Rural women as the invisible victims of militarised political violence: the case of Shurugwi district, Zimbabwe, 2000-2008
type: CreativeWork
description: Zimbabwe was beset by militarised politically-inspired violence between 2000 and 2008. How that violence has been imagined in terms of its causes, memorialisation and impact has been far from conclusive. As a derivative of this huge question that forms an important component of the framing for this dissertation, and to�visibilise� the subaltern, so to say, and to visualise �history from below�, I ask how the women of Shurugwi conceptualise it. This question has also polarised Zimbabweans into two, broadly the human rights and the redistributive, camps. But I ask, what do either of these frameworks enable or eclipse in the further understanding of the violence? Deploying genealogical and ethnographic approaches centred on the rural communities of Shurugwi that analyse the historical, socioeconomic and political factors that have engendered human rights abuses from pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial moments, the dissertation problematizes both discourses and invites a much more troubled analysis.As a way to complicate the reading and to attempt to open the analysis of the violence further, I draw on the theoretical insights from Michel Foucault�s theory on the relationship between power and war. Inverting Clausewitz�s aphorism of war as politics by other means, Foucault argues instead that politics is war by other means. This inversion allows for a nuancing of the connections between the violence and the Chimurenga trope in Zimbabwe. In this way, the labelling of farm takeovers and other force-driven indigenisation modes in the new millennium as the Third Chimurenga, I demonstrate, was not a mere emotive evocation, but was meant to situate the violence as the final stage in a sequence with, and in the same category of importance as, the earlier zvimurenga, that is the First and Second Chimurenga that targeted to uproot the colonial project. I thus argue that the violence represented, in a significant way, the continuation of war for ZANU-PF to retain power amid …
abstract: Zimbabwe was beset by militarised politically-inspired violence between 2000 and 2008. How that violence has been imagined in terms of its causes, memorialisation and impact has been far from conclusive. As a derivative of this huge question that forms an important component of the framing for this dissertation, and to�visibilise� the subaltern, so to say, and to visualise �history from below�, I ask how the women of Shurugwi conceptualise it. This question has also polarised Zimbabweans into two, broadly the human rights and the redistributive, camps. But I ask, what do either of these frameworks enable or eclipse in the further understanding of the violence? Deploying genealogical and ethnographic approaches centred on the rural communities of Shurugwi that analyse the historical, socioeconomic and political factors that have engendered human rights abuses from pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial moments, the dissertation problematizes both discourses and invites a much more troubled analysis.As a way to complicate the reading and to attempt to open the analysis of the violence further, I draw on the theoretical insights from Michel Foucault�s theory on the relationship between power and war. Inverting Clausewitz�s aphorism of war as politics by other means, Foucault argues instead that politics is war by other means. This inversion allows for a nuancing of the connections between the violence and the Chimurenga trope in Zimbabwe. In this way, the labelling of farm takeovers and other force-driven indigenisation modes in the new millennium as the Third Chimurenga, I demonstrate, was not a mere emotive evocation, but was meant to situate the violence as the final stage in a sequence with, and in the same category of importance as, the earlier zvimurenga, that is the First and Second Chimurenga that targeted to uproot the colonial project. I thus argue that the violence represented, in a significant way, the continuation of war for ZANU-PF to retain power amid …
author: Marongwe, Ngonidzashe
keywords: Zimbabwe, Political violence, Women, Zanu-PF
license: https://uwcscholar.uwc.ac.za/bitstreams/bacea424-3c87-4364-9108-ec3b6d4eab13/download
date published: 2012
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:00:52Z
provider: University of the Western Cape
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of the Western Cape