2 The unsettled land

At the heart of all of the conflict in the country, from the ‘provocative interventions of early colonial rule in what became known as the Ndebele-Shona Rising of 1896–7: the First Chimurenga or Umvukela Wokuqala’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Reference Ndlovu-Gatsheni2009: 39), to the civil war or Second Chimurenga of the 1970s, and after independence to the present day, what President Robert Mugabe labelled the Third Chimurenga, is the matter of land (Alexander Reference Alexander2006: 185). The core motivation for colonisation and resistance is land – its occupation, its ownership and its culture. Jocelyn Alexander (Reference Alexander2006: 1) observes that the metaphor of the ‘unsettled land’ has rich and varied meanings throughout Zimbabwean history. At the end of the nineteenth century, ‘the unsettled land’ ‘conjures white settler fantasies of an empty, unproductive land, ripe for exploitation’ and ‘the harsh disruptions of colonial conquest, eviction and agrarian intervention’ (2006: 1). Indeed, in one of the earliest ego narratives about colonial Zimbabwe, F. Courtney Selous reflects upon the prospects for Europeans to flourish and prosper on the land:

This extract embodies the nineteenth-century British imperialist view of Africa as ripe for European settlement and exploitation. Although Selous was not himself a colonist – he was an explorer and hunter – he here espouses the colonists’ attitude towards the opportunities for settlers to seize and prosper in the territories that became first Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe. Selous wrote this reflection to conclude his account of the Ndebele uprising in 1896 which was incited by the massive expropriation of Ndebele lands and cattle by white settlers. The First Chimurenga or Umvukela Wokuqala heralds the transformation of a British imperial discourse to a Rhodesian settler discourse, a discourse which signals the construction of a white identity ‘derived from the need to establish hegemony and the right to minority rule’ (Alexander Reference Alexander2004: 196). By the beginning of the twentieth century, Rhodesia was an emerging settler colony:

The legislative record of the colony, the rebel republic and finally independent Zimbabwe tells the story of seizure, settlement, protection, containment, redistribution, occupation and resettlement of the land. The impact of the definition along racial lines of citizens and subjects was evident in the nomenclature that marks the public discourse about the settlement of the land. Through the twentieth century, Africans were continually displaced from their homes and removed from their farms. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 codified the segregation of land in Southern Rhodesia, creating ‘European Areas’, ‘Native Reserves’, ‘Native Purchase Areas’ and ‘Forest Areas’, and leaving as ‘unassigned land’ about seven million hectares (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Reference Ndlovu-Gatsheni2009: 66). At the same time, the state sought to shape the nature of settlement and farming practices in the reserves, casting African farming methods as ‘traditional, unproductive and destructive’ (Alexander Reference Alexander2006: 25).

After World War II, as large numbers of white immigrants were settled on farms under the Government's Settlement Scheme, African communities were displaced from the so-called ‘European areas’ (Mlambo Reference Mlambo2009: 76). The consequence was severe overcrowding in the Reserves, with the concomitant results of overgrazing and soil erosion. The state responded with the Native Land Husbandry Act (1951) which enforced livestock reduction, regulated the crops, acreage and areas to be planted, required the application of particular husbandry methods and controlled the marketing and distribution of the products (Raftopoulos Reference Hammar, Raftopoulos and Jensen2003: 17). The tight control of the reserve lands effectively denied blacks land in the reserved areas at all unless they agreed to become peasant farmers following strictly regulated methods. In consequence, ‘those who could not be accommodated in the countryside would be transformed into cheap permanent labour for the emerging manufacturing sector’ (Mlambo Reference Mlambo2009: 86). The Land Tenure Act (1969) further protected the zoning of land along racial lines. As Alexander (Reference Alexander2006: 1) notes, ‘land was central once again in provoking the brutal conflict of the liberation war, and in ultimately bringing about the demise of the settler state’. Alexander demonstrates how the trope of the ‘unsettled land’ applies equally to agrarian reform after independence. From 1980, the state regulated the slow, highly controlled process of resettling the large commercial agricultural area hitherto owned exclusively by whites with black smallholders. Economic protection for whites had been guaranteed by the constitution at independence in the stipulation that land could not be expropriated; it could, however, be bought ‘on a willing-seller – willing-buyer basis’ (Mtisi et al. Reference Mtisi, Nyakudya and Barnes2009: 165). The constitution was a significant obstacle to the new state's ability to deliver on its key promise to restore the land to the people. Moyo & Chambati (Reference Moyo and Chambati2013: 7) point out that in the first decade, land distribution was ‘a market-based and state-managed process which primarily targeted landlessness, “overcrowding” and land shortages among the rural and urban poor and unemployed’. In the 1990s, despite the government's adoption of land expropriation laws, land redistribution both slowed down and tended to benefit elites alone (Moyo Reference Moyo2013: 30). In 1997, when the government gazetted thousands of large commercial farms for compulsory acquisition, the commercial farmers vigorously challenged the government in the courts (Pilossof Reference Pilossof2012a: 34). The result was political impasse until 2000, when war veterans led hundreds of thousands of black Zimbabweans to occupy great tracts of very visibly untouched ‘white’ land. Thus once again the landscape was ‘dramatically unsettled’ (Alexander Reference Alexander2006: 1).

