In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

87 Bulldozers Always Come ... Bulldozers Always Come ‘Maggots’, Citizens and Governance in Contemporary Zimbabwe Tinashe L. Chimedza 7 This chapter explores citizenship, citizenship rights and governance in postcolonial Zimbabwe in the context of Operation Murambatsvina. The focus is on how public law reform and coercive public policy has been deployed by nationalist elites to revive a waning hegemony resulting in excessive interference with the rights of citizens. Operation Murambatsvina must be interrogated and understood historically and empirically as an elite and uncivil nationalist project of establishing and conjuring ‘identities’ which make inclusion and exclusion possible and mess democratic governance. The consequence has been to enable the brutal policing and ordering of access to and enjoyment of citizenship . Resolving that ‘citizenship deficit’ lies not only in democratic public law reform and struggle but crucially in the contestation for history – to challenge the official scripts that are used to legitimate who is in and who is out. That way an exclusionary mode of citizenship is challenged and inclusive and democratic citizenship is drawn within reach. Introduction: ‘maggots’ must be cleaned up1 I Robert Mugabe with ancestral generations far back, I be dragged to court by a settler who only came 90 years ago, who will claim the land we are taking is his. Morally, we can’t accept that.2 (my emphasis) 1 Police Commissioner Augistine Chihuri explaining the objectives of Operation Murambatsvina. See article by Dzikamayi Chidyausiku, 2005, ‘Clearance Victims left in Limbo’, Institute for War & Peace Reporting, Africa Reports No 38. 2 ‘No Unfairness in Land Policy, Says President’, The Herald, 7 February 1991, cited in Moyo, J. 1992. ‘State Politics and Social Domination in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 305-30. 88 TINASHE L. CHIMEDZA For several days in June and July 2005 I sat in the Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) studios in Sydney going through unending hours of footage covering the devastating effect of Operation Murambatsvina3 or Drive out the trash in Zimbabwe .4 Since then I have endured reading and watching grotesque and sadistic pictures, reports, journal articles, documentaries and press coverage of the devastation caused by ‘government by operations’ in Zimbabwe.5 As I sat in that studio, far removed from the experiences of being cleaned up, I thought of the young women and men who often sold ‘buddie cards’ or ‘juice cards’6 to me and my friends at the corner of Julius Nyerere and Samora Machel Streets in the Harare city centre. I thought of the young man who sat outside the entrance to a big internet café on the same street where I bought bananas and apples, sometimes on credit. I thought of the women along Sam Nujoma Street where we bought cheap sadza (thick porridge, Zimbabwe’s staple meal) at lunch from an ‘illegal’ cooking business. I thought of them because I asked myself what it means to be Zimbabwean and what rights they and we are entitled to as citizens of Zimbabwe. While growing up in rural Zimbabwe we used to ridicule anyone who was ‘ignorant’ as coming from the ‘farms’ where most of the people have family roots in Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia – a lasting effect of the labour migration patterns of late colonialism in southern and eastern Africa. While at high school as a ‘Zimbabwean’ I had often seen Municipal Police raid ‘foreigners’ on the streets in the eastern border town of Mutare and they applied a crude language ‘test’ to distinguish the ‘natives’ from the ‘foreigners’, marking the border between the ‘insiders’ (with the right to stay since they belonged to Zimbabwe ) and the ‘outsiders’ (who had no right to stay since they did not belong to Zimbabwe). Those who failed the crude test, speaking ‘Shona’7 or often the meaning and pronunciation of particular words like ‘eggs’ in the local language were immediately bundled into police trucks and deported to Mozambique. Others were simply identified by how they looked and asked arbitrary questions about where they ‘came from’. The failure to either identify the ‘rural area’ where one came from or to produce a ‘national identification card’ (chitupa/ situpa in colonial Zimbabwe) qualified one as a foreigner and thus an outsider. 3 For a comprehensive report on Operation Murambatsvina or Drive Out Trash see Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe to assess the Scope and Impact of Operation Murambatsvina by the UN Special Envoy on Human Settlements Issues in Zimbabwe, Mrs Anna K. Tibaijuka. http://www.unhabitat.org/documents/ZimbabweReport...

Share