'Nothing is straight in Zimbabwe': The rise of the Kukiya-kiya economy 2000-2008

Journal of Southern African Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 285-299

  Jones, Jeremy L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY; ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT; PERCEPTION; REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT; REGIONAL ECONOMY;

ZIMBABWE;

EID: 77954167057     PISSN: 03057070     EISSN: 14653893     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2010.485784     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. The literature on the Zimbabwean situation is now voluminous. For a scholarly exchange on these and other issues, see the articles in S. Jacobs and J. Mundy (eds), 'Reflections on Mahmood Mamdani's "Lessons of Zimbabwe"', ACAS Bulletin82, Concerned Africa Scholars(Summer2009). To access, see http://concernedafricascholars.org/bulletin/82/
2. See for example P. Chabal and J-P. Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as a Political Instrument (Oxford, James Currey, 1999).
3. See J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, 'Notes on Afromodernity and the Neo-World Order: An Afterward', in B. Weiss (ed.), Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (Boston, Brill, 2004).
4. See below for common synonyms. While non Shona-speakers use different words (prime equivalents in siNdebele being ukusanganisa or ukudoba-doba), I would argue that a similar economic logic holds throughout the country.
5. See J. MacGaffey, The Real Economy of Zaire: The Contribution of Smuggling & Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
6. Compare dubriagem in Lusophone Africa (H. Vigh, 'Social Death and Violent Life Chances', in C. Christiansen, M. Utas and H. Vigh (eds), Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood: Social Becoming in an African Context (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2006) and jeito in Brazil.
7. N. Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992.
8. See also A. Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2004),
9. R. Devisch, 'Frenzy, Violence and Ethical Renewal in Kinshasa', Public Culture, 7 (1995), pp. 593-629, amongst others.
10. See T. Yoshikuni, African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Social History of Harare before 1925 (Harare, Weaver Press, 2007).
11. MacGaffey, The Real Economy of Zaire.
12. See G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1998).
13. I will not dwell on this analysis here, though my later discussion of 'suspension' is constructed with its claims in mind.
14. For a critique see J.P. Olivier de Sardan, 'A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?', Journal of Modern African Studies, 37, 1 (1999), pp. 25-52.
15. Names throughout are pseudonyms.
16. Price controls had the effect of pushing nearly all basic items onto the 'black market' (the local term), where they fetched much higher prices. Formal stores were nearly empty at the time Dondo wrote this entry, and remained so until early 2009.
17. A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001).
18. See P. Carmody, 'Neoclassical Practice and the Collapse of Industry in Zimbabwe: The Cases of Textiles, Clothing, and Footwear', Economic Geography, 74, 4 (October, 1998), pp. 319-43.
19. Many vapostori (African apostolic Christians), for instance, presented work with one's hands as a moral alternative to working for varungu (whites). Other forms, though, were explicitly linked to the creation of either bourgeois domesticity or a racialised labour force, i.e. 'hewers of wood' - see C. Dillon-Malone, The Korsten Basketmakers: A Study of the Masowe Apostles (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1978).
20. T. Barnes, 'We Women Worked So Hard': Gender, Urbanization and Social Reproduction in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930-1956 (Oxford, James Currey, 1999).
21. M. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe 1898-1965 (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2002).
22. See B. Raftopoulos and D. Compagnon, 'Indigenization, the State Bourgeoisie, and Neo-Authoritarian Politics', in S. Darnolf and L. Laasko (eds), Twenty Years of Independence in Zimbabwe: From Liberation to Authoritarianism (New York, Palgrave, 2003).
23. Compare A.Y. Kamete, 'Home Industries and the Formal City in Harare, Zimbabwe', in K. Tranberg Hansen (ed.) Reconsidering Informality: Perspectives from Urban Africa (Uppsala, Nordiska Afriainstitutet, 2004), pp. 120-38.
24. Again, for all perspectives, see the articles collected in Jacobs and Mundy, 'Reflections on Mahmood Mamdani's "Lessons of Zimbabwe"'.
25. For one of many accounts, see M. Bratton and E. Masunungure, 'Popular Reactions to State Repression: Operation Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe', African Affairs, 106, 422 (2006), pp. 21-45.
26. In this regard, many observers ask why Zimbabweans have not revolted. Some point to fear of violence, others to ongoing ideological or patronage support for the ruling party.