This narrative reflects the continual upheaval wrought by the repeated violent appropriation of land and the attendant eviction and resettlement of its inhabitants. Indeed, the question of the identity of whites in colonial and now postcolonial Zimbabwe has been inextricably bound up with the notion of the land, as Selous expresses it, ‘white men's country’. It centres on the settlement and ownership of land until 1980 and then the resettlement of the land since 2000.

3 A social-historical framework for semantic-pragmatic change

In order to trace the ways in which the discourse of a community reflects the extent to which its identities are closely tied to access to and association with the land over time, I examine the semasiological history of several key lexical terms, focusing on the changing signification of terms like ‘African’ while terms like ‘Rhodesian’ become fixed and fossilised. Underpinning this work is Traugott & Dasher's (Reference Traugott and Dasher2002) Invited inferencing theory of semantic change (IITSC), which models semantic change as speakers' pragmatic innovation in the stream of speech that has the potential to catch on, spread to other contexts of utterance and eventually become conventionalised. According to this model, speakers may use expressions that carry novel implicatures that are highly specific to the context of utterance. Alternatively, they may exploit an existing conversational implicature in an ad hoc way in a new environment. If the new use persists, it has the potential to acquire social value and if members of a community assign social meaning to its use, it might spread to other linguistic contexts and to other speakers, becoming pragmatically strengthened in the process. If the original coded meaning of the expression reduces to a trace in certain contexts or even disappears, then the interactants may conventionalise the now usual pragmatic meaning. The question is what external conditions or factors trigger (or actuate) the semantic-pragmatic change in the use of an expression. In my sociohistorical framework, the discursive context in which speakers generate novel implicatures by the use of an expression is critical to the process of change. I follow Rory Pilossof (Reference Pilossof2012a) in using Gillian Whitlock's (Reference Whitlock2000) notion of a ‘discursive threshold’. In her study of women's autobiography, Whitlock explores how the convergence of a series of political events that ‘configure and invade the private domain’ constitutes a threshold that triggers change in a group's discourse. The group adds a new style or register to its discursive repertoire, selecting the use of register according to the interlocutor and the specific communicative context. Thus a discourse – a style – may become active in the politics of identity when a particular (discursive) threshold is reached. I adapt Whitlock's notion to label the triggering moments in which meanings change, and in so doing, change the discourse they inhabit. In my model, the moment that accommodates semantic-pragmatic change and consequently discursive change is a discursive threshold. Then new discourses build upon elements that have been covertly or privately disseminated (i.e. those implicatures that speakers generate on the fly in the domain of private conversations). Once the threshold has been passed, these implicatures are conventionalised and emerge into the public domain to receive widespread and popular recognition. The threshold thus marks the waning of one discourse and the growing acceptance and use of another within the public domain. Importantly, a community may control more than one discourse at any one time. Constitutive of such discourses are groups of key terms that have complex polysemies that are contingent both upon the interactants and the discursive context in which they are used. Depending upon the specific historical setting and the ideological domain in which the interactants perform, a group of expressions may index the identity of its users. The notion of ‘contingent polysemy’ captures the fact that while an expression may have multiple meanings at any time, some meanings will be more prominent or primed than others for particular speakers depending upon the temporal, ideological and experiential stance of those speakers. In a sense, the temporal, ideological and experiential stance of speakers will prime them to perceive or apprehend some meanings of an expression more readily than others. In this way, different speakers within the same temporal and spatial domain will construe an expression differently depending upon their particular temporal, ideological and experiential stance. For example, Anthony Chennells (Reference Chennells2005: 134) draws our attention to the different meanings attached to whiteness in colonial Rhodesia, noting that ‘settlers of British origin grudgingly accorded whiteness to Jews and Afrikaners’ but in a qualified manner, referring to them as ‘poor whites’, thus preventing ‘too intimate an identification’ with them. So the label ‘poor white’ signifies for the settler of British origin, a white person, but of some other origin, and as such much diminished by comparison. Rory Pilossof (Reference Pilossof2012a) identifies the onset of the land reform programme or land invasions in 2000 as a key discursive threshold for the shift in the nature of the discourses of white Zimbabwean farmers. Key earlier discursive thresholds that are relevant for the study of emerging discourses in Zimbabwe are 1965, the date of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain made by the Rhodesian Front prime minister, Ian Smith; and 1980, the date of legal independence of Zimbabwe and the first general election held on the principle of universal franchise. I track the multiple meanings commanded by key terms and the semantic-pragmatic shifts speakers produce at key discursive thresholds in the history of Zimbabwe. The rest of the article looks particularly at the manner in which discourses disappear from the public realm to go underground and then, when political events converge in particular ways, to resurface.

