Zimbabwean Diamonds

Of the making of books about Zimbabwe there seems to be no end. I am commenting on thirteen of them in this review. It could easily have been twice that number if I had included all the journalist quick fixes, the inexplicably popular white Zimbabwean memoirs, and the necessary but short-lived accounts of the brutal violence of 2008. These will not be read for long but all the books I am reviewing are likely to have a long shelf-life. Indeed they are diamonds which need no international licence to be traded and consumed.

They fall neatly into clusters and taken together address all the dominant issues in Zimbabwe. Two of them – Ian Scoones’s edited collection and Wilbert Sadomba’s book about the occupation of land in the Mazowe Valley – deal with the process and results of fast-track land resettlement. Two of them – Timothy Scarnecchia’s book about the politics of the Salisbury African townships between 1940 and 1964, and Deborah Potts’s book about the fragility of African livelihoods in contemporary Harare – deal with the problem of the towns. (I shall invoke for comparative purposes but of course cannot review my own recent book on Bulawayo and its townships, 1893 to 1960.) Potts’s book interacts with a cluster about migration into and out of Zimbabwe – Josiah Brownell’s study of the demographic collapse of Rhodesia, Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera’s collection on the Zimbabwean diaspora, and JoAnn McGregor’s collection on Zimbabwean expatriates. Then there is a looser cluster about white identities and landscapes – a good deal in Brownell; David Hughes’s study of white Rhodesian identification with the land; Katja Uusihakala’s study of the continued significance of Rhodesian landscapes in the white expatriate South African community; and JoAnn McGregor’s book about the politics of landscape in the Zambezi Valley. And if this cluster brings out all the uncertainties of Rhodesian identity...