The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe: Harare and Highfield, 1940-1964 (review)

Tim Scarnecchia's book is about the death of a democratic tradition. It argues that, with the ebbing of colonialism in southern Africa, struggles to control the state became struggles between African nationalist movements even more than struggles against intransigent white settlers. Factionalism destroyed a tradition of reciprocal democracy (largely undervalued in previous histories) that had emerged in the townships of what was then Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, in the 1950s. This new politics was a departure from that of existing, elite-led African organizations, which were attempting to secure civil and political rights on the grounds that the elite's education and wealth made them equivalent to whites. The new bottom-up democratic tradition was based, rather, on civic leaders listening to the needs of township dwellers who were also, in a classic patronage model, furthering the interests of the poor in exchange for their political support. It was precisely this political support that gave men like Charles Mzingeli, unofficial mayor of Harare township, leverage within the white settlers' state.

By the 1960s, however, with the "winds of change" and the Cold War, the stakes became higher. Rather than offering local patronage within the townships, new African leaders were seeking control of the state: a much bigger pie with much bigger slices of influence and power on offer. In this dispensation, the demands of the poor at the grassroots could only be satisfied at a national level. Rather than offering redress for immediate grievances in exchange for local support, the new "nationalists" required the poor to provide unconditional, unquestioning, disciplined support, in exchange for the promise of an entirely new form of rule at the top of the state.

Scarnecchia goes on to trace the development of "sell-out" politics in the early 1960s: an approach to political dissent that has scarred public life in Zimbabwe ever since. He argues that once the goal of nationalist struggle was the ability to dispense patronage at the national level, there was no room for dissent or policy debate. Nationalist leaders such as James Chikerema and Robert Mugabe saw competition from within the African opposition as a threat to the movement's chances of reaching the ultimate goal of the "political kingdom" (in Kwame Nkrumah's phrase) from which "all other things shall follow." Above all, then, it was important to inscribe competitors as traitors who had to be excluded from legitimacy at all costs: "imperialist stooges" or "sell-outs." Scarnecchia's book shows how a basic compass error—the shift from fighting for township residents in order to get their support, to fighting over township residents' loyalty—established violent factionalism as the standard mode of politics in Zimbabwe.

Scarnecchia raises some important new perspectives in telling this story. By focusing on urban townships, he challenges work such as Alexander et al.'s 2000 account of nationalism in Zimbabwe (Violence and Memory, James Currey) as fundamentally a rural movement—and, indeed, traces the moment at which a shift toward rural campaigns was deflected by the emergence of urban faction-fighting. He also highlights the influence of women in setting the agenda for civic leaders, and, again, identifies the moment at which rape became a "legitimate" tactic in nationalist politics. Along with his detailed analysis of the nationalists' assault on the independent trade union movement—with its implicit critique of the "political kingdom" as the primary route to a better life—Scarnecchia inscribes gender and class at the heart of the question of what/who constitute "the nation."

Another significant contribution lies in the use of correspondence from the U.S. Embassy and the AFL-CIO. The dependence of all the political movements on U.S. funding, at government or trade union level, highlights the purely polemical nature...