Browsing by Author "Mvundura, Wellington"

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Memory and violence: Displaced Zimbabwean rural communities reliving the memories of the March 2008 political violence.
(2014-08-26) Mvundura, Wellington
This thesis is premised on the argument that a distinct kind of narrative (‘truth’) about political violence, a narrative of the first-person experience, a narrative that is valued for its power to counter totalising historical narratives, is thought to reside in the subjective experience of each individual. Be that as it may, this study aimed to answer the question: What meanings do rural Zimbabweans who were internally displaced by the March 2008 state-sponsored political violence attach to this violence? In particular, the study investigated these meanings in a context where the victims remain(ed) in close proximity to the perpetrators during and after the violence. It also examined these meanings in an alleged silence by the state and local communities, and how these meanings have shaped the victims’ present socio-political identities. In order to answer the question, in-depth narrative interviews were conducted with purposively selected respondents. The study assumed a qualitative exploratory design which was underpinned by the phenomenological and constructionist theoretical approaches. It was concluded that the victims’ interpretation of the state-sponsored political violence is negotiated and mediated in the course of interaction. The personal narrative of the memory attains some latent political and redemptive value when it is interpreted in a social context. The meanings of the violence particularly assume a complex moral and ethical plane in a scenario where the perpetrator remains a permanent feature in the victim’s physical and social space, without any recourse. The complexity is imminent as the victim has to contend with the socio-psychological effects of the daily direct interface with their unpunished aggressor especially due to the communal nature of rural life. It was also concluded that the 2008 state-sponsored violence was increasingly interpreted as unfinished business by the victims. More so, it was also understood to be synonymous and complicit with silence at the communal and national level. Thus, the silence was synonymous with adaptation to power relations, cultural censorship, and liminality. In terms of identity, the victims suffer an identity crisis. They have developed personalities that have arguably, failed to internalise a sense of self as trusting and trustworthy. Last, the identification of the violence as unfinished business has also led to the reaffirmation of the victims’ spiritual identities as they have invoked bewitchment to avenge the death of their loved ones and in the process try to reconnect with them spiritually by invoking their spirits to seek revenge.
Operating under the Radar: Forestry Plantation Workers Everyday Resistance in Chimanimani District, Zimbabwe
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Mvundura, Wellington; Pillay, Devan
This thesis explores and analyses the everyday forms and practices of labour resistance that rural commercial forestry plantation labour crafts to navigate a highly insecure post-colonial capitalist plantation labour process. It attends to the scholarly puzzle that in Zimbabwe, Africa, and elsewhere quotidian forms and practices of resistance are in a much less or barely empirically demonstrated and theoretically elaborated state in both resistance and labour resistance studies. This is even more pronounced in agrarian labour politics studies, yet agriculture labour constitutes a significant proportion of the overall industrial labour-force in xii Africa and elsewhere and is arguably the most easily exploitable form of wage labour. This motivated my empirical focus on commercial plantation labour. In light of evidence from Barura plantation estate, I argue that the workers may have to accept the fact of post-colonial capitalist plantation wage employment, the plantation-specific modalities of statist ethno-national citizenship, and state-sanctioned partisan national politics while contesting the terms and conditions under which these mutual systems of domination and exploitation occur. The practices do not seek to radically decompose the historical material- cum-symbolic bases of these systems of power. The everyday practices of defiance mediate the workers’ realisation of piecemeal de facto material and status gains more than the de jure recognition of those gains. My major empirical contribution is the discovery and foregrounding of the quotidian practices of subaltern groups as an integral part of politics. In a specialised and methodical manner, I re- centre the mundane everyday acts of plantation labour as workplace politics namely labour resistance. Theoretically I deploy and test the conceptual-cum-theoretical positions of seminal scholars on (everyday) resistance and modify some of these positions in light of empirical evidence. Methodologically, I break from the intention-oriented and foreground the practice- oriented approach to everyday resistance. This study is based on a continuous fourteen-month long on-site ethnography at a state-owned commercial forestry plantation. Ethnography was instrumental for the contextualised in-depth discovery and thick description of the workers’ forms, practices, and dynamics of subterranean labour resistance. It also enabled the cultivation of high levels of trust and rapport required to discover a sensitive, incriminating, and largely backstage (hidden) social phenomenon like quotidian labour resistance. For data collection I used three levels of participant observation, unstructured in-depth interviews, casual conversations, and deep hangouts.