‘Kutonga Kwaro Gamba’: Politics and the renaming of defence cantonments in the ‘Second Republic’ in Zimbabwe

Abstract

AbstractLike Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa, Zimbabwe was one of the countries that the imperial mission had targeted to establish as a settler economy. The objective of creating a white settler colony was evident in the entire colonial system, including place naming. Generally, place naming served political functions of declaring power and authority over the entire colony. While white minority rule ended in 1980, it, however, left some symbolic imprints on the cultural landscape of the independent nation, Zimbabwe. Given that colonialism entrenched white identity on the cultural landscape, this article interrogates efforts by the Mnangagwa government, which assumed political office in November 2017, to dislodge Rhodesian memory from the cultural landscape. This article demonstrates that decolonisation is not an event but an ongoing process that political elites execute whenever they want to serve present political purposes. It interrogates the dialectics of political power and remembering the past in Zimbabwe during the aftermath of the military-induced political change of November 2017. The re-inscription of the landscape that the Mnangagwa regime executed specifically targeted military cantonments throughout the country. This decolonisation process was ostensibly done to dismantle white identities from the cultural landscape. However, this article argues that the place renaming exercise served to write back the liberation war legacy into mainstream history, symbolically declared the regime’s political power, and served to legitimise the political status quo. These political purposes had roots in the succession race and the internal party politics within the Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU- PF) that preceded the political transition.