); C. Sylvester,
Producing Women and Progress in Zimbabwe: Narratives of Identity and Work from the 1980s (Portsmouth, NH,
Heinemann, 2000); Hammar, Raftopoulos and Jensen, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business; R. Saunders, Dancing
Out of Tune: A History of Tune. A History of the Media in Zimbabwe (Harare, Brylee Printers, 1999); R. Saunders,
Never the Same Again: Zimbabwe’s Growth Towards Democracy (Harare, FES/OSISA, 2000).
51 J.-K. Seirlis, ‘Coloureds, Space and Belonging in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, Part 1’, Journal of Social
Archaeology, 4, 3 (2004), pp. 405–27; also ‘Undoing the United Front? Coloured Soldiers in Rhodesia
1939– 1980’, African Studies, 63, 1 (July 2004), pp. 73–94; J. Muzondidya, ‘Towards an Historical
Understanding of the Making of the Coloured Community in Zimbabwe, 1890–1920’, Identity, Culture and
Politics, 3, 1 (December 2002), pp. 73–97; also ‘“Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans”: Invisible Subjects Minorities
and the Quest for Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe’, in Raftopoulos and Savage, Injustice
and Political Reconciliation, pp. 213–35; K. Alexander, ‘Orphans of Empire: An Analysis of Elements of White
Identity and Ideology Construction in Zimbabwe’, in Raftopoulos and Savage, Injustice and Political
Reconciliation, pp. 193 –212; A. Mlambo, ‘Building a White Man’s Country: Aspects of White Immigration into
Rhodesia up to World War Two’, Zambezia, 25, 2 (1998), pp. 1,233–46; A. Mlambo, ‘Some are More White than
Others: Racial Chauvinism as a Factor in Rhodesian Immigration Policy 1890–1963’, Zambezia, 25, 2 (1998),
pp. 139 –60.
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214 Journal of Southern African Studies

theory and post-structuralism, in particular the work of Foucault. In the case of Rutherford and
Worby, Foucault has been productively employed to understand the power relations of land
politics in communal areas and commercial farms, increasing our understanding of how
intellectual, economic and political processes are articulated in the formation and maintenance of
power and identities in both the colonial and postcolonial periods.52 Other work on the land
question showed the differences and connections between rural and urban struggles, undercutting
the divide between rural/ethnic subjects and urban citizens, demonstrating the mutual
interconnections and influences of both struggles, and making Neocosmos’s point, in his critique
of Mamdani, that ‘civil society was (and is) not simply an urban phenomenon in Africa’.53 The
general historical thrust of this work points to Frederick Cooper’s assessment that the
. . . triumph of nationalism appears less as a linear progression than as a conjuncture, and the
success of African political parties less a question of a singular mobilisation in the name of the
nation than of coalition building, the forging of clientage networks, and machine politics.54
As noted above, notwithstanding this rich historiography rethinking nationalism in
Zimbabwe, the ruling party has been able, through its media monopoly and the widespread
use of force, to project a much more narrow and selective vision of the past. This has been an
important lesson for progressive forces in Zimbabwe, namely the need to popularise
alternative visions of the past and to ensure that important academic historical work is placed
into the public domain in more accessible forms. As the Zimbabwean experience has shown,
an important part of legitimacy struggles can be fought around the past, and the battles to
confront official appropriations of the liberation struggle are a key area of contestation.
A similar lesson applies to the use of anti-imperialism as an opposing ideology. The Mugabe
regime has been very effective in broadening its appeal through its use of an anti-imperialist
ideological offensive, while domestically carrying out a very specific, repressive class project. The
language of anti-imperialism has mobilised the collective language of the nation, in ‘nationalist
forms of globalisation politics’ that attempt to conceal elite accumulation, and use popular
mobilisation for authoritarian politics.55 There are several reasons for the African and Third Worldist
support for Mugabe’s rhetoric. These include the latest predatory phase of American imperialism56
alongside what Rao calls an ‘insidious return of normative defences of empire’, which very easily
evinces a defensive anti-imperialism.57 The dangers of the authoritarian appropriation of a
potentially progressive discourse have been well summarised by Blade Nzimande:

