Survival in a Hostile Global Environment: Zimbabwe’s Alternative Gold Trade as a Soft Power Interventionist Tact

Abstract

This paper examined the trajectory of Zimbabwe’s gold trade as a soft power strategy towards survival in the brutal global economic environment and explored the concomitant implications this has had on the country’s relations with the global North. Moreover, the paper demystified the Gold Mafia documentary as a means to taint Zimbabwe’s economic survival efforts. Of particular importance is how the neo-imperialist forces co-opted, criminalised and demonised Zimbabwe’s efforts to engage in gold trade with friendly states including China, United Arab Emirates and South Africa among others. In the Aljazeera documentary dubbed Gold Mafia, an attempt was made through plain media propaganda to make Zimbabwe’s governmental institutions accomplices in illicit gold trade and leakages. The idea was to make Zimbabwe appear as a country that lacks transparency and accountability in addition to non-conformity to the so-called international standards which are a mere popularisation of the Western established monopoly. Against this backdrop, it can be argued that the documentary was a means to a political end; the end being to demonise Zimbabwe’s soft power interventionist tact. Furthermore, the objective of the propaganda was to further isolate Zimbabwe as well as to chase away potential investors. With this said, this paper constitutes an epistemic contribution to knowledge on Zimbabwe’s soft power survival strategies, neo-imperialist counterstrategies and the way forward towards sustaining survival in the hostile global environment. Keywords: Gold Trade, Soft Power, Zimbabwe, Gold Mafia.