Jacana

“The inhospitable Cape has reared its ugly head once more,” said Premesh Lalu speaking at the launch of Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo.

“This ugly head has taken the form of the politics of blame which is clearly unforgivable.”

He said it was vital to hold a critical intervention at this crucial point in the discussions that are happening in southern Africa, particularly in relation to Zimbabwe.

“We ought to have a far more sophisticated reading of what is unfolding in the region. Becoming Zimbabwe flies in the face of rather banal and ahistorical formulations on Zimbabwe, particularly those that have proliferated in the print media and more generally in the public sphere. This book is more meaningful than one might automatically anticipate for South Africans; one that opens onto a very important set of questions about how we think about this region.

He said the lesson in this book was for South Africans and the entire southern African region to always historicise. “I suspect,” he said, “that what’s happening in many of the discussions unfolding over the last while is a refusal to do just that – to follow the injunction to always historicise.”

He said it had been a privilege and pleasure to have Brian Roftopolous at the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC for the past year. “He encouraged us to always think about question of the present historically.” Lalu welcomed the book which challenges one to think differently. He acknowledged the District Six Museum that was “always a hospitable place” where one could open up difficult topics, like the discussion around the issue of forced removals.

Fanie du Toit, the Director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, said they were delighted to be part of the project. “We see history as fundamental to coming together and learning to share an understanding of the past. We’ve been working in that field and this book is the result of a long and ongoing conversation between us. Brian took the initiative and drove the project, producing an outstanding work of scholarship.”

He said, “We all know that there is an importance to some sort of liberation history that brings people together after conflict. But the danger of such a liberation becoming hegemonic in itself is always a huge spectre hanging over such a discourse. We are grateful because Zimbabwe testifies to the danger and the possibility of this, and, in terms of this discourse, the solution to this crisis. To form historical common ground without becoming hegemonic is the challenge. This book opens the debate, not with slogans, but with solid scholarship.”

Du Toit concurred with Lalu on the aptness of the timing. With the current situation in De Doorns this book offers a way of making sense of the bigger issues.

Brian Raftopoulos acknowledged the support he received from the Centre for Humanities Research, which he’d experienced as “extremely enriching”. He spoke at length on the chapter he’d written, and the paradoxes that are Zimbabwean issues and the issues of the region. He said the book tried to understand how people come to see themselves as part of a nation. He noted that the idea of the collective “Shona” identity didn’t exist in the pre-Colonial period. This became a political subjectivity much later.

He suggested that Zimbabwe was a domestic issue for South Africa.

“It’s on your doorstep. It’s here, in your face. It’s been one of the central problems of both of the previous presidencies and remains so for the current one. In both defining South Africa’s relationship to the region, as well as defining the ANC’s relation to its own traditions it remains a problem, because in the manner in which it has dealt with Zimbabwe also reflects the contested debate within the alliance about the future of the ANC.

“As I’ve said before, Zimbabwe is extreme, but it’s not exceptional in its problems. These problems can be found in many forms in many parts of the region, thus Zimbabwe is an important place to study and understand.”

Gallery

Book details

• Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo
  EAN: 9781770097636
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Jacana Media, and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation together with the Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape, invite you to the launch of Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008.

“A profoundly new history of Zimbabwe that tears apart all of the old certainties.”

–David Moore, Associate Professor of Development Studies, University of Johannesburg

About the book

In 1997, the then Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Morgan Tsvangirai, expressed the need for a “more open and critical process of writing history in Zimbabwe . . . The history of a nation-in-the-making should not be reduced to a selective heroic tradition, but should be a tolerant and continuing process of questioning and re-examintaion.”

Becoming Zimbabwe tracks the idea of national belonging and citizenship and explores the nature of state rule, the changing contours of the political economy, and the regional and international dimensions of the country’s history.

In their Introduction, Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo enlarge on these themes, and Gerald Mazarire’s opening chapter sets the pre-colonial background. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni tracks the history up to World War II, and Alois Mlambo reviews developments in the settler economy and the emergence of nationalism leading to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965. The politics and economics of the UDI period, and the subsequent war of liberation, are covered by Joseph Mtisi, Munyaradzi Nyakudya and Teresa Barnes.

After independence in 1980, Zimbabwe enjoyed a period of buoyancy and hope. James Muzondidya’s chapter details the transition “from buoyancy to crisis”, and Brian Raftopoulos concludes the book with an analysis of the decade-long crisis and the global political agreement which followed.