52 B. Rutherford, Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe (Harare and
London, Weaver Press and Zed Press, 2001); E. Worby, ‘Tyranny, Parody, and Ethnic Polarity: Ritual
Engagements with the State in Northwestern Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 24, 3 (September
1998), pp. 337–54; also ‘“Discipline without Oppression”: Sequence, Timing and Marginality in Southern
Rhodesia’s Post-War Development Regime’, Journal of African History, 41, 1 (2000), pp. 101–25. For an
interesting piece demonstrating the insights of postcolonial theory for African Studies see R. Abrahamsen,
‘African Studies and the Post-Colonial Challenge’, African Affairs, 102 (2003), pp. 189 –210.
53 M. Neocosmos, ‘The Construction of State Consensus in South Africa: Authoritarian Nationalism, the
Depoliticisation of Politics and the Exclusion of Democratic Discourse’ (paper presented at the International
Conference on ‘Re-conceptualising Democracy and Liberation in Southern Africa’, 11–13 July 2002, Windhoek,
Namibia), p. 35.
54 F. Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, American Historical Review, 99, 5
(1994), p. 1,539; see also Cooper’s ‘Africa’s Pasts and Africa’s Historians’, African Historical Review, 3, 2
(1999), pp. 1–29. Together these two pieces present a brilliant review and revision of African historical trends
and throw up important questions about the contemporary period.
55 For the use of such language in Southeast Asia, see G. Greenfield, ‘Bandung REDUX: Imperialism and Anti-
Globalisation Nationalisms in Southeast Asia’, in Panitch and Leys, Socialist Register 2005, pp. 166–96.
56 T. Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London, Verso, 2002); and Bush in
Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq (London, Verso, 2004).
57 R. Rao, ‘The Empire Writes Back (to Michael Ignatief)’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33, 1
(2004), p. 145. See also I. Phimister and B. Raftopoulos, ‘Mugabe, Mbeki and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism’,
Review of African Political Economy, 101, 31 (2004), pp. 385–400.
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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left 215

. . . what Zimbabwe does illustrate (once more) is that the demagogic appropriation of a
progressive nationalist discourse by a bureaucratic capitalist stratum invariably drives a wedge
between radical third world nationalism and democracy. It ends up leaving former elites as the
active champions of democracy. We need to challenge the monopoly of the nationalist discourse
enjoyed by this stratum, just as we need (certainly here in SA) to challenge the dominance of the
discourse on human rights by conservative ethnic minority forces, who use the discourse to defend
ill-begotten wealth from the past. A working class and popular appropriation of both the national
and the democratic is critical.58
For the authoritarian nationalists in Zimbabwe, this appropriation takes place against what former
Zimbabwean Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stan Mudenge believes to be ‘the mutation of European
and North American “socialists” and even some “communists”, from “progressives” in the 1960s
and 1970s to neo-liberal reactionaries today’. A similar position was taken by ruling party
intellectual, Tafataona Mahoso, who has written that the revival of African nationalism has taken
place as a result of the ‘bitter sense of betrayal which the African majority feel at the hands of a new
breed of neo-liberal African “reformers” and their Western allies, the socialists and progressives of
yester-year’.59
It is clear that historically there have been serious tensions between various factions of the
western Left and progressives in the Third World, relating amongst other issues to the uneven
experiences of capitalism, imperialism, racism, and liberal human and political rights. The
result has often been that, as Nash has written, the ‘appeal to fraternity never led to an account
of the political strategies that would bring the two zones together’.60 In the context of the
demise of the socialist promise post-1989, the decisive loss of an international socialist
solidarity has provided more breeding space for resurrected nationalisms, particularly of the
repressive variety. Mugabe’s nationalism is one such incarnation. Notwithstanding the
impressive achievements of the anti-globalisation movement, the broadness of the diverse
agendas of this movement can also accommodate the authoritarian anti-imperialism of the
Zimbabwe regime.
Thus, there remains the difficult task of developing an anti-imperialist critique and practice
that is both anti-capitalist and democratic, and that builds more democratic political spaces
while challenging the ravages of the New Imperialism. This is not a new challenge for the Left,
as the twentieth-century history of socialist theory and practice showed. However, in the face of
a seemingly unremitting global capitalist onslaught, the challenge has become that much more
urgent. For some on the Left this has led to a form of stoic retreat from anti-capitalist practice
while maintaining a critical intellectual stance.61 This is a structure of feeling that is easy
enough to comprehend and even sympathise with, especially when the alternatives on the Left
are, at times, a repeat of ahistorical, rigid orthodoxies that have little to commend themselves to
critical minds. In the face of such ‘alternatives’, heresy can be a positive virtue. The real
challenge remains the building of alternative political processes and, here again, the
Zimbabwean case has provided some sombre lessons.