4 Africans vs Rhodesians in colonial Zimbabwe

In this section, I examine the manner in which the construction of Rhodesia as a white man's country in the course of the twentieth century is reflected in the development of nomenclature for classifying its population. The European settlement of sub-Saharan Africa through the British colonial office had a particular linguistic legacy; specifically, it bequeathed a terminology that distinguished between colonisers and colonised in terms of their geographical provenance. Accordingly, the empire's citizens were Europeans and the empire's subjects were, in the case of Africa, Africans. European empire builders like Britain, Germany and Italy divided the continent among them into colonies and some, like Britain, began to plant permanent settlements of their citizens in those colonies to cement their possessions. In the process, the lexicon of empire was domesticated and localised, acquiring the specificity of place. The Oxford English Dictionary's (OED) primary entry for ‘African’ (OED, s.v. A1) includes the sense of continental origin or provenance that predominates in the period before Europe's imperial expansion into Africa and distinguishes this from what it refers to as ‘local usage’, in which the term is used to differentiate people of ‘African origin’ from those of ‘European origin’:

Of course, the entry does not make it clear what precisely results in the specification of the term in local usage. The entry does point to Southern African usage as the instantiation of local usage, indicating its use to denote specifically ‘Bantu-speaking’ peoples indigenous to Southern Africa. This situation can be clarified by the appeal to history. The period in which this (localised) sense dominates is from 1806, some eighty years before whites ventured onto the Zimbabwean plateau. Before the scramble for Africa in the last quarter of the nineteenth century imposed upon the map of Africa boundaries agreed by Britain, Germany, Italy and France, linguists like Bleek (Reference Bleek1862−9) identified different parts of Africa according to the geographical distribution of language families. Accordingly, Bleek placed the Bantu-speaking peoples in Southern Africa. The domestication and metonymic adaptation of the term ‘Bantu’ is illustrated in the early twentieth century in the name of the Bantu Congress of Southern Rhodesia, a political organisation formed in 1934 by mission-educated black men who ‘adhered to colonial modernist ideas of progress and civilisation’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Reference Ndlovu-Gatsheni2009: 73). Chennells (Reference Chennells2005: 134) observes that:

In the case of Southern Rhodesia in the early twentieth century, white British (and British South African) settlers were distinguished from the (black) African, colonised by means of the opposition of ‘European’ and ‘African’. In the course of the domestication and localisation of this lexicon, the ideology of race contributes to the specialisation of reference. Thus in practice, ‘European’ comes to be synonymous with ‘white’ and ‘African’ comes to refer exclusively to the indigenous black inhabitants of this territory. This is partly illustrated in the language employed by C. Bernard Rutley in his children's book in which the children relate their travels and adventures through South Africa and Southern Rhodesia:

In this extract, the British author offers snippets of the white man's history in Southern Rhodesia, ostensibly in Patricia's voice. She introduces the topic of the colonisation of the territory using the imperial term ‘Europeans’ to refer to the settlers. When she gets to the matter of the events in 1893 that provoked the Jameson Raid, she distinguishes between the white inhabitants and their ‘native Mashona’ servants. Throughout this travelogue, blacks are referred to as ‘natives’ while whites are labelled ‘Europeans’; the term ‘white’ is used as an adjective, as in the passage above, that is, ‘white inhabitants’, ‘white masters’. This book was published in London in 1952, the year before Britain created a Federation of central African states, composed of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The perspective is that of an outsider, a traveller remarking on both how familiar the ‘Europeans’ are and how exotic and foreign the land is. It is striking that this book employs a colonial vocabulary; the absence of reference anywhere to the colony's inhabitants as ‘Rhodesians’ suggests a particularly British point of view of Southern Rhodesia as a British possession; and of its inhabitants as British colonialists. However by 1960, within the colony, a distinction was increasingly drawn between settlers and those of Rhodesian descent of more than two generations’ depth. Sir Edgar Whitehead, prime minister of Southern Rhodesia, addressing the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London in November 1959, comments explicitly on how (recent) white settlers differ from white Rhodesians. He distinguishes among recent immigrants from Britain who he asserts become ‘the most appalling reactionaries’ on discovering that conditions and people in the country fail to meet their high expectations and ‘the second and third generation Rhodesian born in the country’ who he asserts is ‘far more liberal than most of the immigrants who have come in’ (1960: 194). In his address, he distinguishes too between Africans, the targets of the immigrants’ ‘revulsion’, and ‘Rhodesians’, the white descendants of earlier settlers. Thus, by this time, although ‘Rhodesian’ is slowly replacing ‘European’ in Rhodesian discourse, ‘African’ is embedded and localised in Rhodesian discourse to refer explicitly and specifically to local black people. Whitehead (Reference Whitehead1960: 194) goes so far as to anticipate including blacks as well as whites in the category of ‘Rhodesian’, noting