Event Details

• Date: Monday, 23 November 2009
• Time: 4:30 PM for 5:00 PM
• Venue: District Six Museum, 25a Buitenkant Street,
  Cape Town | Map
• Guest Speaker: Fanie du Toit
• RSVP: Thando, thando@jacana.co.za

About Brian Raftopoulos

Brian Raftopoulos was formerly Associate Professor of Development Studies at the University of Zimbabwe, and is currently the Director of Research and Advocacy, Solidarity Peace Trust since 2007, based in Cape Town. He has published extensively on Zimbabwean history, historiography, politics, and economics. From the late 1990’s he was a key civil society leader in Zimbabwe, serving on the founding executive of the National Constitutional Assembly from 1998-2000, and the first Chair of the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition 2001-2003. Currently also Research Fellow at UWC and Research Associate at UCT.

Book Details

• Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 edited by Brian Raftopoulos, Alois Mlambo
  EAN: 9781770097636
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Read this revealing interview with Sharon Pincott, author of The Elephants and I, who cashed in her savings, gave up a comfortable life in Australia, and moved to Zimbabwe at the start of the country’s controversial and violent “land reform” project – so that she could look after a herd of elephants:

Zimbabwe remains a land in turmoil. A land where not only the people have suffered political oppression and economic hardship, but where wild animals also experienced untold suffering.

Starvation drove many to hunt in Zimbabwe’s national parks and conservancies for food. Wild animals within conservation areas fell victim to the southern African state’s often-violent land reform process.

What would make a woman, who had no previous conservation experience, give up her life as an IT specialist in Australia and move to a country in crisis to protect and document a herd of elephants, all in an effort to protect them?

Despite pleas from friends and family, Sharon Pincott packed up her high-flying life Down Under and headed for Zimbabwe after obtaining permission to monitor the presidential herd of elephants that roamed the Hwange Estate – 140 square kilometres of unfenced land set aside for tourism, adjacent to the Hwange National Park. This is the only herd of elephants in Zimbabwe protected by presidential decree.

Pincott is not an archetypal conservationist. Dressed in bright colours to complement her tanned skin, the author recently paid a whirlwind visit to South Africa to promote her memoir The Elephants and I: Pursuing a Dream in Troubled Zimbabwe.

Speaking comfortably over lunch she described her first visit to South Africa with her partner during which they spent a weekend at a game lodge. It was where she spotted her first elephant “on the horizon” and immediately fell in love with Africa.

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M-Net Prize winner John Eppel has satirised the racial politics of southern Africa in many of his previous novels. Now, in Absent: The English Teacher, he turns his gaze inwards for a generous and richly rewarding parody of the land of his birth.

(Eppel won the M-Net Prize in 1992 for his first novel, D.G.G. Berry’s The Great North Road.)

When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, ‘his pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato.’ When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Njamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant.

Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with George’s lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa. But before it’s time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests – all timed to coincide with the police chief’s need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Grain of Wheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his family’s Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home.

Book details

• Absent: The English Teacher by John Eppel
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770097117
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Photo courtesy African Books Collective

The Elephants and I: Pursuing a Dream in Troubled Zimbabwe is an inspirational true story filled with unrivalled splendour, joy and hope – but sure enough in today’s Zimbabwe, this precious beauty is frequently shattered by heartbreaking despair.

An unplanned visit to South Africa’s Kruger National Park changed Sharon Pincott’s life as she knew it. She was a high-flying Information Technology specialist Down Under, but now she dreamed of working with Africa’s wildlife.
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Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope is set in the densely populated suburb of Mbare, Harare, and explores the complex lives of Onai Moyo – a market woman and mother of three children – and her best friend, Katy Nguni – a vendor and black-market currency dealer.

The novel gives an insight into the challenges faced by a wide cross section of Zimbabweans, whose average life expectancy has dropped to 37, possibly the lowest in the world.

The stories of these two close friends are situated in a high-density suburb. However, the author also introduces Zimbabweans from other spaces: Tom Sibanda, a young business man and farmer, his girlfriend, Faith, a university student, Tom’s sister Emily, a health professional, and Mawaya, the ostensible beggar.
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The call by the Peter Weiss Foundation for a “worldwide reading” against Robert Mugabe this 9 September has gained significant momentum over the past few weeks, with dozens of authors adding their names to the foundation’s petition “for democracy and freedom in Zimbabwe”.

As of July 17th, these now include the likes of JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, Antjie Krog, Zakes Mda, Ingrid de Kok, Ronnie Govender and Nuruddin Farah.

The petition asks that radio stations, schools, universities, theatres and other cultural institutions in Africa (and indeed all over the world) organise readings of poems by Zimbabwean poets Chenjerai Hove, Chirikure Chirikure and Dumbudzo Marecharas, as well as of Elinor Sisulu’s foreword to Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980-1988, just republished by Jacana. We’ve reprinted all the texts below, as the foundation has organized for the rights to be open on 9 September.

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