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  • Suffering For Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe
  • Blair Rutherford
Donald S. Moore . Suffering For Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. 424 pp. Photographs. Maps. Bibliography. Index. $23.95. Paper.

Suffering for Territory is one of those rare monographs that has much to offer to numerous audiences as it interlayers a sophisticated theoretical analysis with highly insightful historical and ethnographic detail. It also combines a carefully situated political and ethical commentary with an engaging writing style that easily carries the reader through a rich landscape while conveying a historicized terrain of power and struggles, localized vulnerabilities, and ironic humor. In this ethnography, Donald S. Moore examines the cultural politics of power, place, and social identification at various levels of action (e.g., local, national, regional) as they intersect with the livelihoods and struggles of people living in or passing through an eastern Zimbabwean locality on the border with Mozambique that resonates highly with African nationalist import. The focus is Kaerezi, home of the late Chief Rekayi Tangwena, famous in Zimbabwe and elsewhere for leading his people against colonial land evictions in the late 1960s and early 1970s and in 1975 for escorting Robert Mugabe, who was fleeing the Rhodesian forces, over the border into Mozambican camps controlled by the guerrilla forces of the African nationalist group he was soon to lead. Moore makes substantive contributions to the understanding of Zimbabwe and southern Africa, to the conceptual and heuristic tools deployed in analyzing state power, development, sovereignty, and livelihoods in Africa and beyond, and to refashioning ethnographic studies to become more astutely engaged in the cultural politics informing the localities of their research.

Drawing on thirty months of fieldwork between 1988 and 1996, including a period of over two years spent in Kaerezi, Moore lays bare the dense (or to use his apt metaphor of choice, "entangled") social geographies of racialized, gendered, and at times, ethnicized land politics in Zimbabwe. He invokes the idiom of "suffering for territory" used by many of his Kaerezian interlocutors to convey the brutalities they experienced during [End Page 59] the colonial period and what they struggle with now to make land claims against a postcolonial state that has its own agendas and forms of violence. The three parts of the book expand on and tease out the historical, social, and discursive contexts that sustain this idiom.

The first part examines the historical modes of power that shaped the social, physical, and political landscapes of Kaerezi to the 1990s, in particular the tension between the postcolonial government resettlement policies and the modes of livelihood, land claims, and forms of chiefly rule as the government tried to enforce its disciplinary techniques on a resettlement scheme also claimed by the Tangwena chiefdom. The second part expands Moore's analysis of the colonial period by providing a richly detailed examination of the individuals, labor, and production dynamics, textual acts, and movements of people that consolidated the categories, boundaries, and contours of rule and resistance in Kaerezi and beyond. The final part carries out a similar analysis of the postcolonial period, engaging analytically with both the sharp and fraying edges of power over people's lives and livelihoods. In terms of providing a substantive historical and ethnographic rural case study of the contested politics of rule, administration, development, and nationalism, Moore makes a significant contribution to the already impressive number of strong historical and social science monographs on these topics in Zimbabwe and southern Africa. But Suffering for Territory also makes important theoretical advances.

Moore has an admirable grasp of historic and current theoretical strands and debates in anthropology, political ecology, cultural geography, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism, and political theory, among others, and his book is in critical dialogue with them all. His anchoring theoretical framework is what he calls "the triad-in-motion of sovereignty, discipline and government," informed particularly by his reading of Foucault and Gramsci, which he utilizes to great advantage in his historical and ethnographic analyses, demonstrating the important point that to better understand global, national, or regional processes and power relations it is vital to see how they are entangled with the shifting...

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