Five years later, Ian Smith's UDI in 1965 rejects British plans for moving towards black majority rule and seeks to establish a white supremacist regime. Thus ‘Rhodesia’ becomes synonymous with ‘white’. It is amply illustrated in the advertisement headed Rhodesia's Claim for Independence, which the Rhodesian Government's Ministry of Information placed in the Daily Mirror on 30 October 1965.Footnote ⁴

This advertisement (reproduced in figure 1) gives some indication of what the line of the Rhodesian Front government would be after UDI, the threshold of a specifically Rhodesian (rather than a British or colonial) discourse, in which its people are separated by a markedly raced lexicon. The lexicon, which juxtaposes whites (‘European’) and non-whites (‘African’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Asian’), is reflected in the advertisement. Its content insists that independence will be beneficial for all Rhodesians. The manner in which this claim is made is disingenuous, of course, trading on the British reader's ignorance of the place. For example, the claims about ‘African education’ under items 1 and 2 appear to invite the inference that the Rhodesian government makes the education of black children a key priority. Actually, the fact ‘[t]hat more African than European children started secondary school’ in 1965 is not a consequence of more spending or a greater commitment to the education of blacks, but an inevitable consequence of the fact that black children leaving primary school significantly outnumbered whites. The Daily Mirror editorial response to this advertisement published on 3 December 1965 summarises the status of the Rhodesian problem in a forthright manner, noting: ‘Rhodesia is the British Commonwealth's last major squabble about the rights of 220,000 whites and 3,800,000 coloured Africans, and there is no doubt at all about the moral issue’. It then offers an unequivocal condemnation of the motivation for UDI, declaring ‘[t]he racial doctrine of white supremacy practised by Rhodesia's rulers is ugly, wicked and totally indefensible’ (Editorial, Daily Mirror, 3 December 1965).Footnote ⁵ The language of the editorial's summary reflects the extent to which British attitudes differ from those espoused by the Rhodesians. The editorial pits the term ‘whites’ against a phrase that does not occur in the now highly localised Rhodesian lexicon, namely, ‘coloured Africans’. In the Rhodesian system, terms such as ‘Coloured’, ‘Asian’, ‘African’ and ‘European’ were used as an official means to categorise people because all aspects of their lives were circumscribed by their designated race.Footnote ⁶ The Daily Mirror’s phrase emphasises the observation that the Rhodesian independence project is designed to keep the whites in power at the same time as continuing to keep all other parts of the population in a position of subjugation. This, of course, was a major challenge to Britain's programme of decolonisation.

Figure 1.

Rhodesian Government advertisement in the Daily Mirror, Saturday 30 October 1965. Reproduced by permission of Mirrorpix

Thus by 1965, the meaning of the name ‘African’ in Rhodesian discourse has changed. Specifically, while it retains its vestigial coded meaning (i.e. ‘a native or inhabitant of Africa’), for Rhodesians, it has also acquired a classificatory function to contrast with ‘European’. It is also used metonymically. It refers now, not to all people of Africa, but specifically to the black African people particularly of Rhodesia. Thus African remains a term of description but it acquires uses and forms that primarily convey speaker attitude. The extent to which the term is embedded in local Rhodesian discourse is evidenced in its several diminutive forms, for example, Af and Affie as illustrated in the following example, taken from an interview conducted by David Caute in 1977.

The diminutising effect of a speaker's choice of Af or Affie conveys a profoundly paternalistic attitude towards the referent. Not only is Rhodesian discourse explicitly raced, it also represents the black as juvenile and inferior to whites. Writing in 1994, Doris Lessing reflects on her childhood in Rhodesia, noting the extent to which she lived quite separately and ignorantly from the Africans. Writing about living on a farm in the 1930s, she wonders:

She offers three glosses of ‘African’, the latter two being increasingly offensive epithets commonly used in Rhodesian discourse to refer to blacks. The proliferation of terms with different connotations to refer to what Godwin & Hancock (Reference Godwin and Hancock1993) call the ‘allegedly unknowable African mind’ highlights the parallel discourses designed for different audiences in different contexts. Lessing ventriloquises the voice of the white settler in describing Shona as ‘a kaffir language’, thus implicitly inviting the connection by refusing to describe ‘white settler attitudes’ more fully. Lessing's choice of the term ‘white settler’ in this context conveys negative pragmatic force, allowing the inference that the speaker disapproves of the referent.Footnote ⁷ The highly offensive terms ‘munt’ and ‘kaffir’ persist in the private discourse used among white Rhodesians. This habitual linguistic behaviour is a matter for reflection in Lauren St John's coming-of-age memoir, Rainbow's End, set in the 1970s. The narrator assumes the stance of the teenage girl to report white men's language to refer to ‘the adequacy or inadequacy of the blacks’, and she reflects on the language used in her own family:

The narrator's judgement of the use of munt indicates that its use by whites to refer to blacks was always ‘disrespectful’. Indeed, its definition in ‘the Fanagalo phrasebook’ is no recommendation as a guide for ‘any one [sic] who, when employing or coming into contact with Bantu men or women, finds European languages inadequate to get ideas across’ (Bold Reference Bold1983: 4) to the use of a jargon, also called chiraparapa or typically, ‘kitchen kaffir’ (Ferraz Reference Ferraz1980).Footnote ⁸ St John lists the dysphemisms that convey the potent force of paternalistic or racist attitudes of the (white) speaker towards his or her (black) interlocutors. The label munt is a shortened and metathesised form of Ndebele umntu (pl. abantu) ‘human being, person’. The coded meaning of this borrowing, adapted into English and used exclusively with negative, pejorative force, is ‘black African (of Rhodesia)’. In the third edition of the OED, munt (s.v. A) is classified as ‘slang’, and defined as follows: ‘Among some white people in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, an insulting term for: a black African’.Footnote ⁹ The OED's illustrative quotation from the Listener magazine attested in 1964 explicitly attributes the use to white Rhodesians in a metalinguistic comment: ‘His friends were muttering . . . about “cheeky munts”, which is the insulting white Rhodesian term for Africans’ (Listener 13 Feb. 1964, 257/1). The term percolated into the discourse of white civilians, adults and children alike, as a slang term to refer to black people. The extract below from Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel, set in the 1960s, echoes the Listener quotation, illustrating the prevalence of the collocation ‘cheeky munt’:

The ‘beefy youth’ exhibits the stereotypical linguistic behaviour of white Rhodesians, offering the pejorative label ‘munt’ before resorting to the extremely derogatory term ‘kaffir’ in response to the use of ‘the natives’, a markedly old-fashioned term, by the elderly white middle class woman. This extract neatly illustrates the co-existence of these terms within the same public discourse though with different patterns of use. In pragmatic terms, by 1965 then, the force of ‘munt’ as an utterance-token by a white person in the Rhodesian context is unambiguously derogatory, insulting and offensive to the referent. The implicature borne by the utterance-type, in other words, on every occasion on which it is produced, is that the referent is the ‘other’; as the referent is not white, he is inferior, and by implication, uncivilised. If ‘munt’ is an offensive, albeit routinised insulting way to refer to black people in Rhodesia, ‘kaffir’ is an extremely abusive term. The OED (s.v. A 2a) identifies the label as ‘a highly offensive term of extreme abuse in Southern African contexts’ since 1940. The use of this utterance-type conveys extreme contempt, fear and loathing of the user for the object or referent of the label. Its choice in discourse immediately and unequivocally identifies the (white) speaker as an extreme racist.Footnote ¹⁰

The war between black nationalist guerilla armies and white government forces escalated in the 1970s. Farmers and black civil servants in rural areas were increasingly targeted by the principal guerilla armies while peasants in the Tribal Trust Lands were incarcerated in what the security forces euphemistically labelled ‘protected villages’ for public consumption and ‘keeps’ among themselves (Worby Reference Worby2001: 482). Mtisi et al. (Reference Mtisi, Nyakudya and Barnes2009: 162−5) describe the staggering increase in the financial and human costs of the war between 1978 and the failure of an internal settlement and independence in 1980. At the same time that the physical violence escalated, so too did the verbal violence. In 1970, according to the editor of the Umtali Post (14 October, 1970), the majority of whites had ceased to use words like ‘munt’ and ‘kaffir’ (Godwin & Hancock Reference Godwin and Hancock1993: 48). And St. John's commentary appears to confirm the impression that whites regarded these terms as taboo. However, David Caute's (Reference Caute1983) account of the ‘death of white Rhodesia’ in the second half of the decade suggests that overtly racist language still permeated white discourse. Thus he reports the routine racism of men he comes across (in 1977) like Assistant Superintendent Goddard, who tosses out off-colour stories in the office before asking his interlocutor in the presence of the black clerks: ‘So—do our munts look hungry, like the foreign press alleges?’ (Caute Reference Caute1983: 167). In fact, the Rhodesian uses of munt, Kaffir and African to refer specifically to blacks in Zimbabwe indicate the extent to which these terms had become localised for their speakers, apparently semantically synonymous with ‘black’ (Fitzmaurice Reference Fitzmaurice, Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williams2010: 282). But if whites really did begin to eschew these ostensible synonyms to refer to their black countrymen in public, this avoidance indicates that these terms are highly marked. Specifically, the active choice of such terms leaves the addressee in no doubt about the speaker's attitude towards what he or she is speaking about. They are emblems of racial attitudes. By the end of the 1970s, the lexicon of race was a cornerstone of white Rhodesian discourse, a discourse of superiority which depended upon the process of racialised ‘othering’ in order to construct white identity (Alexander Reference Alexander2004: 195). As Alexander (Reference Alexander2004: 195) notes:

