BREAKING HOUSES, ANTICIPATING THE TSUNAMI

One morning in July 2005, Tanaka phoned to say he was dismantling the ‘cottages’ (one-roomed houses) behind his house in Harare's southern, and relatively poor, low-density suburb of Hatfield. Arriving at the scene I found him breaking the walls of one ‘cottage’ with a small hammer. With two tenants, we spent most of the day dismantling walls, removing windows and doors, stacking reusable bricks, and debating what to do with the remaining rubble. Covered in dust, we kept a watchful eye on the front gate, waiting for the police and council officials to turn up to destroy any ‘illegal structures’. As long as we were dismantling the houses ourselves, we felt confident they would not do it for us; in this way we would be able to save some of the materials. It was a slow business and by mid-afternoon we had only dismantled two out of five cottages.

As we worked Tanaka explained how, as a boy, he had helped his late father form the concrete blocks we were now trying to save. ‘Zvinorwadza!’ (‘It hurts!’) he exclaimed, and we all understood that this referred not only to the destruction of inherited property, but also to the loss of rent from these cottages that supplemented his low income, which is under much pressure from family responsibilities also inherited upon his parents’ death. ‘Zvinorwadza!’ could also have referred to the situation of the families – tenants but also friends – that Tanaka had been forced to evict earlier that morning. For the two tenants helping us it undoubtedly resounded uneasily with the knowledge that their homes were next in line for our hammers. But not that day; by late afternoon the tsunami, as Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order was popularly known as, had not arrived. Three days later the government announced a reprieve for low-density suburbs:Footnote ¹ ten days to regularize plans for ‘illegal structures’, at a price of Z$24 million.Footnote ² Two weeks later on 27 July 2005, a period punctuated by much media activity surrounding a visit by the UN special envoy, Mrs Tibaijuka, Vice-President Mujuru announced that Operation Murambatsvina was now over.³

A few days after destroying two of his ‘cottages’, at an impromptu barbecue at my home, Tanaka mused he had been lucky the tsunami officials had not arrived that day and that there had been no time to destroy the other cottages – ‘that is lucky for me and lucky for the people living in them’. He could have added he was lucky the actual roof over his head had not been threatened and, furthermore, that in low-density Hatfield the tsunami only amounted to small groups of officials wandering from house to house, inspecting planning documents and notifying people to dismantle ‘unplanned structures’ – rather than materializing as forced evictions from ‘illegally’ squatted areas, or as bulldozers flattening informal markets and homes, offering owners and inhabitants only minutes to remove property, as had happened in Chitungwiza, Mbare and elsewhere across Harare and the country.Footnote ⁴ As some people made comparisons with past, Rhodesian-era ‘slum clearances’, another guest at the party commented that his home, a rented backyard cottage nearby, had been spared (‘it had a plan’, apparently) but his workplace was due for destruction. He and his colleagues had decided to risk the uncertainty, and ‘wait until the bulldozers arrived’. But the family of four from Chitungwiza, who now squashed in with the six of us already sharing a two-bedroom flat, had had hardly any opportunity to wait before their two-room cottage was destroyed by officials some weeks before.

That day Tanaka said he was now concerned about the planning fees he might have to pay,Footnote ⁵ but a few weeks later, after the end of the ‘operation’ was announced, he felt more confident that he could avoid paying for ‘formal planning’, as by then it seemed unlikely the tsunami would strike again.Footnote ⁶ At the barbecue Tanaka asked me, off the cuff, what the ‘party’ was for. I said it was a spur of the moment thing; as it was Saturday, we decided to invite a few friends over. He replied, ‘That's exactly like this tsunami. One day somebody just went to work and said, let's do this, and that started all this off!’ (Notes, 18 July 2005).

LUCK AND PLANNING⁷

Although the impact of Zimbabwe's tsunami on Tanaka's situation seems minor in comparison to the many, much less fortunate, people in high-density suburbs and peri-urban settlements, or working as informal traders, elsewhere across Zimbabwe,Footnote ⁸ the events above do reveal a tension common to many experiences of Operation Murambatsvina. This tension relates to the disjuncture between official pronouncements about the need to ‘restore order’ – to reassert formal planning procedures, bye-laws and local state institutions – and the contradictory experience of the apparently arbitrary application and often extreme, sometimes violent, execution of the operation by council officials, police and the military, which for many seemed to operate outside of the legitimate, bureaucratic ‘state’. There were many ironic and graphic illustrations of this tension. If in Harare the aim was to restore the city's ‘sunshine’ status, Murambatsvina often created more squalor than it removed. In many cases good-quality, albeit unplanned or ‘illegal’ housing was destroyed, only to be replaced by exactly the kind of ramshackle, temporary structures which are common to so many informal urban settlements across the continent, but had been comparatively rare in Zimbabwe. The destructions created vast quantities of rubble, which were such an eyesore in Chitungwiza and elsewhere that councils issued statements requiring people to remove rubble under threat of further fines.Footnote ⁹ With reusable materials stacked up loosely to create temporary shelters for the newly homeless, unusable rubble was promptly deposited into the streets, filling potholes and exacerbating the ‘post-tsunami look’ from which the operation got its nickname.¹⁰