27. Others give a pseudo-psychological answer: 'rebelliousness to authority (any authority!) is not an integral part of the political psyche of the Zimbabwean demos... Those who cannot tolerate the abuse would rather take the exit option.' E. Masunungure, 'Why Zimbabweans will not revolt against authority', Zimbabwe Standard, October 1, 2006.Compare 'escape' as an African political strategy of the longue durée in J.F. Bayart, 'Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion', African Affairs, 99 (2000), pp. 217-67.
28. A. Mbembe and J. Roitman, 'Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis', Public Culture, 7, 2 (1995), pp. 323-52.
29. Ibid., p. 339.
30. Ibid., p. 323.
31. Ibid., pp. 348, 338.
32. Ibid., p. 342.
33. Namely, 'Kana munhu achikiya-kiya anenge achingoita zvinhu zvekutamburira kuti awane chinomuraramisa'.
34. H. Chimhundu, Duramazwi Guru reChiShona (Harare, College Press, 2001)
35. Hure may refer to any 'loose' woman, not only 'sex-workers'. On the tsotsi, see C. Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935- 976 (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2000).
36. As well as the classic analysis by M. Wilson and A. Mafeje, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1963).
37. On prostitution and respectability, see Barnes, 'We Women Worked So Hard' and West, The Rise of an African Middle Class.
38. That is, wage labour. See discussion below.
39. Compare the Greek notion of 'kairos' as detailed in M. Detienne and J.P. Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991).
40. If the tools were stolen, it is likely that the seller willingly submitted to a loss knowing that the ultimate buyer would finger Tapiwa instead should the police get involved.
41. See MacGaffey, The Real Economy of Zaire; Vigh, 'Social Death and Violent Life Chances'.
42. J.I. Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004).
43. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984).
44. Ibid., p. xii.
45. Ibid., pp. 37, 25.
46. Ibid., p. 37
47. Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, p. 1.
48. Ibid., pp. 3, 5
49. See, for example, the Afrikaans idiom n Boer maak'n plan.
50. For example, the SADC election observer for the27June2008Presidential run-off: www.kubatana.net/docs/elec/seom_presidential_run-off_&_by-election_080629.pdf (accessed 5 July 2008).
51. J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, 'On Personhood: an Anthropological Perspective from Africa', Social Identities, 7, 2 (2002), pp. 267-83.
52. The broadcast was in ChiShona. Underlined words are in English in the original.
53. Mbembe and Roitman, Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis.
54. H. Vigh, 'Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline', Ethnos, 73, 1(2007), pp. 5-24.
55. This sort of binary device is common in everyday speech, particularly when discussing generational differences. It is ideologically entrenched in the vernacular language media and school curriculum.
56. See E. Chiwome, A Social History of the Shona Novel (Gweru, Mambo Press, 2002).
57. Compare the development of the similar categories amongst Tswana speakers: J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume One (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991).
58. See M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York, Vintage Books, 1994).
59. J. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999).
60. Notably, kuswatuka might also convey the notion of [morally] 'upright'. Anita Jacobsen-Widding has discussed at length the gendered symbolism of straightness amongst the Manyika of Eastern Zimbabwe.
61. See A Jacobsen-Widding, Chapungu: The Bird That Never Drops a Feather: Male and Female Identities in an African Society (Uppsala, Uppsala University Library, 2000).
62. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.
63. See the polemic by E. Maloka and B. Magubane, 'Zimbabwe: an International Pariah! "What are the Revolutionary Tasks of the South African Democratic Movement?"', Communiqué printed in City Press [South Africa], 4 May 2008.
64. For instance, churches often seek to effect a sort of play-by-play 'straightening' of behaviour in people's lives.
65. See, for example, the global 'What Would Jesus Do' campaign: S. Simmons, 'WWJD?', Brookings Review, 17, 2 (Spring 1999), p. 27.
66. A. Simone, 'Pirate Towns: Reworking Social and Symbolic Infrastructures in Johannesburg and Douala', Urban Studies, 43, 2 (February 2006), pp. 357-70, p. 357.
67. See Guyer, Marginal Gains.
68. This word, derived from the root for 'want' or'desire', has also been regularly used to measure the tradition/modernity divide. In that register, it refers to acts carried out individually without regard for authority, advice, or moral consequences.
69. J. Roitman, 'The Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin', in J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 266.
70. G. Gono, Zimbabwe's Casino Economy: Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges (Harare, ZPH Publishers, 2009).
71. See also S. Strange, Casino Capitalism (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986).
72. There is no evidence that Gono was familiar with the latter.
73. Statement on the 2009 Budget (Government of Zimbabwe, 17 March 2009), p. 12.