58 B. Nzimande, ‘Towards an Alternative South African Developmental Path: Notes for Input to a Policy Workshop
on Zimbabwe – An SACP Perspective’ (paper presented at the launch of the Zimbabwe Institute, 27 February
2004, Johannesburg).
59 These remarks are quoted in T. Ranger’s, ‘The Uses and Abuses of History in Zimbabwe’ (lecture given at the
University of Uppsala, 24 May 2004). Mahoso’s thinking draws heavily on I. Shivji’s article, ‘The Rise, the Fall
and the Insurrection of Nationalism in Africa’ (Centre for Civil Society, Report No. 12, University of Kwa-Zulu
Natal, South Africa, 2004). In particular, Shivji observes: ‘In sum, neo-liberal discourse and political rhetoric has
served to debunk African nationalism on the one hand, and to rehabilitate imperialism on the other. The majority
of intellectuals have pretty well accommodated mainstream thought. This includes former militant nationalists
and socialist intellectuals’, p. 9.
60 A. Nash, ‘Third Worldism’, African Sociological Review, 7, 1 (2003), pp. 104 –5.
61 For one such trajectory see P. Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (London, Merlin Press,
2004).
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216 Journal of Southern African Studies

Problems of Opposition Politics

The emergence of a major political opposition in the post-1980 period, emerging from a
combination of civic and labour struggles, heralded a new phase in Zimbabwean politics. The
emergence of the MDC represented the first major broad-based alliance of social forces in
Zimbabwe mobilised against the party of the liberation movement, and drawing its strength
in particular from the urban areas. The movement drew its ideological strength from an
emphasis on political, civic and human rights, pointing to the democratic deficit of the
incumbent ruling party and building on the cumulative popular frustration with ZANU-PF after
nearly two decades of one-party dominance. The stress on human and civic rights issues and on
the importance of using available judicial spaces to contest authoritarian politics has often been
interpreted as characterising the opposition’s attachment to liberalism, and the rights of elites.
In a very useful broad critique of such liberalism, Neocosmos has written:
The politics of human rights is, at best, a state-focused politics and is predominantly reduced to a
technicised politics, which is limited to a demand for inclusion in to an existing state domain. Thus
a struggle for rights, if successful, can end up producing the outcome of a fundamentally de-
politicised politics.62

One could, however, argue a more sanguine view of such rights politics, and see it as an
important modality for both challenging the repressive politics of authoritarian states as well
as providing more spaces for developing democratic politics. Additionally, working through
such perspectives often draws on historically-based perspectives of human and civic rights
struggles, which provide an important component in developing popular ownership around
such struggles. Drawing on these legacies is also necessary because, as Jonathan Hyslop has
pointed out, while the liberal tradition has avoided questions of material inequality,
‘socialism has never had an adequate theory of political rights necessary to a democratic
politics’.63 This is an important reminder when the deleterious effects of neo-liberal
economics have sometimes evoked a blanket denigration of the opportunities afforded by
liberal rights, which have often been a central part of anti-colonial struggles.
That being said, it is also clear that the political and civic opposition in Zimbabwe have not placed
sufficient attention on the relations between civic/human rights questions and economic rights, thus
contributing to a dangerous rupture in the rights/redistribution discourse and politics in Zimbabwe.
Moreover, into this caesura the Mugabe regime has imposed a selective articulation of the issue of
colonial redress, which has either forgotten, or completely marginalised the broader political rights
questions that were just as central to the struggles against colonial rule. The opposition generally have
not responded strongly to this position, and yet one could argue that this is a general challenge for any
progressive opposition today. The limitations of turning to neo-liberal economic programmes in
response to authoritarian nationalist regimes have become globally apparent.
From its inception, the political opposition in Zimbabwe made the urban areas its major
focus, although until the land occupations of 2000 and beyond, it had begun to make inroads into
the rural areas. However, once the state’s land occupation programme effectively cordoned the
opposition out of the rural areas, the disjuncture between ruling party domination in the rural
areas and opposition urban dominance was consolidated. This process has created major strategic
and political problems for the opposition, and emphasised a long-standing historical weakness of
the Zimbabwean trade union movement in dealing with rural issues. The result has been a break
in the political connections between the lived experiences of rural and urban livelihoods, and the

62 M. Neocosmos, ‘Rethinking Politics Today: Elements of a Critique of Political Liberalism in Southern Africa’,
in Centre for Civil Society, From Local Processes to Global Forces (Research Reports, Volume 1, University of
Kwa-Zulu Natal, 2005).
63 J. Hyslop, ‘The Notorious Syndicalist: Interview with Jonathan Hyslop’, Wiser In Brief, 3, 1 (December 2004), p. 7.
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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left 217

