A History of Zimbabwe by Alois S. Mlambo (review)

Given its troubled and contested past, its recent wild inflation, and President Robert Mugabe’s destruction of the country that he has led badly and autocratically since 1980, Zimbabwe needs a comprehensive history researched and written by someone closely attuned both to the precolonial rise and fall of the Rozwi or Zimbabwean Empire and to Mugabe’s postcolonial failures and triumphs. Making sense of the precolonial era demands an interdisciplinary approach; much of the evidence about critical periods in the country’s early history is unwritten and must be recovered by oral or archaeological historians. Equally, making sense of the Mugabean maelstrom demands the mastery of several cognate disciplines alongside the best empathic techniques of modern historians.

Mlambo has hardly begun to write such a history of Zimbabwe. His is a purely narrative treatment. Moreover, it mostly skims the surface, trying to use as few dots as possible to create a connected story. Thus, his history says painstakingly little about most of Zimbabwe’s important early vicissitudes. He gives as scant attention to the creation of the early indigenous empires as he does to contemporary Zimbabwe (the subject of his last two chapters). Everything is brushed over lightly with almost no interdisciplinary attention to the kinds of new methodologies and techniques that readers of this journal expect.

Mlambo’s best chapter is titled “The Colonial Society and Economy.” All of the others are straightforward recitations of the main facts of a particular slice of time, with little interpretation, hardly any generalizations, and great omissions. Given a deep past that is unusually contested and a contemporary era that is equally polarized, Zimbabwe will need carefully to articulate a thorough historical treatment before it can come to terms with itself, and before its peoples can come to terms with one another.