The tension between the stated aim of ‘restoring order’, and the operation's brutal and indiscriminate (but often admittedly thorough and efficient) execution, was reflected in public forums. While government media stressed the reassertion of order and planning, the MDC opposition, independent media, the United NationsFootnote ¹¹ and various NGOs emphasized the government's abandonment of legal rights and its recourse to a new set of violent political exclusions. In a small way, the events that I have begun to describe capture how this tension appeared on the ground. Tanaka and many others I spoke to in Hatfield, in high-density Chitungwiza and elsewhere, talked of their situation as a mixture of luck and planning. Contrary to both sides of the polarized media debates, I suggest the tsunami was experienced both as a ‘reassertion’ of formal planning, which resonated with people's memories of past (colonial and post-colonial) enforcement of urban regulations, limitations on informal markets, and sometimes evictions and clearances (Dorman Reference Dorman2007: 10; Mujere Reference Mujere2007: 6; Horn Reference Horn1994), and as a ‘display’ or demonstration of ‘state power’ deployed on a whim. In this article I argue it is precisely in the ambiguity and uncertainty generated by this tension, between the spectacle of ZANU PF's ability to deploy ‘state power’ as it chooses (that is, arbitrarily), and the resonances of official appeals to the reassertion of formal, bureaucratic planning and ‘governance’, that the political advantages of this operation for the ruling party become apparent.

ARBITRARY FORCE

‘He (President Mugabe) is like our father – but one who takes a stick and beats the child who says “I'm hungry”.’Footnote ¹² This quote encapsulates what I mean by suggesting that Operation Murambatsvina was, in part, experienced as a demonstration of ‘arbitrary force’. Like the father who beats his child, the brute force of the operation was ‘arbitrary’ not so much because it did or did not conform to the plethora of different logics and motivations ascribed by diverging rumours – there were too many contradictory explanations circulating for such an argument to work. Rather, it was ‘arbitrary’ exactly because its unexpected suddenness and brutality was experienced regardless of whether its motives would ever be properly understood. In other words, Zimbabwe's tsunami demonstrated clearly that this level of state machinery could be deployed at the whim of the ruling echelons of ZANU PF, regardless of the uncertainty that surrounded, and still surrounds, the intentions behind these events. Whatever motivations may have lain behind Operation Murambatsvina, it was a massive spectacle of power that clearly displayed the capacity of the ruling elite to deploy state forces as it chose. I am arguing that, like the ‘arbitrary power’ of a monarch (cf. Foucault Reference Foucault1975), Zimbabwe's tsunami was experienced, in part, as an ‘expression of sovereignty’ akin to (but necessarily less ‘ultimate’ than) Mbembe's notion of ‘necropolitics’ (2003: 11).

Indeed the popular use of the word tsunami to describe the operation captures perfectly its perceived ‘arbitrariness’, as well as graphically portraying the levelled houses and rubble that lined suburban streets after May–July 2005. It was also, obviously, a way in which people were able to relate their experiences to international events earlier that year. Yet even the discrepancy in the Shona and English versions of the official names given to the programme – Operation Murambatsvina (literally, refuse/reject the rubbish/filth) and Operation Restore Order – captures something of the tension I am trying to highlight. As one NGO report remarked,Footnote ¹³ there is an ‘unfortunate similarity in meaning of Murambatsvina and Gukurahundi ’, the latter being the much more violent government campaign in Matabeleland in the 1980s, when an estimated 20,000 civilians were killed (CCJP 1997). Whether these resonances were deliberate or not, it is clear that many victims felt that they were the tsvina (literally, dirt, filth, human waste) that was to be cleared out.¹⁴

This attitude was not surprising given that Police Commissioner Chihuri reportedly said the purpose of the operation was ‘to clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy’.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, Deputy Minister Chihota (Industry and International Trade) told Parliament that the ‘thousands of refugees spawned by “Operation Murambatsvina” without rural homes to go to were not “indigenous”'.Footnote ¹⁶ Noting the efforts that were made to relocate some newly homeless urban communities to rural areas (Potts 2006a: 279–80; Potts, forthcoming), many interpreted the operation as an attempt by the ruling party to further marginalize largely opposition-voting urban populationsFootnote ¹⁷ – an ongoing process of political exclusion best exemplified by President Mugabe's well-known denigration of the people of Mbare as ‘people without totems’ (Ranger Reference Ranger2004a; Mujere Reference Mujere2007: 13).Footnote ¹⁸ Suggestions were also made that the exercise was a Maoist attempt to engineer a rural revolution,Footnote ¹⁹ effecting demographic manipulation by ‘returning’ troublesome urban people to rural areas under the closer political supervision of ‘traditional authorities’ allied to the ruling party.Footnote ²⁰ Other rumours suggested that if the aim was to force urban people into rural areas, it was to supply labour for resettled farms in order to bolster the faltering land reform exercise, particularly in the context of drought and dramatic food shortages.Footnote ²¹ In May 2006, long after the operation's ‘official’ end, one middle-aged vegetable vendor at a Harare shopping centre told me how a few days previously she had been arrested during a police raid,Footnote ²² and, instead of being fined or imprisoned, she and others were sent to labour on a farm belonging to Vice-President Mujuru.Footnote ²³ She described the two days and one night they spent working there, ‘harvesting for their families, but they don't even think about our families. What can we do for our families?… Surely God will punish them for that!’ (Notes, 2 June 2006).