5 We are all Zimbabweans now (1980−2000)

1979 saw the messy transition from war-battered white Rhodesia through an interim government of ‘national unity’ headed by Rhodesian-supported black politicians in an awkwardly named ‘Zimbabwe-Rhodesia’ to the legitimately independent Zimbabwe governed by a black majority. Thus, by independence in 1980, the names ‘Rhodesia’ and ‘Zimbabwe’ commanded very different ideological and racial connotations for its inhabitants. ‘Rhodesia’ is an anachronism; it is a temporary historical name for a colonial territory first demarcated by Rhodes’ British South Africa Company and then defined by the white settler colonial state. It is also an imaginary space occupied by the descendants of white settlers who laid claim to a particular version of the nation space (as captured in the Facebook post in the introduction to this article). In contrast, the historical name ‘Zimbabwe’ is appropriated in the African nationalist reinterpretation of the settler territory in terms of the international system of nation-states on the one hand and an attempt to put aside deep ethnic, regional and tribal identities to assume a homogeneous postcolonial identity on the other.Footnote ¹¹

In his election victory speech on 4 March 1980, Prime Minister-elect Robert Mugabe sought to forge a spirit of reconciliation in order to create a ‘new amity’ among all the territory's people, ‘as Zimbabweans’. He appealed to whites as well as blacks in the pledge to ‘reconstruct and rehabilitate’ this society:

Mugabe's reconciliation speech invited blacks and whites to engage in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of a country ravaged by war, economic crisis, and deep social divisions. The key terms that Mugabe uses to identify the causes of division among Zimbabweans are ‘racialism’, ‘tribalism’ and ‘regionalism’. Racialism is at the heart of the separation and separateness of people according to their race and the consequent profound ignorance that shaped colonial and post-UDI Rhodesian politics and the war. But Mugabe was not speaking to whites alone. Tribalism—in today's terminology, ethnicity—refers to the historical tensions between Shona and Ndebele, symbolised in the conflict between the Shona dominated ZANU(PF) and Ndebele dominated ZAPU. Regionalism proved critical in the emergence of the de facto one-party state in the years after 1980; Mtisi et al. (Reference Mtisi, Nyakudya and Barnes2009: 166) report that in Zimbabwe's first election, ‘[a]ll but one of PF-ZAPU's seats were won in Matabeleland, while ZANU(PF) won all its seats in Mashonaland—boding ill for the post-independence period’.Footnote ¹³

But in his first parliamentary address delivered in April, 1980, Mugabe urged people to change themselves in order to tackle the challenges that lay ahead. This was nothing less than a call for personal reconstruction:

In the fiction and memoirs published since 1980, this speech has figured as prominently as the Rhodesian anthems did for the accounts of the demise of White Rhodesia (Fitzmaurice Reference Fitzmaurice, Kytö, Taavitsainen, Smith and Claridge2014). Accordingly, Douglas Rogers reports the reaction of his parents to this momentous speech (2009: 58):

Thus as Zimbabwe emerged, so its white citizens crossed a major discursive threshold. The advent of a new political order seemed to change the public discourse. Rogers's parents, by identifying themselves as ‘Zimbabweans’, declare their intention to remain and participate in the reconciliation offered by Mugabe under the new dispensation. Those whites who would remain ‘Rhodesians’ departed for South Africa and Britain in their thousands (Simon Reference Simon1988). They identified themselves as ‘Rhodesians’, referring to themselves among themselves colloquially as ‘Rhodies’ and as ‘ex-Rhodesians’ when talking to outsiders (Fitzmaurice Reference Fitzmaurice, Kytö, Taavitsainen, Smith and Claridge2014).

The whites who stayed adjusted their public discourse to fit the post-independent setting. Pilossof (Reference Pilossof2012a) illustrates how white farmers represented by the influential Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU) signalled their ostensible willingness to cooperate with the new government. For example, Piers Nicolle, a farmer from Lomagundi, joined the ruling party, ZANU(PF). Peter Godwin interviewed him in 1986, and reports his self-identification:

It is notable that this story suggests that the census used anachronistic language for the classification of race, namely, ‘European’, and, implicitly, ‘African’, instead of ‘white’ and ‘black’. The veracity of the anecdote, though, is less important than its symbolism. Nicolle conveys his decision to remain in Zimbabwe, in Africa. This anecdote signals the self-conscious appropriation by whites of a term hitherto limited to the classification of black Zimbabweans. This self-identifying act marks the investment of positive force in a term that whites had used in order to other blacks.

At the same time, a massive shift of official nomenclature papered over the deep historical legacy of race in the geopolitical demarcation of the land. The ‘Tribal Trustlands’, the erstwhile ‘Native Reserves’, disappeared to be replaced by ‘Communal Areas’; the ‘African Purchase Areas’, specially designated lands adjacent to the reserves intended for blacks who wished to own land, were reclassified as ‘Small-Scale Commercial Farms’ (SSCF). The largest sector of land use in the country, historically white-owned commercial agricultural areas occupying one-third of the total arable land, was labelled ‘Large-Scale Commercial Farms’ (LSCF). These continued largely to be owned by whites or by companies controlled by whites (Worby Reference Worby2001: 484).