deepening of the despotic politics of ZANU-PF in the rural traditional and local governance
structures. Moreover, the land occupations displaced approximately one million farm workers
and their families, thus deepening the crisis of social reproduction in the rural areas. In the urban
areas the state has undermined elected local government structures through the imposition of
rigid central government administrative and financial controls,64 and a recent state assault on the
urban ‘surplus’ in the informal sector through its notorious Operation Murambatsvina. The latter
operation resulted in approximately 700,000 people in the cities losing their homes, their sources
of livelihood or both, while a further 2.4 million people were indirectly affected.65 The loss of this
reserve of employment, income and source of cheaper consumer goods in the informal sector, at a
time of a massive shrinking of formal sector employment, has greatly contributed to a more
general crisis of the reproduction of labour in the Zimbabwean economy. This broad-based
reproduction crisis has further destroyed the urban social basis for trade union organisation,
political mobilisation and civic politics and led to the increased ruralisation of Zimbabwe.66
Thus, the opposition, as a result of a combination of state repression, a general crisis of social
reproduction, mass exhaustion, inadequate planning and preparation, and a weak
conceptualisation of the relations between land and livelihood struggles in the rural and urban
areas, is faced with enormous challenges in its attempts to develop new rural–urban political
linkages. Clearly the challenge of developing a broad citizenship-rights politics across rural and
urban areas remains immense.67
As the electoral obstacles, repressive institutional measures, state violence and tactical
acuity deployed by the state have eroded the political effectiveness of the opposition,68 the
major strategic question facing the latter is: how to confront an authoritarian state, with strong
regional support and liberation legitimacy, through peaceful means, in the context of a

64 A. Kamete, ‘Contestable Nationalism: The Liberation Movement and Urban Constituencies in Zimbabwe’ (paper
presented at the ‘Futures for Southern Africa’ Symposium organised by CIIR, ICS, NAI, and SACBC, Windhoek,
Namibia, 15–17 September 2003).
65 For various reports on Operation Murambatsvina (Remove the Filth) see: UNDP, ‘Report of the Fact-Finding
Mission to Zimbabwe to Assess the Scope and Impact of Operation Murambatsvina by the UN Special Envoy on
Human Settlements Issues in Zimbabwe, Mrs Anna Kajamulo Tibaijuka’ (Geneva, UN, 2005); Action Aid
International, ‘Zimbabwe Demolitions’ (Johannesburg, AAI, 2005); Solidarity Peace Trust, ‘Discarding The
Filth: Operation Murambatsvina’ (Johannesburg, Solidarity Peace Trust, 2005); Zimbabwe Human Rights
Forum, ‘Zimbabwe: Facts or Fiction. An Audit of the Recommendations of the Fact-Finding Mission of the
African Commission for Human and People’s Rights’ (Harare, Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, 2005). See also
the articles by A. Kamete and D. Potts in this issue.
66 B. Kinsey, ‘Zimbabwe’s Land Reform Programme: Underinvestment in Post-Conflict Transformation’, World
Development, 32, 10 (2004), pp. 1,669– 96. Jeremy Cronin points out the importance of the informal sector and
other township activities to the anti-apartheid struggle: ‘The dense and intricate layer of township and squatter
camp activities – spaza shops, shebeens, stokvels, minibus associations, church voluntarism, neighbourhood
watches, sports clubs, choirs, etc – were in many respects the “social capital” that supported our liberation
struggles. They were our equivalent of the scattered peasantry of the Sierra Maestra, or Yunan, or the hamlets of
South East Asia. They continue to be an absolutely critical working class “reserve fund”, shock absorbers,
breathing space, insurance against retrenchments, casualisations, fluctuations in the Rand/Dollar etc.’ Cronin’s
argument is related to his more general strategic question, namely, ‘How does a modern working class, more or
less wholly dependent on the capitalist market for its livelihood, sustain itself for a fairly protracted struggle?’
J. Cronin, ‘Towards a Marxist Approach to the Struggle for “Sustainable livelihoods”’ (unpublished mimeo,
2005).
67 Gillian Hart has suggested ‘the need to de-link the land question from agriculture and from individual restitution
claims, and to re-articulate it in terms of racialised dispossession as an ongoing process . . . this move extends the
definition of the social wage beyond employment-based entitlements or even conventional social policy to insist
on basic social security grounded in citizenship rights’. G. Hart, ‘Denaturalising Dispossession: Critical
Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism’, in Centre for Civil Society, From Local Processes to Global
Forces, p. 17.
68 E. Masunugure, ‘Travails of Opposition Politics in Zimbabwe Since Independence’, in D. Harold-Barry (ed.),
Zimbabwe: The Past is the Future (Harare, Weaver, 2004), pp. 147–92; L. Laakso, ‘Where Elections are Just a
Formality: Rural–Urban Dynamics in the Dominant Party System in Zimbabwe’, in M. Cowens and L. Laakso
(eds), Multi-Party Elections in Africa (Oxford and New York, James Currey and Palgrave, 2002), pp. 325–45.
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218 Journal of Southern African Studies

