Index

Suffering for Territory: Race, place and power in Zimbabwe
Donald S. Moore

399pp
ISBN: 1 77922 037 5

Review from African Affairs, 1-2, June 2007
Reviewer: Joost Fontein, University of Edinburgh


In Zimbabwe, matangwena is often used in the vernacular to refer to the makeshift, ramshackle shelters that squatters typically live in before building more established homes. In a small way, this word illustrates how important the subject of Donald Moore’s excellent book is. This term for squatters comes from the history of Rekayi Tangwena who famously led the people of Kaerezi, in the 1960s and 1970s, in resistance against eviction from ancestral lands by the Rhodesian government, acting under the directive of the hugely unpopular Land Apportionment Act. Defying eviction, Rekayi and the people of Kaerezi lived in hideouts in the mountains around the ranch from which they were to be evicted, coming down through the night to replant and rebuild homes destroyed by the Rhodesian government, until they finally went into exile in Mozambique. As if years of defying colonial evictions were not enough to cement a place in the history books, the nationalist credentials of Rekayi Tangwena and his people were further bolstered by assisting the highly mythologized flight into exile of Robert Mugabe, who escaped through the night, and through a window, into the recently liberated territories of Mozambique in 1975. Younger people across Zimbabwe (the ‘born free’) will on occasion use the phrase matangwena without understanding its significance, but for those who remember colonial eviction and the liberation struggle, the meanings and importance are not lost.

This is the story that Donald Moore picks up in Suffering for Territory. It sets the scene, for Kaerezi in Nyanga district in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe is where Moore carried out the fieldwork for this thought-provoking book. But more than simply producing another history of the minutiae of struggles within the liberation war, Moore traces the stories of Kaerezians forward to the 1990s, when they again had to resist the pressures of an overbearing now post-colonial state, seeking this time not so much to evict, as to resettle Kaerezians into villagized, governmentalized, resettlement grids known in Zimbabwe as ‘maline’. Moore traces the new struggles of individuals within communities as they appear alongside and confront the old struggles. Eschewing ‘a single unfolding chronology’, Moore pulls ‘temporally and spatially distant events into understandings of struggles in the early 1990s to emphasize how their traces, while reworked, remain consequential’ (p. 29). For Kaerezians, the idiom of ‘suffering for territory’ combines past local, national and trans-national struggles with ongoing contests in the 1990s, struggles which Moore brilliantly shows, are situated in place, making place as well as being about place.

Indeed, if the subject of this study – tracing the story of how resistance against colonial eviction, was followed by, and invoked in, resistance against post-colonial developmental resettlement – is enough to make this book an important contribution to academic debate about Zimbabwe’s ongoing dilemmas over land, then of equal significance are the theoretical insights that emerge from its empathetic and finely grained ethnography. In common with other current anthropological analyses of power and the state, Moore not only engages with both Foucauldian African Affairs, and Gramscian notions of power, but also moves beyond the existing literature by focusing on what he calls the ‘spatiality of power relations and politics of positioning’ and the ‘historical sedimentations, at once discursive and material, that entangle subjects and territory’ (p. 9 and 12). Moore demonstrates the importance of place and landscape, not only as the site of struggle, as backdrop to ongoing political contestation, or as material, symbolic or cultural resource, but also as the productive result of entangled local and trans-local practices and discourses. As he puts it ‘where cultural practices take place matters because they are among the critical assemblages that produce place’ (p. 120). ‘Cultural practices, social relations and political economic processes meld with the materiality of milieu, producing place’ (p. 17). He develops the notion of ‘articulated assemblages’ of the discursive and the material, and in so doing displaces: ‘humans as sovereign makers of histories’. ‘Humans’, he tells us, ‘are not the only entities making mixtures not of their own choosing... Assemblages arrange provisionally, giving emergent force to contingent alignments of social relations, material substance and cultural meaning ... They span the divide between nature and culture, humans and non-humans, symbol and substance’ (pp. 23–24). Thus, Moore suggests, ‘history and politics are inflected with the consequential materiality of milieu, of non-human entities and artifacts’ (p. 24).
Moore’s emphasis on articulation ‘foregrounds how power relations and historical sediments formatively shape contingent constellations that become materially and discursively consequential’ (p. 25). This is of great theoretical importance for anthropology because it points a way forward to understanding the complex interrelationships between ideational and material aspects of landscape, without losing focus on the study of power and politics, a defining aspect of our discipline in recent years. He explores how the micro-practices of livelihood and labour entangle with the materiality of landscape, and the contested sedimentations of ‘selective sovereignties’ – of chiefs, ancestors and rainmakers confronting each other even as they adopt, or take on, the governmentalizing and disciplining technologies of state bureaucracy. Moore discusses how articulated assemblages gain ‘traction’ and become ‘effective’ at specific moments, and yet always remain contingent and dynamic. Finally, he ends by considering how such assemblages of the discursive and the material, and the idiom of ‘suffering for territory’, have again found ‘traction’ in the context of post-2000 land reform. His work opens the way for a renewed sophistication in the study of landscape and power, both in relation to Zimbabwe’s ‘land’ conundrum and beyond. In sum, Moore’s book is itself a powerful assemblage: of insightful and sympathetic ethnography; of multiple and overlapping subjectivities confronting different regimes of power; and of multiple sovereignties and spatialities intermeshed in locality and territory; all of which is brilliantly narrated, in the context of struggle, of power and of resistance, through the lens of the daily lives of people in Kaerezi. This book rewrites academic debate over land, environment and power in Zimbabwe, and beyond, and if non-specialists find some of its narrative dense and too hard to penetrate, then I urge them to read on and persevere, for this book is truly a remarkable achievement.


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