When land and land organisation were subject to reclassification and new names, Zimbabwe's cities and towns also received new names; for example, Salisbury became Harare, Hartley became Chegutu and Fort Victoria became Mazvingo. Other African place names adapted for English pronunciations in colonial times were adapted afresh; for example, Gwelo became Gweru; Shabani became Zvishavane and Selukwe became Shurugwi. However, the official renaming of places and people in independent Zimbabwe did not mean that all old Rhodesian locutions disappeared. Instead, they went underground, to be used in private, in small enclaves of ‘Rhodies’ in South Africa or Britain, but also in Zimbabwe. Rory Pilossof (Reference Pilossof2012a: 119) argues that independence then was ‘a silencing threshold that seeks to ‘leave the past behind’’.

Changes in official nomenclature were not accompanied by radical political or economic change or in the redistribution of the land in the first decade after independence. The persistence of the status quo suggested that whites believed themselves to be entitled to what Mandaza (Reference Mandaza1986: 3) observed was true for the first decade, namely:

Independence in 1980 saw the emergence of what appeared to be a unified public discourse marked by a political effort to engage all Zimbabweans in nation-building, in personal reconstruction and in reconciliation. In the public sphere, the term ‘Rhodesian’ was used solely to refer to those whites who declared themselves to be unreconstructed. However, beneath the surface, the private discourses that had endured through the war along racial and political lines persisted.

6 Zimbabweans vs white Africans

The Government held a constitutional referendum in 2000 which was designed to expand the power of the state and that of the president. Key items included citizenship, land distribution, the representation of whites in parliament and an executive rather than a ceremonial presidency. When the government's proposals were defeated, it became evident that the new opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) posed a significant electoral challenge to ZANU(PF). The ZANU(PF) government's rhetorical response was to revise the nationalist narrative, according a central role to the land, so that:

The immediate political consequence was a crackdown on the MDC and other opposition groups in the urban areas (Pilossof Reference Pilossof2012a: 43). In the rural areas, war veterans led the occupation (or invasion) of large commercial farms, thus inaugurating the radical resettlement of the land. Chaumba et al. (Reference Chaumba, Scoones and Wolmer2003), Hammar et al. (Reference Hammar, Raftopoulos and Jensen2003), Sachikonye (Reference Sachikonye2004), Alexander (Reference Alexander2006) and Pilossof (Reference Pilossof2012a) among many other historians, ethnographers and social scientists, have documented in detail the events from February 2000 through to the end of 2003 which began with farm occupations and then were regulated as the fast-track land reform programme (FTLRP). Of interest to me is the impact that these events had on the discourses employed by the participants at the time and since. There is no doubt that these events marked a discursive threshold which undermined and overturned what Auret (Reference Auret1992) had considered to be the ‘miracle’ of reconciliation among blacks and whites since 1980.

The farm occupations of 2000 came to be labelled ‘the time of Jambanja’ (Chaumba et al. Reference Chaumba, Scoones and Wolmer2003: 539). ‘Jambanja’ comes from the title of a pop song (Jambanja Pahotera) about a fight between two pairs of cheating lovers. Apparently meaning ‘violence’ or angry argument’, the word was applied in different contexts, to refer to ‘the ex-combatant farm invaders themselves, the farm invasions and more broadly politically instigated violence’ (Chaumba et al. Reference Chaumba, Scoones and Wolmer2003: 540). The use of the word evokes violent confrontation and connotes disorder and lawlessness. Chaumba et al. (Reference Chaumba, Scoones and Wolmer2003: 540) report that veterans adopted it as part of a catch-phrase: jambanja ndizvo (‘violence is the answer’). Its introduction into public discourse was discussed in the media. The Daily News’s Tagwirei Bango commented:

The language surrounding these events is charged with tension and serves to highlight the central position of the land. The lexicon includes a number of terms that denote the agents and acts of taking possession of the land: ‘squatters’, ‘settlers’, ‘resettling’, ‘settlement’; ‘occupation’, ‘invaders’, ‘invasion’. Worby (Reference Worby2001) reflects on the diversity of the ‘morally laden lexicon’ that different participants have used, noting that: ‘“invasion” bears a heavy, if ambiguous moral load’ as both invaders and invaded ‘have found sufficient righteousness in its implications for the term to remain remarkably uncontroversial’ (Worby Reference Worby2001: fn. 1). The same observation applies to the term ‘settler’. In colonial times, when modified by ‘white’, ‘settler’ bore opprobrious connotations of colonialist seizing and settling on land, dispossessing its rightful owners. In 2000, the invasions engineered the FTLRP which placed ‘fast track settlers’ onto designated land.