The experience of the tsunami as a brutal demonstration of ZANU PF's ability to deploy ‘state power’ arbitrarily (sometimes, as above, in the personal interests of particular individuals) also derived from the apparently selective manner in which the operation was executed in different urban areas, and the fact that, in some well-reported cases, it was licensed street vendors, formal housing cooperatives and other declared structures, alongside their illegal counterparts, which were affected.Footnote ²⁴ Such cases intensified the aura of uncertainty that surrounded the operation, but did not lessen its demonstrative affects. The examples of legalized peri-urban settlements like Epworth, and ‘squatter camps’ where previous government programmes had resettled people moved from illegal sites within the city (Hatcliffe Extension and Porta Farm), as well as formal housing cooperatives run by churches and, in some cases, war-veteran groups (Tongogara Park on White Cliff Farm), which also fell foul of the operation, exacerbated both the uncertainty and the sense of the arbitrariness of the exercise (Potts Reference Potts2006a: 282).²⁵

The manner in which the exercise was carried out differently in low-, medium- and high-density residential areas of Harare also reinforced the experience of the tsunami as a display of force by the ruling party against urban areas where opposition to the ruling party was most significant. Talking to a young man in Chitungwiza, I described how my friend Tanaka had needlessly destroyed two of his houses before the ten-day reprieve for low-density areas was announced.Footnote ²⁶ He responded:

The young man's response verbalized a common, and probably justified, perspective that it was poorer, high-density townships (like Mbare and Chitungwiza), peri-urban settlements (like Epworth) and ‘squatter’ settlements (like Hatcliffe Extension and Porta Farm) that were the main target of the operation (Potts Reference Potts2006a: 286).Footnote ²⁷ Certainly the worst cases of police brutality, mass arrests and the use of overwhelming force occurred in these areas. This reinforced common perceptions that the exercise was a form of punishment for urban voters who had overwhelmingly voted against the ruling party in the parliamentary elections of March that year, an opinion that was voiced by MDC MP Paul Themba-Nyathi.²⁸

The young man's comments about the reputation of communities in Mbare and other poorer townships probably do, partly, explain why more extreme force was used in those areas. But a related point is the trajectory of the crisis itself. In May, when the tsunami first hit the townships, it was met with relatively fierce resistance in the form of riots and public demonstrations. On 23 May 2005 a ZUPCO bus was stoned, and a policeman seriously injured in riots in St Mary's suburb of Chitungwiza, and another eleven officers were hurt when police ‘stormed Chigovanyika Shopping Centre’.Footnote ²⁹ On the same day, the ‘Army [was] put on alert as fears of civil unrest mount’, and police ‘set up makeshift camps in the city's low income suburbs such as Highfields, Glen View and Dzivarasekwa’.Footnote ³⁰ The next day in Glen Norah ‘tensions were at a knife edge’ after flea markets were destroyed, and the streets were being patrolled by ‘heavily armed police’.Footnote ³¹ At the same time the operation spread to other cities including Bulawayo, Kadoma, Nyazura, Odzi, RusapeFootnote ³² and later Mutare.Footnote ³³ By Friday 27 May 2005, ‘anti-riot police stormed Mbare’ sparking ‘a violent response from informal traders who quickly ganged up against the police and overpowered them’.Footnote ³⁴ On the same day, Police Commissioner Chihuri warned ‘any miscreants within our society who may wish to show their discontent against the current clean up operations to stop the day dream forthwith as the ZRP [police] has adequate resources to ensure that peace and tranquillity prevail’.Footnote ³⁵ By 31 May 2005 an IRIN report (2005) estimated that around 20,000 people had been arrested.

These angry outbreaks of rioting and the heavy police responses led to suggestions that the aim of the operation was, as MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai put it, ‘to provoke urban residents into resisting the brutal campaign as an excuse to declare a State of Emergency’.Footnote ³⁶ As often seems to happen,Footnote ³⁷ there were also predictions that the operation might provoke a popular uprising that would finally force dramatic political change.Footnote ³⁸ But these predictions were premature, and the initial riots did not lead to a ‘state of emergency’.Footnote ³⁹ Heavily reinforced police ensured that, within a few weeks, images of rioting were replaced by much more depressing images of resigned residents dismantling their own houses well in advance of the arrival of police and council officials (Notes, 16 June 2005). Yet after the riots subsided, new forms of ‘resistance’ did seem to emerge, as rumours spread about residents deploying witchcraft to exact revenge on the officials and police. In Chitungwiza I heard a story of a bulldozer driver targeted with witchcraft by an angry resident: the driver, so the story went, was found frozen, hands stuck fast to the steering wheel of his machine (Notes, 16 June 2005). Another story told of a bewitched man, perhaps a soldier or a policeman, who ‘accidentally’ shot himself.Footnote ⁴⁰ The extent to which such more subtle forms of subterfuge, or even ‘everyday’ resistance (Scott Reference Scott1985 and 1990), were actually deployed are, of course, hard to fathom, but such stories do illustrate how people tried to respond to and make sense of the unexpectedness of Operation Murambatsvina as it unfolded.⁴¹

Such stories were often told in conversations as people questioned why police and other officials were carrying out orders, as if they and their relatives were not also affected by the very same operation (Notes, 16 June 2005). This incongruence was the cause of considerable anxiety and uncertainty among many people I spoke to in Chitungwiza, Hatfield and Masvingo. Stories about war veterans also being targeted by the clearances reinforced this sense of uncertainty,Footnote ⁴² and for quite a long period public denials by Comrade Chinx (a well-known musician/war veteran and government ‘praise singer’) that his own house had been destroyed in the operation whilst he continued to sing the government's praises, were the subject of jokes amongst people in both high- and low-density areas in Harare.⁴³

PLANNING

Narratives which illustrate how Operation Murambatsvina was often experienced as a brutal demonstration of ‘state power’, are repeated across the broad array of NGO reports published since the events, which understandably focus most attention upon its dreadful humanitarian effects. Such reports often emphasize the apparently unplanned spontaneity of Operation Murambatsvina in order to stress the unpredictable, ‘tyrannical’ nature of the Zimbabwean state. After ‘perhaps falling back in horror at what they have done’ (Ndlovu Reference Ndlovu2005), the sudden announcement of Operation Garikai,Footnote ⁴⁴ at the same time as UN envoy Tibaijuka arrived to assess Murambatsvina, was perceived with particular scepticism. As my friend Tanaka put it ‘Operation Garikai? There is no such thing!’ Independent media reports highlighted the impossibly ambitious targets of Garikai, particularly given the dire economic situation and the fact that no budget allocation had been set aside to fund the ‘$1 trillion facility availed by the government’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This lack of fiscal planning, in particular, was used to illustrate the ‘unplanned’, random nature of the whole exercise, whilst predictions that the huge unbudgeted expenditure would worsen the economy were used to illustrate the irresponsible incompetence of the government.⁴⁶

But fiscal discipline aside, the situation was not quite as simple as is often made out by the normal voices of opposition; official pronouncements about the aim to ‘restore order’ were not just an empty façade; official appeals to a ‘reassertion of planning’ did have important, if varying, resonances for people across Zimbabwe's urban areas, alongside the demonstration of power. Of course these resonances differed across Zimbabwe's hugely divergent urban populations.Footnote ⁴⁷ A growing body of literature indicates the deep historical complexity of differing, overlapping and entangled African urban imaginaries, aspirations, and notions of respectability, traversing divisions of class, age, gender, religion and political allegiance (whether to differing nationalist or labour movements pre-independence, or opposed political parties since 1980) across urban Zimbabwe (cf. Raftopoulos and Yoshikuni Reference Raftopoulos and Yoshikuni1999; Scarnecchia Reference Scarnecchia, Raftopoulos and Yoshikuni1999; West Reference McGregor2002; Barnes Reference Barnes1999; Yoshikuni Reference Yoshikuni2007; Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006; Ranger Reference Ranger2004b; Ranger Reference Ranger2008). Nevertheless, official appeals to ‘order’ and ‘planning’ did hold resonances for people across many of these social divides; they certainly did amongst both poorer and wealthier residents of high-density Chitungwiza and low-density Hatfield with whom I spoke, regardless of whether they actually approved of the operation, which most, understandably, did not. The point is that official appeals to ‘planning’ were recognizable to people in these different urban areas, particular those who lived in, rented or owned backward ‘cottages’, who were numerically probably the most affected by the operation, particularly in Harare's townships (Potts Reference Potts2006a: 284).⁴⁸

This recognition of official appeals to planning was perhaps best reflected in how people everywhere – in both Hatfield and Chitungwiza at the very least – were to be seen dusting off old planning documents, or newly applying to regularize buildings, or discussing the finer details of what constituted a ‘temporary’, ‘permanent’ or ‘illegal’ structure.Footnote ⁴⁹ This sometimes triggered memories and comparisons with earlier ‘slum clearances’ and past (colonial and post-colonial) periods when enforcement of planning regulations had been much more stringent (particularly in high-density areas) than in the intervening period of the late 1990s (Notes, 16 June 2005). At one household in Waterfalls a group of middle-aged people spent much of the day discussing the tsunami:

Although these people, like Tanaka and many others in low-density areas, were in no way the worst affected, even for them the operation provoked considerable anxiety which manifested itself in remarkably minuscule and detailed conversations about what constituted an ‘illegal structure’. Yet despite these people's worries and concerns, there was also broad agreement that in principle Operation Murambatsvina was a good thing.

The sentiment that the principles behind Operation Murambatsvina were beneficial, and that it was making the streets cleaner and safer, was one that I heard frequently both in Harare's low-density southern suburbs, and in high-density areas like Chitungwiza. This was particularly the case in the early weeks of the operation, when informal markets in the city centre were the main target. Initially, many people across Harare seemed to agree with the views of government officials. According to Phillip Chidavaenzi, ‘when the authorities in Harare … launched an unprecedented clean-up campaign – presumably meant to restore order in the former “Sunshine City” – residents at first welcomed the manoeuvre, until it assumed a sinister dimension that has led people to revise the true motive behind the campaign’.Footnote ⁵⁰ If the clearances of Harare's CBD areas elicited initial feelings of support from many, for people directly affected in Hatfield, Chitungwiza and elsewhere whom I spoke to, these sentiments changed when the operation began to target ‘illegal structures’ in residential areas.⁵¹

Unsurprisingly, government newspapers highlighted the benefits of the operation. On the 22 June 2005, The Herald reported that criminal activities in Harare's CBD had fallen by 16 per cent in the previous month.Footnote ⁵² And the Daily Mirror commented that ‘the city council deserves a pat on the shoulder. The once filthy and unkempt city is on the path of retaining its status as the “sunshine city” within a short and a hectic period of clean up’.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, for the Sunday Mail ‘positive results have begun to emerge with the restoration of orderliness in the major urban centres which had become havens of lawlessness in the past few years’, and ‘although there are divergent views over the manner in which the operation is being carried out and although many people have lost their homes, the ultimate goal of the exercise has been widely accepted as noble’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, despite shrill suggestions that the operation had split the ruling party, many ZANU PF politicians publicly indicated their support for the exercise.⁵⁵

Letters in the government press also indicated how the operation could appeal to the particular concerns of different urban residents. One ‘concerned citizen’ in the capital ‘hailed the City of Harare and the ZRP for … making Harare look like what it used to be’ and in particular, for ‘restricting commuter omnibuses to designated areas’ as ‘those people’ were a ‘menace’ and ‘a law unto themselves’ in the city centre. He/she also urged the council to extend the operation to ‘timely and regular removal of garbage from residential areas’ and expressed concern about the ‘very unsightly’ rubble from demolished ‘illegal structures’.Footnote ⁵⁶ On 22 June 2005, the Bulawayo Chronicle published similar letters of support. One applauded the ‘clean up campaign against illegal housing co-operatives which were building houses without approval’, adding that ‘of special concern’ was the common occurrence of private developers speculating on housing stands, thereby raising prices in a way which was ‘tantamount to daylight robbery’. Another letter, signed ‘Homeless’, commended the government's commitment ‘to restoring order in cities’, but also highlighted the plight of civil servants and teachers made homeless by the demolitions, urging the authorities to ‘allow school development committees in urban areas to build houses for teachers like their counterparts in rural areas’. Another Bulawayo resident was ‘amazed to see the black market raising its ugly head again at Renkini long distance bus terminus’, blaming retailers for promoting the ‘barbaric’ black market by selling sugar in 20kg lots ‘using the back door’.

Of course, such letters in the government press are not necessarily representative of the broader public mood, and it seems unlikely that simplistic statements of open support for the operation were widely appreciated by the newly destitute across high-density and peri-urban areas in the country, or the many, such as Tanaka, who lost a vital source of income through the destruction of rent-raising backyard shacks (Potts Reference Potts2006a: 286 and 288).Footnote ⁵⁷ Nevertheless, my own encounters in Chitungwiza, Hatfield and Masvingo do suggest that some of the diversity of issues raised by such letters – such as the conduct of commuter minibuses, the vagaries of the black market, and the lack of housing for teachers – do resonate intimately with the daily trials and tribulations of many ordinary urban residents across high- and low-density areas, including, perhaps more so, those directly affected by the tsunami in poorer areas dominated by the working and informally employed classes, for whom these particular complaints have much more daily salience than for the wealth-cushioned residents of Harare's northern suburbs. Indeed the issues raised by letters in this vein illustrate how official justifications for the operation could be commensurable with the experiences and aspirations of the poorer, higher-density residents most affected by it. As has become much clearer recently, amid rapidly declining basic public services – and particularly, for example, in the rising numbers of cholera deaths in high-density areas due to massively deteriorating water and sewerage systemsFootnote ⁵⁸ – the poor often have much more at stake in issues of service provision, urban planning and ‘order’ to which official justifications of Murambatsvina appealed, than do the wealthier residents of low-density areas. In August 2008, one long-term resident of Chitungwisa even lamented that Operation Murambatsvina had not delivered on its official promises, as that might have helped prevent rising cholera deaths.⁵⁹

For many older residents the tsunami triggered memories of past evictions and ‘slum clearances’ carried out by the Rhodesian government in Mufakose and other high-density areas in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One old woman, a former resident of Mufakose now living in Hatfield, described how ‘this is not new for us, it happened to us when we were young in Mufakose, in our father's house’, stressing that ‘it was good because the streets were clean, and they built markets for people to sell their things’ (Notes, 16 June 2005). Often the tsunami also invoked memories of a later, post-independence period of enforcement of urban planning regulations, before the late 1990s heralded increasing official tolerance towards the ‘informalization of the economy and environment’ (Potts Reference Potts2006a: 287). For one mupostori (member of the apostolic church) living in Unit H in Chitungwiza, the operation rekindled positive memories of the early 1990s, when the council demolished older housing in the area and replaced it with new, affordable ‘rent to buy’ core houses, which residents were then permitted to extend, subject to compliance with planning regulations.⁶⁰

Such accounts mirror those academic analyses (Potts Reference Potts2006a and Reference Potts, Myers and Murray2006b; Dorman Reference Dorman2007; Mlambo Reference Mlambo and Vambe2008) that have considered Murambatsvina in terms of a longer durée of Zimbabwean urban history, indicating that in many respects the exercise was not particularly novel in either form or manner, however unprecedented in terms of ‘scale and thoroughness’ (Potts Reference Potts2006a: 276, fn. 14) it clearly was.Footnote ⁶¹ As Potts (Reference Potts2006a: 284) has pointed out, Zimbabwe was in many ways exceptional across sub-Saharan Africa in that a very small percentage of its urban population lived in the ‘slums’ common to cities in other developing countries. The reason for this, Potts explains,

Such a longer, historical view reiterates that in many ways Operation Murambatsvina was not unprecedented. Such historical precedents explain how the government's appeals to order and planning could be salient and recognizable to many people in both high- and low-density areas. If Murambatsvina ‘did not represent a true change of commitment to “order” by many in the government’ (Potts Reference Potts2006a: 276 fn 14), neither was that commitment to ‘order’ unrecognizable to the widespread urban populations which the operation directly or indirectly affected.Footnote ⁶² Therefore, while firmly castigating ZANU PF incompetence (besides any political motives), Punungwe of the independent The Standard acknowledged the operation ‘may have had good intentions’.Footnote ⁶³ Even Bill Saidi, veteran journalist and former editor of the banned Daily News, acknowledged that while the ‘orgy of destruction’ demonstrated that ‘the most illegal structure today is the government’, in principle ‘the clean up of central business district made eminent sense’ as ‘Harare had become a veritable dump’.⁶⁴

Regardless, then, of the extent to which the government was able to persuasively expound the legitimacy of its intentions,Footnote ⁶⁵ the logic of ‘restoring order’ and formal planning was recognizable and salient to many victims of the campaign, resonating both with varying, well-engrained, older aspirations to respectability and propriety (cf. Scarnecchia Reference Scarnecchia, Raftopoulos and Yoshikuni1999; West Reference McGregor2002; Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006), and memories of past ‘slum clearances’ and more stringent enforcement of planning regulations (Potts Reference Potts2006a and Reference Potts, Myers and Murray2006b; Dorman Reference Yoshikuni2007; Mlambo Reference Mlambo and Vambe2008). Otherwise, the images of people dusting off old planning documents or minutely discussing past evictions, or what constitutes an illegal structure, would not make any sense at all. Moreover, the effect of this ‘planning’ aspect of the operation was reflected in the common sight of people destroying their own ‘illegal structures’ ahead of the arrival of council officials; in anticipation of the tsunami. Most of all, the point is made simply by the fact that in many areas ruined backyard shacks, tuckshops and other demolished ‘illegal’ structures have been neither rebuilt nor repaired.Footnote ⁶⁶ With the exception of the ‘resilient urbanites’ of Mbare and Highfields, whom Mujere observed beginning to reconstruct shacks in late 2007 for want of income or shelter (Mujere Reference Mujere2007: 16), and notwithstanding dramatic shortages in financing and materials, few people, I suspect, would be likely to simply rebuild expensive backyard cottages unless they could do so with the sense of security that being ‘on a plan’ offers.

It seems Chombo's warnings to ‘observe proper development procedures’ have been taken seriously.Footnote ⁶⁷ Of course, in the absence of formal employment, black market activities re-emerged almost immediately (Bratton and Masunungure 2006: 38), but, apart from the few traders allocated stands in rebuilt council markets,Footnote ⁶⁸ most have continued ‘playing hide and seek with municipal police’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Both news reports later in the year,Footnote ⁷⁰ and the account of the unfortunate vendor forced to labour on a vice-presidential farm, illustrate that the operation was ‘not a once-off exercise but a sustained’ effort, as Sekesai Makwavarara had indeed warned in her opening announcement of the operation on 19 May.Footnote ⁷¹ Evidently, the exercise was not just, in Chombo's words, a ‘political gimmick’ and the government was indeed, ‘serious in what it says’.⁷²

RUMOURS AND UNCERTAINTY

If Operation Murambatsvina was experienced in terms of a tension between the resonances of official appeals to ‘planning’ and its demonstration of ZANU PF's ability to deploy ‘state power’ ruthlessly, and as it chose, then perhaps it was the ambiguity and uncertainty provoked by this ‘tension’ which resulted in the extraordinary range of explanations, ‘hidden’ agendas and rumours which were circulating at that time. I have already mentioned some of these – that the initial operation was a means of emptying the city-centre streets and neutralizing a possible eruption of public discontent at worsening economic hardships; or a form of punishment against urban opposition supporters; or a means of electoral manipulation by forcing dramatic demographic change. Other suggestions included that the operation was the result of internal power struggles within the ruling party; or a means of overcoming labour shortages on resettled farms; or a means of centralizing power over urban areas and bypassing troublesome but elected urban councils (Ndlovu Reference Ndlovu2005). Other speculations focused on how the clearances affected war-veteran-led housing projects, suggesting that the aim was to ‘clip the wings’ of troublesome veterans, whose political uses as violent campaigners had been surpassed by the new availability of the youth militia.Footnote ⁷³ Others focused on economic reasons: that the clearances of flea markets and street vendors were about reasserting central government (and ZANU PF) influence over the burgeoning, non-tax-paying informal economy. Rumours circulated that the operation derived from the growing ambitions of the Reserve Bank and ZIMRAFootnote ⁷⁴ to exert more control over black market trading in scarce foreign currency. Rumours also later emerged about Operation Garikai: that new housing projects replacing demolished homes opened up new forms of political patronage to be exploited by the ruling party.⁷⁵

Of course, discussion of ‘rumours’ and ‘hidden agendas’ provokes a somewhat circular scenario; uncertainty about the intentions behind the operation may have been reflected in this plethora of rumours, but the barrage of different, conflicting rumours must have simultaneously reinforced the sense of ambiguity, uncertainty and anxiety about what the purpose of the tsunami was. The array of differing official explanations may have contributed to the plethora of rumours about the possible ‘hidden’ political agendas behind the operation.Footnote ⁷⁶ But these varying official explanations did tend to emphasize those aspects of the operation which could resonate with memories of past clearances and differing aspirations to respectability, as well as the more immediate, daily tribulations of urban residents.⁷⁷

This occasional congruence of appeal, and the fact that many rumours engaged finely with, even as they twisted, official explanations, suggest it is probably mistaken to make a clear distinction between ‘official reasons’ for the operation and an alternative, rumour-based discourse of ‘hidden’ political agendas. Rather, it is precisely in the tension between official reasons and ‘hidden’ agendas – the tension between the demonstration of state power, and the resonances of official appeals to ‘order’ – that the political advantages for the ruling elite become most apparent. This is not to suggest that there was necessarily a ‘master plan’ to promote this ambiguous uncertainty.Footnote ⁷⁸ Rather, I suspect that what actually happened is that the way the tsunami manifested itself in particular places and moments was a function of the complex multiplicity of different agendas located at different points in council, government and ruling party hierarchies. In other words, for some bashing troublesome war vets was important, for others punishing MDC voters or preventing a threatening public outpouring of discontent took priority, while for frustrated council planners the opportunity to reinforce bye-laws was too good to miss, ZIMRA officials saw a chance to raise scarce foreign currency, and so on.

The point here is not to uncover the multiple or ‘real’ origins of the operation but to explore the political affects of the way it was experienced. Key to this is separating intention from political affect. The tension between the resonances of official appeals to planning and the spectacle of state power deployed at ZANU PF's whim was not necessarily the result of any particular intentions.Footnote ⁷⁹ In order to elaborate what I mean, I turn briefly to a master writer on political affect, Achilles Mbembe. In On the Postcolony, Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2001) discusses the way in which the vulgar excesses of ruling elites in Cameroon are represented and satirized in newspaper cartoons. Mbembe questions the extent to which such satire, and the laughter it can provoke, really represents a ‘speaking back’ to power or a form of ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott Reference Scott1985 and 1990). In his words,

This is, as reviewers have noted, a profoundly pessimistic view, which deploys something akin to Bakhtin's carnivalesque ‘baroque practices’ yet rejects any notion of ‘subalternity as resistance’, favouring instead a vision of all encompassing power in order to explain the ‘African potentate's long tenure’ (Adeeko Reference Adeeko2002; Weate Reference Weate2003: 36). For Mbembe, post-coloniality is better understood not as a relationship of resistance or of collaboration, but as one of ‘conviviality’, which inscribes ‘the dominant and the dominated within the same episteme’ (Mbembe Reference Dean, Hansen and Stepputat2001: 110). As some commentators have noted, this is a distinctly Hegelian scheme (Adeeko Reference Adeeko2002), yet the importance of Mbembe's approach lies in its ‘hybrid amalgam of poststructuralist semiotics and existential phenomenology’, aligned ‘at some point between concrete lived experience and economies of the sign’ (Weate Reference Weate2003: 28–9). For Mbembe, the satirical cartoons that attempt to ridicule and thus debase the vulgar excesses of the political elite are ‘an integral part of the stylistics of power’ (2001: 115) which do not check the power of the ‘elite’ so much as reinforce their omnipotent presence. What I want to suggest, therefore, is that the plethora of rumours – what Ellis (1989) called ‘pavement radio’ – which circulated on the streets and sometimes in newspapers, about the ‘true’ intentions and ‘hidden’ political agendas that lay behind Operation Murambatsvina act in a way similar to Mbembe's cartoons, reinforcing the omnipotent presence of the ruling party elite, and its ability to deploy devastating ‘state power’ at will. While White's Speaking With Vampires (2000: 312) showed how ‘stories and rumours … mark ways to talk about conflicts and contradictions that gave them meaning and power’, Mbembe's text points the way towards ‘recontextualizing’ rumour ‘as a quasi-material substance, as a hinge between the world of concepts and the world of bodily experience’ (Weate Reference Weate2003: 40). Rumours then, like cartoons, not only carry or reveal a complexity of meanings; they can have duplicitous political affects. In this sense, the popular dubbing of Operation Murambatsvina as Zimbabwe's tsunami not only reflects attempts to make sense of its perceived arbitrariness in terms which resonate internationally, and subvert official justifications for the operation; it also simultaneously reifies the very powerful presence of the ruling party and its ability to deploy force ruthlessly, as it chooses.⁸⁰

But although there is something important in Mbembe's argument about the way cartoons, and in this case rumours, are part of the ‘stylistics of power’,Footnote ⁸¹ I am also suspicious of the pessimism of Mbembe's motif of ‘all encompassing power’. Official justifications for Operation Murambatsvina did resonate with some people's sensibilities about good governance – and a bureaucratically functional ‘state’ – even if those same people did not necessarily approve of the operation. Such sensibilities do matter to the ruling party. Officials were keen to demonstrate the benign and ‘proper’ motives that lay behind the operation, even as ZANU PF, no doubt, absorbed the political advantages of demonstrating, again, its ability to deploy ruthless ‘state power’ as it chooses. That is surely why the government welcomed and facilitated the UN special envoy's visit to assess the impact of the operation.Footnote ⁸² And when her report (Tibaijuka Reference Tibaijuka2005) fiercely denigrated it, the government responded by publishing an extremely lengthy, step-by-step refutation of the UN's findings (Government of Zimbabwe 2005). In sum, while the ‘spectacle’ of the violence of the clearances suited ZANU PF in terms of Mbembe's ‘stylistics of power’ (as a reification of its omni-powerful presence), the government also craved a kind of legitimacy which manifested itself in its attempts to appeal to (some) people's aspirations towards good governance and a functioning, bureaucratic state. And it is for this reason that the ambiguity and uncertainty of the tension between ‘luck and planning’, the demonstration of force and the resonances of official appeals to the restoration of ‘order’, were of such political advantage to the ruling party.

In many ways, what I am describing here is not unique to post-colonial Zimbabwe; indeed my theoretical framework is part of a broader trend in political anthropology which has explored the interplay of Foucauldian and Gramscian notions of power and hegemony, governance and sovereignty; the role of political affect (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004); and the importance of the margins in the ongoing process of the construction of the state (Hansen and Steputtat Reference Hansen and Steputtat2001; Tsing Reference Tsing1994; Das and Poole Reference Asad, Das and Poole2004). In her fascinating analysis of ‘state rituals’, ‘public statism’ and the production of ‘civil society’ in Turkey, Navaro-Yashin (Reference Navaro-Yashin2002: 117–54) comes to the following conclusion, which I think has significant echoes in what I have been discussing.

In many ways this ‘blurring’ of ‘spontaneity and enforcement’, between ‘repressive and productive mechanisms of power’, mirrors the ambiguity and uncertainty of the tension between a display of force and the appeal to ‘planning’ that I have focused on here. But one last issue still needs to be resolved. If this very tension was of such political advantage to the ruling elite, as ‘the blurred zone’ where ‘power so effectively operates’, what is left of ‘resistance’ and ‘agency’? Does this analysis not merely repeat or indeed further reinforce Mbembe's bleak picture of ‘all encompassing power’? I am not comfortable with that image. If rumours are the site of the reinforcement of a particular mechanism of ‘state power’, if rumours that seek to subvert or reveal the truth behind official representations actually duplicitously and treacherously reify the omnipotent presence they seek to undermine, then surely this can work both ways. There must always remain the possibility that rumours can subvert the other, ‘productive aspect of power’, which appeals to or resonates with some people's aspirations to good governance and a functioning state. The Zimbabwean government was very keen to demonstrate the legitimacy of its intentions, and there were indications of official uneasiness at some of the rumours circulating about the ‘hidden agendas’ behind the operation. This was perhaps best revealed by another rumour circulating in June 2005 – that one could be arrested for referring to Murambatsvina as the tsunami. One man was allegedly ‘beaten and left for dead by five soldiers’ for exactly that.Footnote ⁸³ Later, similar rumours emerged that a common derogatory reference to poor-quality Chinese goods (which have in recent years littered Zimbabwean markets) as zhingzhong was also an arrestable offence.Footnote ⁸⁴ Of course the existence of such ‘counter-rumours’ can be taken to demonstrate not only the insecurity of officials, but also, again, a kind of reinforcement of ZANU PF's powerful presence. In a way, the circular nature of this argument in itself represents exactly the ambiguous nature of rumours that I am highlighting.

The issue of mazhingzhong leads me to a final rumour about the ‘hidden’ political intentions behind Operation Murambatsvina, which I have not yet mentioned. According to this rumour, the attack upon informal traders was ‘nothing but a shameless attempt by the government to protect Chinese traders’, who had allegedly ‘complained to President Mugabe that the flea markets were taking away a huge chunk of their business’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Morgan Tsvangirai, MDC leader, reportedly said ‘the country has been mortgaged to the Chinese … how can we violently remove Zimbabweans from our flea markets to make way for the Chinese? The majority of Zimbabweans depend on informal trade to feed, clothe, and educate their families’.Footnote ⁸⁶ With the high profile being given at that particular moment to the government's ‘Look East Policy’ as a means of solving Zimbabwe's fiscal crisis,Footnote ⁸⁷ it is not surprising that widespread, popular references to Chinese products as mazhingzhong were not well appreciated, particularly given the disturbing racial undertones of some such references.⁸⁸

Indeed, of all the rumours that I have discussed, the suggestion that the ‘real’ intention of the clearances was to ‘make space’ in local markets for Chinese traders had perhaps the greatest potential to provoke official uneasiness, because it strikes so hard at the core of what Ranka Primorac (2005: 2) has called Zimbabwe's ‘whole, coherent and self-perpetuating’ post-colonial ‘master fiction’, in which the ruling party, war veterans and particularly President Mugabe himself are represented as the heroic defenders of Zimbabwean sovereignty against foreign interference and neo-colonialism (see also Ranger 2004a). The subversive potential of this rumour is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that, a year later, public anger at the effects of unfettered Chinese trade in Zimbabwe (and the poor quality of some Chinese imports) had reached such a crescendo that ZANU PF's politburo had to take note. As one politburo member put it, ‘although the Chinese are our friends, they are making the people hate the government’.Footnote ⁸⁹ ZANU PF's newspaper, The Voice, reported that Vice-President Mujuru informed the politburo that ‘all Chinese deals would now have to be “evaluated”'.Footnote ⁹⁰ Clearly, the idea that the government was ‘selling out’ to the Chinese was far too disconcerting to be simply ignored, and the ‘counter-rumour’ that one could be arrested for making such derogatory remarks was more than simply ‘an integral part of the stylistics of power’ as Mbembe's analysis might have us think. Rather, I suggest, it reflected genuine concern about the threat posed by this rumour.

Back in July 2005, intrigued by the idea that police might be arresting people for referring to Chinese goods as mazhingzhong (which was extremely common), I took an opportunity one Friday, when my car broke down in central Harare, to see if there was any truth in it (Notes, 16 July 2005). Faulty part in hand, I arrived at the auto repair shop to find a policeman involved in a light-hearted conversation with a shop attendant. Complaining about having to report for duty, he exclaimed that ‘It is a nuisance having to do these roadblocks every day!’ Sensing the jovial mood, I joked in Shona, ‘So even the police get bored with roadblocks, because they really trouble us!’ The policeman laughed and then asked why I had come into the shop. I explained I had come to replace a faulty part for my car: ‘I was sold this condenser but it doesn't work. I was sold this zhingzhong.’ Laughing at my audacity, the policemen warned: ‘You could be arrested for saying that!’ Pushing the point, I asked, ‘Are you going to arrest me now?’ It was all a joke and I was not arrested, but I did not push the matter further, sensing I might have reached the boundary.

Later I reflected on this event. Contrary to another less jovial moment at a roadblock a few weeks earlier (Notes, 6 July 2005), when an angry policeman handed my companion an on-the-spot fine for ‘being uncooperative’, the policeman in the shop seemed to have been in a good mood. The comparison of these events illustrates perfectly the larger argument of Das and Poole's book (2004), that ‘the entirety of the state is a margin’ (Asad Reference Ranger2004: 287), and that it is exactly on these all-pervasive but necessarily ambiguous and uncertain ‘margins’ that unstable ‘state power’ has constantly to be re-established. The incident with the jovial policeman in the shop laughing at my reference to zhingzhong suggests that if the rumours that circulated about Operation Murambatsvina are an example of the constant re-making of ‘stateness’ on the margins, then not only can the uncertain ambiguity of such rumours reinforce the omnipotent presence of the ‘arbitrary’ ‘state power’ available to a ruling elite, but they can also illustrate the omnipresence of its fundamental insecurity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Sara Dorman, Ranka Primorac, the anonymous reviewers, and those who attended the BZS Research Day in Oxford in June 2007 for all their comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank my much-missed colleague Charles Jedrej, who commented on early drafts but sadly passed away before this was published. Thanks also to the British Academy, and to the Munro, Hayter and Tweedie committees at Edinburgh, all of whom provided funding for different periods of this research. Finally, I would also like to thank my informants, particularly those from Chitungwiza, Hatfield and Mucheke (Masvingo), whose names have been changed for obvious reasons.