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This book examines the triumphs and tribulations of the Zimbabwean national project, providing a radical and critical analysis of the fossilisation of Zimbabwean nationalism against the wider context of African nationalism in general. The book departs radically from the common 'praise-texts' in seriously engaging with the darker aspects of nationalism, including its failure to create the nation-as-people, and to install democracy and a culture of human rights. The author examines how the various people inhabiting the lands between the Limpopo and Zambezi Rivers entered history and how violence became a central aspect of the national project of organising Zimbabweans into a collectivity in pursuit of a political end.
This book examines why Zimbabwean immigrants in Britain should be viewed as a product of ethno-racial identities and prejudices developed and nurtured during the colonial and post-colonial phases of Zimbabwe’s history. In the absence of shared historic socio-economic or cultural commonalities, the book will tackle the key question: ‘Are Zimbabweans in Britain demarcated by race and ethnicity an imagined community?’ Through an analysis of personal interviews, and secondary and primary sources, it identifies and engages historical experiences that had been instrumental in constructing diasporic identities and integration processes of Zimbabwean immigrants. With most literature tending to create perceptions that Zimbabwean immigrants are a monolithic community of Blacks, the book’s comparative analysis of Blacks, Whites, Coloureds and Asians unveils a multi-racial community fragmented by historic racial and ethnic allegiances and prejudices. It is essential reading for scholars and researchers interested in migration, African Diaspora, and colonial and post-colonial studies.
This report is based on a survey of 1,000 Zimbabwean nationals living in the UK and South Africa which shows that most migrants have not cut their ties with Zimbabwe and are making a vital contribution to the development of their host countries. Nearly half were in touch with family members once a week; 74% send money back home. 82% had a formal qualification of which 38% had a degree or post-graduate qualification. Amongst those who came to the UK, 97% had a qualification of which 43% had a degree or post-graduate qualification. 48% of migrants cited the economic situation or employment as the main reason for leaving Zimbabwe and 26% gave political reasons as the main reason. Two thirds would definitely like to return to Zimbabwe, depending on improvements in political and economic situation; 21% might like to return. Only 12% definitely did not want to return. When asked if they wanted to participate in development related activities in Zimbabwe, 73% of the respondents said they would be interested in a skills transfer programme.
Zimbabwe's Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival is written by leading migration scholars, many from the Zimbabwean diaspora. The book explores the relationship between Zimbabwe's economic and political crisis and migration as a survival strategy.
The Art of Survival: Depictions of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean in Crisis offers a fresh, interdisciplinary examination of a period against which development in Zimbabwe is often measured, one epitomized by the severe shortages and runaway inflation of 2008. While journalistic stories of the 1998–2008 era often privilege the reductive stories of woe, defeat and crushed hopes, this volume explores how survival was still possible in those circumstances. The book offers insights into how ordinary Zimbabweans battled the odds by making startling innovations in language use to legitimize new survival strategies, how they weaved new songs and reinterpreted old ones to fight for survival, how social institutions such as churches reinterpreted popular gospel, and how authors, playwrights and dramatists crafted works that acknowledge the unprecedented difficulties and yet find humour, laughter and love in unusual places. This work will appeal to both scholars, who will appreciate the depth of the analysis, and the general reader.
Hope Deferred asks the question: How did Zimbabwe, a country with so much promise—a stellar education system, a growing middle class, a sophisticated economic infrastructure, a liberal constitution, and an independent judiciary—come so close to collapse? In their own words, Zimbabweans tell their stories of losing their homes, land, livelihoods, and families as a direct result of political violence. They describe being tortured in detention, firebombed at work, or beaten up or raped to “punish” votes for the opposition. Those forced to flee to neighboring countries recount their escapes: cutting through fences, swimming across crocodile-infested rivers, and entrusting themselves to human smugglers. This book includes. Zimbabweans of every age, class, and political conviction—from farm laborers and academics to doctors and artists—ordinary people surviving the fragmentation of a once-thriving nation.
Pasura proposes a framework for understanding African diasporas as core, epistemic, dormant and silent diasporas. The book explores the origin, formation and performance of the Zimbabwean transnational diaspora in Britain and examines how the diaspora is constituted in the hostland and how it maintains connections with the homeland.
Zimbabwe’s crisis since 2000 has produced a dramatic global scattering of people. This volume investigates this enforced dispersal, and the processes shaping the emergence of a new "diaspora" of Zimbabweans abroad, focusing on the most important concentrations in South Africa and in Britain. Not only is this the first book on the diasporic connections created through Zimbabwe’s multifaceted crisis, but it also offers an innovative combination of research on the political, economic, cultural and legal dimensions of movement across borders and survival thereafter with a discussion of shifting identities and cultural change. It highlights the ways in which new movements are connected to older flows, and how displacements across physical borders are intimately linked to the reworking of conceptual borders in both sending and receiving states. The book is essential reading for researchers/students in migration, diaspora and postcolonial literary studies.
Largely in response to the unstable economic situation and a political climate characterised by a limited space for divergent opinions, democratic participation and political pluralism, an estimated one third of the Zimbabwean population has left the country since the early 2000s, mainly to neighbouring and Western countries. As the great majority of those outside their home country are of voting age, the growth of the diaspora is tantamount to an increase in the size of Zimbabwe's political community abroad. Denied external voting rights - and thus to participate in the most basic political decision-making process of their country - Zimbabweans abroad have searched for other, non-electoral ...