African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
Politics
Home›African Arguments›Politics›Debating ‘Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-colonial Period to 2008’ — by Joost Fontein

Debating ‘Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-colonial Period to 2008’ — by Joost Fontein

By rethinkingzim
March 1, 2012
2345
0

The editorial team of Critical African Studies is delighted to announce the publication of its 6th issue. It contains a critical debate engaging with a recent, much celebrated, single-volume history of Zimbabwe, entitled Becoming Zimbabwe, authored and edited by some of Zimbabwe’s most revered scholars of the recent generation. It derives from a panel held at the African Studies Association meeting in Oxford in September 2010, organised by Jocelyn Alexander.

The editors of the book, Brian Raftopolous and Alois Mlambo, open with a discussion of the challenges they faced, collating and assembling a complex history co-written by many different hands, which sought to “˜track the uneven and difficult roads towards “becoming national” in Zimbabwe’. Their account sets the book into longer histories of Zimbabwean historiography, and illustrates why doing good, pluralistic history matters, particularly in contexts where an intolerant politics of the national past constantly pulls against inclusion, complexity, multiplicity and nuance. Their discussion also shows how doing collaborative and opened-end history as ambitious as this, inevitably turns on a myriad of factors ranging from how to integrate differences of individual style and approach, to the needs of accommodating a diverse readership, to knowing when to stop writing amid the on-going turmoil of fast changing events.

Their introduction is followed by contributions from other scholars of Zimbabwe, each of whom engage with Becoming Zimbabwe as it relates to particular aspects of it’s always unfolding past. Deborah Potts engages with Becoming Zimbabwe through her discussion of the continuities and discontinuities of Zimbabwean city planning. Joann McGregor throws down a challenge about the need to rethink “˜the boundaries of the nation’ in the context of Zimbabwe’s “˜new diaspora’. And Jocelyn Alexander considers the need to “˜rethink’ politics and history, “˜through the prism of the prison’. This is followed by a critical commentary from Munyaradzi Munochiveyi about the continued need not only for multiple accounts of Zimbabwean nationalism, but also a better consideration of the multiple subjectivities these necessarily involved.

Raftopoulos and Mlambo then offer a generous and enthusiastic response to the issues raised by the commentators. The collection closes with an afterword by Terence Ranger reflecting on the debate and looking forward at what future histories of Zimbabwe might look like.

The entire issue of Critical African Studies Issue 6 (2012) is open access and available now.

Table of Contents
Articles
EDITORIAL
Joost Fontein

OUTSIDE THE THIRD CHIMURENGA: THE CHALLENGES OF WRITING A NATIONAL HISTORY OF ZIMBABWE
Brian Raftopoulos, Alois Mlambo

“˜WE HAVE A TIGER BY THE TAIL’: CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES IN ZIMBABWEAN CITY PLANNING AND POLITICS
Deborah Potts

RETHINKING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE NATION: HISTORIES OF CROSS BORDER MOBILITY AND ZIMBABWE’S NEW “˜DIASPORA’
JoAnn McGregor

RETHINKING THE STATE AND POLITICAL OPPOSITION THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE PRISON
Jocelyn Alexander

BECOMING ZIMBABWE FROM BELOW: MULTIPLE NARRATIVES OF ZIMBABWEAN NATIONALISM
Munyaradzi B. Munochiveyi

RESPONSES TO DEBATING BECOMING ZIMBABWE
Alois Mlambo, Brian Raftopoulos

AFTERWORD
Terence Ranger

TagsAlois MlamboBecoming ZimbabweBrian Raftopoulos
Previous Article

Senegal Presidential Polls Thus Far: No Condition ...

Next Article

Nigeria: a “˜pivotal power’ in emerging markets? ...

rethinkingzim

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    Complex Emergencies and the Humanitarian Enterprise

  • Politics

    Review: Borderlines by Michela Wrong

  • Politics

    Contra Trial Skepticism

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Nigeria’s curious voter turnout problem
  • Cyclone Freddy dumped six months’ rain in six days in Malawi
  • The loud part the IPCC said quietly
  • “Nobody imagined it would be so intense”: Mozambique after Freddy
  • Libya’s captured prosecutor?

Editor’s Picks

Editor's PicksMauritiusPolitics

Mauritius: A picture perfect democracy’s fall from grace

Mauritius has been listed as one of the world’s top ten autocratising nations. Can the people save it? Over the past few decades, Mauritius has built a glowing international reputation. ...
  • media diversity

    How white are the newsrooms working on Africa? We asked them.

    By Emmanuel Freudenthal
    August 12, 2020
  • The making of a global port, and the unmaking of a people

    By Nasir M. Ali, Jutta Bakonyi & May Darwich
    December 1, 2022
  • A dilapidated billboard of former president Jose Eduardo Dos Santos. Credit: Carsten ten Brink.

    How the radical became normal in Angola

    By Cláudio Silva
    October 18, 2021
  • Don’t just vote. Mobilise. (Aka Why elections won’t change Nigeria)

    By Ayo Sogunro
    January 29, 2019

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.