Association of Concerned Africa Scholars
Analysis and Action on Policies Impacting Africa

Displacements of various kinds, overlaying one another across time and space, litter Zimbabwe’s histories and geographies, while adding new layers to ongoing relationships with neighbouring countries. Physical, social and symbolic landscapes are all powerfully imprinted with the racialised colonial past of violent land dispossessions on a massive scale, and with the routinised practices of state evictions and both politically motivated and ‘development induced’ dislocations in post-independence Zimbabwe. The normalisation of such practices as an ordinary dimension of statecraft reveals an intimate and sustained relationship between displacement, assertions of sovereignty, and processes of state making. This relationship has become further complicated in recent times by the increasingly direct links between party-political affiliation, notions of belonging (to the party, to the nation), and forms of violent displacement and exclusion.

Zimbabwe’s politics are profoundly shaped by violence. Violence has motivated, divided and united each of Zimbabwe’s political parties in distinctive ways, it has shaped their ability to mobilise, their constituencies and their ideology, it has marked successive electoral contests and it has been used to transform the state. The ruling Zanu(PF)’s ‘third chimurenga’, launched in 2000, is rooted in a historical narrative of violence that links the uprisings against conquest in the 1890s to the liberation war of the 1970s and the battle to reclaim the nation’s white-owned farmland in 2000. For those in opposition politics, the violence of the third chimurenga evokes a different lineage: the extreme repression – known as Gukurahundi – that was launched against Zanu(PF)’s liberation-era rival Zapu in the 1980s, and the violence periodically directed at civic and political opponents of Zanu(PF) since then.

Africa Action is concerned about the whereabouts of Justina Mukoko, a prominent civil socity leader in Zimbabwe, reportedly missing for over forty-eight hours. As the Director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, Jestina has been instrumental in keeping the world informed of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

Understanding the Zimbabwean crises or acting on it, is only part of the story. Meanwhile, people lack access to basic necessities: medicines, health services and food. Here’s some ideas how you can help.

Writing about the current financial debacle, Thomas L. Friedman holds that in a globalizing world, “we are all partners now.” He hopes that “globalization will saveth.” More than 20 years ago, a global commission headed by Willy Brandt, the former chancellor of West Germany, called for a partnership in international development. What have been the results?

The first issue of LGD, Law, Social Justice and Global Development, a new electronic law journal published by Warwick University, is now available online.

The failure of development reflects a crisis in the economic theory that has driven the policies that the World Bank has imposed since 1980. Development economist and professor of African studies Howard Stein examines the evolution of policy in the Bank, focusing on how economists became hegemonic. In this essay he details the origin of structural adjustment, tracing its roots back to a set of neoliberal economists who gained influence at the Bank in the late 1970s.

Sean Jacobs (Concerned Africa Scholars co-chair), writes about the end of the Mbeki-era and its aftermath at The Guardian Online.

Oxford University Press and Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research have announced an ambitious new project, the Dictionary of African Biography, that will include 5,000 entries both online and in print editions. The General Editors of the project are two Harvard faculty, Henry Louis Gates and Emmanuel Akyeampong.