A growing literature has shed new light on interactions between the Soviet Union and Africa, notably through studies of the large numbers of African students who arrived in Moscow from 1960. Scholars have, however, largely ignored the many thousands of African military trainees who arrived in the same period. Here we begin to explore soldiers' experiences through a...

Southern African liberation movements in and out of power have been bedevilled by a politics in which loyalties are uncertain and histories of division cannot easily be shed. I use the story of Zephaniah Moyo, who was over his lifetime both loyal to and accused of treachery by all three armed adversaries in Zimbabwe's liberation struggle, to argue that the disrupti...

Efforts to understand Zimbabwe's recent upheavals have brought scholars into productive conversation with approaches to African politics hitherto neglected in Zimbabwe. These have included political science analyses of ‘disorder’ and ethnographic approaches to the state at its unstable ‘margins’. Such analyses have highlighted the reconstitution of power through th...

Cet article se penche sur un moment de bouleversement politique - l'état d'urgence de la Rhodésie du sud en 1959 - pour explorer les utilisations de l'écriture dans le renouvellement de l'autorité de l'État et de la citoyenneté. Les années 50 avaient produit un État bureaucratique puissant, une tentative hésitante de « partenariat » multiracial et des aspirations a...

A period of terrible state repression known as 'Gukurahundi' indelibly marked the foundational years of the Zimbabwean nation. The perpetrators of that period still hold power. It has never been subject to an official truth-telling process, nor have the responsible actors been held accountable. Instead, irreconcilable narratives about this past have interacted and,...

This article situates the experiences of political prisoners in post-2000 Zimbabwe in a historical sequence of imprisonment. It uses prisoners' narratives to examine the shifting political ideas and social and material practices that shaped opposition politics. I explore the centrality of ideas about the rule of law, the practices and beliefs through which social a...