Toward non-hagiographical reflections on Zimbabwe’s ‘heroes’: Dumiso Dabengwa’s history

Abstract

Dumiso Dabengwa’s death in May 2019 offers the opportunity to reflect on Zimbabwe’s fraught liberation struggle and its consequences today. 1 That Robert Mugabe’s passing was a few months later makes such considerations more pertinent. This article thus revisits some of the liberation war’s moments of evident tension between its two main nationalist movements, as well as those in the post-1980 era. It also considers some of Dabengwa’s last, most historically important and philosophically interesting reflections.

Discontinuity without change? the place and discourse of colonial memory in Zimbabwe’s post- Mugabe Zanu-PF politics.

“…ZANU PF caught the attention of international political actors in the last decade as a result of its steady articulation of a supposedly radical, Pan-African agenda of Black Zimbabwean restitution that has since turned out to be a political patronage and corrupt enrichment of members of ZANU-PF elites (Gwekwerere and Mpondi 2018). The primary architects of this idea have been the ZANU-PF elites (Mlambo, 2018;Moore, 2020). The whole idea was to revive the histories of the liberation struggle for political expedience.…”