resurgent imperialism wielding the sword of human rights as its battle call. The answers
remain difficult and challenging. In the interim, the opposition movement has also had
problems developing an alternative political culture, on some occasions displaying a
proclivity for perpetuating the ethnic contests and enforcer politics that have become the trade
mark of ZANU-PF.
In finalising this section it should be noted that one of the more positive features of
opposition politics since 2000 has been the development of regional solidarities over the
Zimbabwe crisis. Even as the alliance between the ZCTU and the MDC has come under
increasing strain internally, the bonds between labour movements in Zimbabwe and South
Africa have grown. COSATU’s two attempts to enter Zimbabwe in 2004 and 2005, in
solidarity with the ZCTU, were both an important display of solidarity in the face of
violations of labour rights, and a challenge to the claims by an authoritarian state to use the
issue of sovereignty as a legitimisation for abusing such rights. Not for the first time in the
history of the world’s labour movements, were alternative constructions of sovereignty being
proposed across national boundaries. In the context of a regional political body, SADC, that
has given continued public support to a repressive regime, this was a very important political
statement to make. The action points to different forms of popular pan-Africanist solidarity
between postcolonial states.

Conclusion
In 1980s’ Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, to be on the Left meant a strong theoretical adherence to
the discourse of political economy. In analytical terms this translated into a strong emphasis
on economic and broadly structural concerns and economistic notions of class and race.
The language of human rights and civic struggles, when even considered, was peripheral and
of secondary importance to economic, developmental priorities. Central to this logic was the
role of the party and emerging state, the repository of the legitimacy of the liberation struggle.
Nationalism was rarely problematised and accounts of the liberation struggle were for the
most part locked in a celebratory phase. Thus, much of the academic work of this period was
marked by these limitations. The official ‘Marxism-Leninism’ of the ruling party was
an unimaginative rhetorical mechanism, with no substantial organic basis either in the ruling
party structures or the new state. Most academic discussions around Marxism were
characterised by lifeless mechanistic interpretations with little or no historical moorings.
The democratic struggles of the 1990s around trade unionism, human rights and
constitutionalism, as well as the emergence of a popular opposition political party, provided
the context for the emergence of more critical academic debates. A wide-ranging
problematising of nationalism combined with critiques of the postcolonial political and
economic policies to produce much more interesting questions about both the contemporary
period and the past. The discourse of political economy itself was affected as new studies
were influenced by the growing national human rights culture and civic struggles, and the
international demise of ‘actually existing socialisms’. Concluding his study of the radical
ZIPA group of the 1970s, David Moore hoped that these militants would re-emerge in the
postcolonial period and tackle the task of popularising socialism ‘by forging its ever
precarious links with its ultimate sources in the working class and peasantry of Zimbabwe’.69
In the event, members of the ex-ZIPA group did re-emerge in the period of the new
democratic struggles, forming the Zimbabwe Liberators Platform in the 1990s. However, the
language of their interventions connected more with the democratic discourse of the civic

69 Moore, ‘The Contradictory Construction of Hegemony in Zimbabwe’, p. 223.

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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left 219

movement than any return to the 1970s’ language of socialism. The politics of the opposition
party and the civics has often been criticised for its lack of attention to the structural legacies
of inequality. There is clearly a point to this criticism. It is also true that the central thrust of
civic politics was to redirect the postcolonial discussions to the importance of democratising
the modalities through which both the past and the present could be discussed. This remains a
central arena of contestation in an authoritarian nationalist state.
It is easy to be dismissive about left alternatives in our region, given the weakness of the
forces of the Left both in Africa and globally. It is also true that those who still claim some
affinity to selective aspects of the legacies of Marxism have had to confront the huge political
defeats of that history and the theoretical challenges that it has presented. This is particularly
true in the face of a growing reactionary nationalism that threatens to enclose our political
structures within the narrow agendas of our ruling elites. For some on the African Left, this
resurgent nationalism represents a necessary defensive stance in the face of the New
Imperialism, an abrasive face towards the global bully. Unfortunately much of the anger of
this embattled nationalism is channelled against the citizens of our states, and the nationalism
that presents itself as the nation’s shield is often the suffocating embrace of murderous
regimes. We need to find new collective discourses that build on a broad participation, and a
deep commitment to critical discussion and debate. For Zimbabweans, this challenge is more
urgent than ever as divisions over democratic questions continue to deepen.

Brian Raftopoulos
Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, Cape Town, South Africa. E-mail: braftopoilos@
iijr.org.za