In other words, this lexicon is claimed both by the people whose farms were occupied and by the people occupying the land. Pilossof (Reference Pilossof2012a: 119) argues that these events ‘reinvigorated much of the language and discourse of the Liberation War and offered the opportunity for these discourses to re-emerge and become potent once more’. This was as true for ZANU(PF) as it was for the affected farming communities. Alexander (Reference Alexander2006: 185) notes that ‘Mugabe donned combat fatigues and spoke of enemies and war, veterans occupied farms and revived the liberation war-era meetings called pungwes; while farmers reverted to their agric-alert security systems and were once again killed on their land’. Pilossof (Reference Pilossof2012a: 45) further observes that ‘as the communication networks of the war were reinvigorated, so too was the language associated with it: “terrs”, “gooks” and mujibas became colloquial terms for describing the land occupiers in farming circles’. These observations suggest that the inflammatory language reported in the memoirs of the 1970s did not disappear; it lurked just beneath the surface, to be revived in white public discourse after 2000.

Land and the rights to its possession were at the centre of nationalist politics at the start of the new millennium, and intimately implicated in the question of legitimate rights to the land was the matter of citizenship. James Muzondidya (Reference Muzondidya2004: 225) has explored how, after 2000, in a revised historical narrative of nation, ‘only “native Africans” or vanavevhu/abantwana bombhlabathi (‘children of the soil’)’ are projected ‘not only as the original and true inhabitants of Zimbabwe but also as having pre-eminent rights over the country's land and other resources’. The implication of this narrative is that all other Zimbabweans are foreigners. Governmental control of the electronic media ensured that its essentialist narrative saturated the public sphere. Raftopoulos (Reference Raftopoulos2004: 162) quotes Gandhi & Jambaya's (Reference Gandhi and Jambaya2002) report on the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation's simplistic conceptualisation of ‘nation’ based on race: ‘The Black nation was called Africa. Whites were presented as Europeans who could only belong to Europe just as Africa was for Africans and Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans’ (Gandhi & Jambaya Reference Gandhi and Jambaya2002: 4). Muzondidya (Reference Muzondidya2004: 225) argues that:

In response to the new construction after 2000 of the Zimbabwean as the black Zimbabwean alone, ethnic minorities including whites, Zimbabwean Asians and Coloureds began to appropriate the term ‘African’ as a means of self-identification in public discourse as well as in private.Footnote ¹⁶ This discursive move was most apparent in the language of white farmers, who sought to assert legitimate ownership of land and legitimate belonging to the country. It finds expression in farmer memoirs that make the land reform programme central to their narratives. Douglas Rogers's Reference Rogers2009 memoir tells the story of his parents’ transformation, first from Rhodesians to Zimbabweans (see section 5 above), and then from Zimbabweans to Africans as they battle the invasions of their farm and resist resettlement. In the excerpt below, Rogers dramatises the process of naming that his father uses to assert his identity, and more importantly, his perception of his rights in response to a television broadcast of Mugabe speaking in 2002, telling white farmers to ‘go back to Britain, go back to Blair’:

The plight of white farmers in the time of Jambanja received widespread international media attention. For example, Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey directed a documentary film, Mugabe and the White African (2009), about the battle of two white farmers, Mike Campbell and Ben Freeth, to take a landmark case against the Zimbabwe government to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal. The basis of Campbell's claim to a legitimate right to the land is that he did not inherit it but that he purchased it in 1974, in the middle of the war years, a fact that raises the question of the status of land ownership prior to independence. The significance of Campbell's claim is that he both denies and rejects the assertion that he is a descendant of white settlers who seized the land from blacks in the early twentieth century, forcibly displacing the original inhabitants. The documentary concludes that this was the first time that an ‘African citizen has had their rights upheld through an International Court’. The case rests upon definitions of national identity. In the film, Freeth says:

Freeth's sentiment responds directly to Mugabe's legislation of Zimbabwean citizenship but it also obscures the historical complexity that attends the construction of white identity in Zimbabwe (see Alexander Reference Alexander2004). The challenge for the white farmers whose commercial farms were targeted by the Zimbabwe government for large-scale resettlement without compensation was to show how they could claim legitimacy of occupancy. This task entailed removing themselves from the stigma of being the descendants of white settlers, and therefore unlawful occupiers of the land. It involves the rhetorical move of casting themselves as Zimbabweans who expressed their commitment to the new, non-racial state and their deference to the majority by purchasing land in a symbolic act of belonging. This kind of move is designed to silence the accusations firstly, that they came by their land by privilege (for instance, through inheritance) and secondly, that they have alternative loyalties, namely, to Britain.

Alexandra Fuller's (Reference Fuller2001) memoir of her childhood in Rhodesia fleetingly gestures to the complexity of race, ethnicity, history and identity. In this extract, she reflects on history:

At the same time as acknowledging displacement and non-belonging as wandering whites in the face of a rooted history and embeddedness in the land, Fuller's childhood memoir nevertheless establishes Zimbabwe as home. This statement is emblematic of the sense with which Rhodesian whites felt that they could ‘take the gap’, that is to say, leave the country to settle elsewhere in Africa (e.g. South Africa) or emigrate or return to Britain after independence. It is this attitude too that arguably informed Mugabe's statement in the state newspapers, the Bulawayo Chronicle and the Herald (5 September 2002) that white commercial farmers:

Alexander (Reference Alexander2004: 200) argues that: