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Social Dynamics
ISSN: 0253-3952 (Print) 1940-7874 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsdy20
Living with uncertainty: disappearing modernities
and polluted urbanity in post‐2000 Harare,
Zimbabwe
Shannon Morreira
To cite this article: Shannon Morreira (2010) Living with uncertainty: disappearing modernities
and polluted urbanity in post‐2000 Harare, Zimbabwe, Social Dynamics, 36:2, 352-365, DOI:
10.1080/02533951003790520
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533951003790520
Published online: 22 Jun 2010.
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Social Dynamics
Vol. 36, No. 2, June 2010, 352–365
ISSN 0253-3952 print/ISSN 1940-7874 online
© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/02533951003790520
http://www.informaworld.com
Living with uncertainty: disappearing modernities and polluted
urbanity in post-2000 Harare, Zimbabwe1
Shannon Morreira*
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Taylor and FrancisRSDY_A_479574.sgm10.1080/02533951003790520Social Dynamics0253-3952 (print)/1940-7874 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis3620000002010ShannonMorreirask.morreira@uct.ac.za
Most studies of Zimbabwean migration and the country’s politico-economic crisis
focus on the material aspects of these two issues. In this article, through dual-sited
ethnographic work, I illustrate the symbolisms and meanings that are entangled
within political and economic decline in urban Zimbabwe. Using data from
fieldwork in Zimbabwe and South Africa, I argue that ‘crisis’ has carried with it a
re-configuration of the meanings associated with urbanity. This leads to a
contradiction between how the state and citizens view ‘proper’ modernity. In
combination with political factors, the state’s attempts to maintain modernity have
led to a paradigm of pollution being associated with poor urbanites. This
symbolism and its correspondent reality were found to have influenced the
migration of informants in South Africa. It is thus not only economic and political
relations that are at stake in present-day Zimbabwe.
Keywords: Zimbabwe; urbanity; migration; modernity; pollution
This paper is concerned with the urban poor in Harare and with the migration of
Zimbabweans to South Africa during Zimbabwe’s current era of ongoing political
constraint and economic decline. Although the term ‘crisis’ is commonly used to
describe contemporary Zimbabwe, I use ‘constraint’ and ‘decline’, as ‘crisis’ implies
criticality and quick remedial action. In post-2000 Zimbabwe, ‘crisis’ has dragged on
for a decade, with a continual decline in both democratic freedoms and economic
possibilities, such that various politico-economic exigencies have become part of the
fabric of an increasingly constrained and uncertain daily life. I am concerned here
with the ways in which the uncertainty of ‘mazuva ano’ (‘these days’, held to be radi-
cally different from the past)2 in 2007 altered urban socio-scapes, bringing infor-
mants to question modernity and what it meant to be urban (cf. Ferguson 1999).
Further, I explore the Zimbabwean urbanite as a political category, examining the
ways in which state-based assumptions about urban dwellers have affected migration
in this period of the country’s history. While most studies of Zimbabwean migration
to South Africa focus on political-economic push factors, I am concerned with a read-
ing of symbolic ramifications. Kirsten Hastrup (1993) argues against modernist
trends within social theory that separate the material from the subjective, privileging
‘hard’ facts over ‘soft’. Discourses on Zimbabwean ‘crisis’ and migration that focus
on the quantifiable do not provide room for symbolic and emotive factors in migra-
tion. Zimbabwe’s urban poor3 have been quantifiably and symbolically targeted by
the state. During my fieldwork, a perception of decline in modernity, combined with
*Email: sk.morreira@uct.ac.za
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Social Dynamics 353
the targeting of poor urban populations, emerged as key factors in people’s decisions
to move both internally and across borders. Mobility can thus be seen as a means of
safeguarding against both the physical and the symbolic uncertainties of Zimbabwean
urban life.
The argument presented here is based upon fieldwork carried out in Harare,
Zimbabwe, and Cape Town, South Africa, between December 2006 and January
2008. The data from Harare come from participant observation in three households all
of which were attempting to ‘get by’ in conditions of severe poverty and from infor-
mal conversations and formal interviews with 30 people living in similar economic
circumstances. My snowball sampling technique cannot be said to be representative
of urban Zimbabwe in its entirety. Nevertheless, the similarity in informant responses
shows the strategies described here to be common in Harare at the time. My initial aim
in Harare was to gather data on the lived effects of structural violence in a profoundly
failing economy. Interviews and observation within Zimbabwe soon provided ample
data for this. They also indicated the ways in which informants felt themselves to be
witnessing the demise of Zimbabwean modernity, and revealed the centrality of a
state-based symbolic paradigm of dirt and pollution, specifically aimed at the urban
poor, to the possibilities and practices of daily life.
In addition, I worked with Zimbabwean undocumented migrants in Cape Town
throughout 2007 and 2008. As my research focused on migrants who were in the
country illegally (albeit attempting to remedy this by seeking asylum), the sample of
50 migrants was initially drawn from an activist group, People Against Suffering,
Suppression and Oppression (PASSOP), concerned with the rights of asylum seekers,
and thereafter through snowball techniques. Most informants were between the ages
of 20 and 30 years and all had been poor in Zimbabwe. The sample, comprising 29
men and 21 women, reflects the higher percentage of male migrants making use of
PASSOP’s services in Cape Town at the time. Data for this paper derive from oral
migration histories, focusing on those parts of migration histories that were concerned
with living in or movements to or from Zimbabwean urban areas.
Urbanity in pre- and post-2000 Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe has been an independent state since 1980, when the Zimbabwe African
National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF), came into power. Throughout the 1980s,
there were respectable economic growth rates and a corresponding increase in
incomes for most of the population, as well as a government focus on expanding social
services (Raftopoulos 2004). Migration patterns in the 1980s tended to be from rural
to urban areas. Throughout the 1980s, urban poverty decreased, and most household
heads were employed in the formal sector (Potts 2006). Urban centres, at this time,
existed within the national imagination as spaces of modernity and progress, as
symbolised by formal employment, access to government services and the availability
of commodities.
Economic growth rates fell in the early 1990s, however, and Zimbabwe came
under increasing pressure from the World Bank to implement a structural adjustment
programme (see Ferguson 2006). The Economic Structural Adjustment Program
(ESAP) was unsuccessful (Saunders 1996). Economic decline led to an increase in
urban livelihoods being based in the informal sector (Mlambo 2008) and also height-
ened the economic importance of links to rural areas (Potts 2008). Deborah Potts, who
provides a clear chronology of economic decline in Zimbabwean urban areas,
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354 S. Morreira
concludes that ‘the urban people of Zimbabwe have experienced dramatic negative
changes in their incomes, consumption patterns and livelihoods since 1990. These
accelerated in 1997 and further accelerated from 2000’ (Potts 2006, p. 547).
Urban dissatisfaction was seen as early as 1995, with food riots occurring across
the country (Holland 2008). In 1997, veterans from the Second Chimurenga (libera-
tion struggle) demanded pensions, thus presenting a challenge to the party from
within. President Robert Mugabe agreed to pay the war veterans, and the value of the
Zimbabwe dollar plunged. Economic difficulties thus predate the point which is often
considered (e.g., by Hill 2003) as the beginning of the current ‘crisis’ (Hammar and
Raftopoulos 2003, p. 1):4 namely, a referendum carried out in February 2000, where
the populace voted against changes to the constitution which would further empower
ZANU–PF.
The opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), headed by
former trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai, was formed in 1999 and quickly gained
prominence in urban areas. Since 2000, three sets of elections have been held, all of
which have been accompanied by violence, intimidation and other electoral irregular-
ities (Reeler 2001, Human Rights Watch 2006). In 2008, Zimbabwe held both
parliamentary and presidential elections. The MDC gained a majority in parliament
for the first time, but failed to secure a 50% Presidential majority, though violence and
electoral irregularities may well have contributed to this result. The constitutionally
required run-off election was marked by further political violence. Tsvangirai with-
drew from the run-off and Mugabe regained the presidency. To all intents and
purposes, ZANU–PF retained its exclusive grip on power until early 2009, when a
power sharing deal (which my informants considered to be largely illusionary, with
ZANU–PF still retaining the ‘real’ power) was brokered between ZANU–PF and the
MDC. At the time of my fieldwork in 2007, however, political power was still firmly
in ZANU–PF hands.
Following the election in 2000, it became apparent that ZANU–PF had lost its
hold on urban areas to the MDC and was supported by a largely rural constituency.
Historically, Zimbabwean urban areas were important sites of struggle. Although the
Chimurenga was largely fought in rural areas, urban centres ‘were the cradle of
African nationalism… [and were] sites of dissent, resentment and instability’ (Kamete
2006, p. 258). Power relations based largely upon ZANU–PF patronage systems have
come to predominate rural areas (Maphosa 2005). Amin Kamete (2006, p. 259) has
outlined the (largely failed) attempts made by ZANU–PF to ‘re-urbanise’ the party.
As during the Rhodesian era, the post-2000 government viewed Harare as an unruly
site that needed controlling (Kamete 2006).
The period from 2000 to the present has seen an unprecedented collapse in the
economy. Inflation rates, before the state legalised the use of foreign currency in
2009, had exceeded 100 million percent (Jones, this volume). The lived effects of
inflation were extreme. Economic conditions deteriorated rapidly across the country
and, as the formal sector could no longer support the urban populace, the informal
sector increased as a means of livelihood. Economic decline was accompanied by a
decline in access to health services and education (Harold-Barry 2004). In 2005,
Operation Murambatsvina (officially translated as ‘Restore Order’, but more accu-
rately translated as ‘clean out the filth’) destroyed thousands of homes and informal
trading areas in urban areas. Murambatsvina is widely understood, both locally and
by international rights organisations, as a way of punishing (mainly) urban people
for voting against ZANU–PF (Human Rights Watch 2005, Solidarity Peace Trust
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Social Dynamics 355
2006). Murambatsvina, however, cannot be understood as an isolated incident
against the urban population; it has its history in the need to control urban spaces
and people (Kamete 2008) and in other, less publicised coercive campaigns (Moore
2008). Although Murambatsvina was largely concentrated in urban centres, there
were also rural operations, and both MDC and ZANU supporters (as well as the
non-aligned) were targeted by the police and army. Operation Murambatsvina can
thus be read as ‘a spectacle of excess’ (Vambe 2008, p. 5) of discipline against an
unruly populace. Governmental efforts to control and discipline extend beyond polit-
ical violence (see Jones, this volume). The following exploration of modes of
economic survival in Harare in 2007 shows the ways in which constraints in urban
areas influenced internal and cross-border mobility/displacement,5 as well as the
ways in which economic decline led to a reconfiguration of the meanings associated
with urbanity.
Getting by: daily life in urban Zimbabwe, 2007
In 2006 and 2007, I travelled from Cape Town to Harare by road. The border posts
between South Africa and Zimbabwe may seem a strange place to begin an ethno-
graphic description of Harare, but the movements of people and goods I observed
there were imperative to the continuation of life in Zimbabwe’s urban areas. On the
South African side, cars and open trucks were loaded to the limit with goods,
including containers of cooking oil, rice, maize meal, canned foods, blankets and
clothing. At the border posts, and on the Zimbabwean side, the patterns of move-
ment diversified: goods went one way and large numbers of people tried to go
another. The queues of people crossing into South Africa reflected only the small
proportion of people who had managed to access documentation, and were entering
South Africa legally. As George,6 a 45-year-old informant in Harare, who was
largely reliant upon remittances sent by family members in South Africa,
commented: ‘Bob Marley’s Exodus should be our new national anthem’. The move-
ment of people out of Zimbabwe facilitated the movement of commodities back into
the country; it was Zimbabwean migrants who had paid for remitted goods and who
also sent money to kin networks at home. Their efforts should not be underesti-
mated; in 2004, the Solidarity Peace Trust reported that ‘around US$ 300 million is
returned monthly to Zimbabwe from nationals in the diaspora, 98% of this via black
market channels’ (Solidarity Peace Trust 2004, p. 7). Sarah Bracking and Lloyd
Sachikonye’s 2006 study of 300 households in Harare and Bulawayo shows that
78.4% of households in low density areas and 53.3% of households in high-density
areas of Harare received remittances in goods or money from family or friends
outside the country. Over 75% of their sample had received remittances within the
preceding month. Importantly, 61% of migrants sending remittances had left Zimba-
bwe after 2000.
Figures can seem dry (Hastrup 1993): let me demonstrate with a case study. I first
met Mai Tendai, a 47-year-old Shona woman, in a parking lot behind a shopping
centre in Harare. Seated under a tree, she beckoned me. When I had crossed the pot-
holed tarmac, she whispered: ‘So what do you need?’ I was puzzled, nervous that I
had involved myself in something illicit: the place I was in, after all, was known for
dagga (marijuana) sales. Mai Tendai, however, didn’t look the type. Dressed in a long
skirt and buttoned shirt, she was the epitome of a respectable Shona woman. She
looked like the vegetable vendors who had supplied my family with vegetables when
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356 S. Morreira
I was a child. But the tone of this transaction was entirely different. Mai Tendai was
wary, looking around, and clearly impatient with the time it was taking me to respond.
‘What do you have?’ I ventured. She reached behind her and brought out a bag of
tomatoes. ‘Only tomatoes today’. The last time I had been in Harare was before
Operation Murambatsvina. Now, two years later, I was seeing the after-effects: hidden
tomatoes and illicit vegetable deals in suburban Harare.
I came to know Mai Tendai well, and a descriptive case study of the economics of
her household is a useful way to explore survival in Harare in 2007. The strategies
described here reflect my findings in the other two households in which I spent time,
and were commonly described in interviews with 30 other informants. Though strate-
gies were not identical, I have drawn out those elements that were central to most
informants’ behaviours and narratives.
Mai Tendai grew up in a rural area, but moved to Harare with her husband in
1986. Her husband had a job as a factory worker and she supplemented their income
by selling vegetables. In 2005, while they were resident in Hatcliffe Extension, a
high-density suburb in Harare, her husband was retrenched. He began working with a
friend selling goods in a nearby market, while Mai Tendai continued to sell vegeta-
bles. In June 2005, during Operation Murambatsvina, residents in the ‘unauthorised’
neighbourhood were given orders by the police to demolish all buildings. They did
so, and thus lost their homes and livelihoods. Demolition in Hatcliffe Extension was
extreme, even by the standards of Murambatsvina; in most other areas, backyard
dwellings and informal shops were destroyed, while the main buildings were left
untouched.
All three households in which I spent time had been affected by Murambatsvina.
Of the 30 informants interviewed, 23 had been involved in the informal economy in
2005. All had lost goods in that or other police ‘crack-downs’ on the informal econ-
omy. Seven interviewees had lost their homes. Kamete (2008, p. 1722) argues that
Zimbabwean urban areas are ‘some of the most regulated urban places in the develop-
ing world’. Juxtaposing Henri Lefebvre’s (1991 [1974]) notion of the ‘lived’ city to
postcolonial ‘planned’ cities, Kamete (2008) argues that it is the poor who most often
utilise urban spaces in ways that clash with urban planners’ ideals. The decline in the
economy post-2000 had resulted in a large increase in the informal sector, and thus in
a greater perception by the state of a need for ‘order’ to be imposed on what was
perceived as ‘matter out of place’ (cf. Douglas 2002 [1966], p. 36). In the case of
Murambatsvina and subsequent violent contestations against informalisation,
however, Kamete (2006, p. 1731) argues that the primary motivation was political and
that ‘in what appears to have been an afterthought, planning was brought in to
rationalise the campaign’. I will return to this point in order to discuss the contradic-
tions between the notions of modernity propagated by the state and those utilised by
informants.
Following the loss of their home, Mai Tendai and her husband moved in with
Mai Tendai’s sister, who was employed as a domestic worker in a low-density
suburb in Harare. For ‘some weeks’ her husband looked for work, while Mai Tendai
borrowed money from her sister and began to sell vegetables again. Things were
difficult: there was little space and money was scarce. Mai Tendai’s oldest son had
been in Johannesburg since 2001. He was able to send money intermittently, but was
also supporting his own wife and child, as well as some of his wife’s kin in
Zimbabwe. In 2006, Mai Tendai’s husband managed to enter South Africa illegally.
He found work and sent money in South African Rand notes, carried illegally by
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Social Dynamics 357
agents who charged a 20% fee. It was not used for food, unless the situation was
dire, but kept for major expenses, such as illness or more commonly, school fees and
uniforms.
In 2007, the household consisted of Mai Tendai, her youngest child, her sister,
Fadzai, two of Fadzai’s children and Fadzai’s brother-in-law, Petrus. Meals in the
household consisted mainly of sadza (maize meal) with a vegetable relish. Due to
frequent power failures, most cooking took place on open fires. Municipal water too
was often unavailable; fortunately, the property on which they resided had a borehole.
A section of land was used to farm vegetables. The final source of income for the
household came from Petrus, who had begun to sell vegetables with Mai Tendai. Ten
years ago, this was seen as women’s work (see Jones 2010, Mupedziswa and Gumbo
1998), but in 2007 any work was acceptable and some gender norms crumbled under
the weight of decline.
Surviving economic collapse
The importance of social networks and mobility
Mai Tendai’s story illustrates common household dynamics in several ways. First,
kinship networks, both within the country and across borders, were essential to
survival. Access to food and money was largely centred on these networks in Mai
Tendai’s narrative, which was confirmed by other informants. Cross-border migration
of kin allowed those still in Zimbabwe to access money that could be protected from
inflation, in that foreign currency could be kept aside and changed to Zimbabwe
dollars when needed. As much of this money as possible was reserved for either
emergencies or for schooling, the latter an important marker of modernity. Only the
Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was legally allowed to trade in foreign currency, but the
government-fixed rate of exchange bore little relation to actual value7 (see Jones, this
volume) and most Zimbabweans regarded the ‘parallel’ rate as the most valid indica-
tor of value. Circular migration and cross-border trading became more common in
Zimbabwe after the implementation of ESAP (Mudzvidziwa 2001), but since 2000,
longer term migration, for the express purposes of sending remittances home, has
become more prevalent, and is undertaken by far greater numbers of migrants than
previously (Maphosa 2005).
In Harare, 25 out of 30 informants said they received remittances in cash or goods
from relatives who had moved out of the country within the last five years. Of the 50
migrants I interviewed in Cape Town, only three were not sending money to
Zimbabwe on a regular basis. In two cases this was simply because they had no
resources. When averaged to a monthly amount over six months, the 47 migrants
remitted an average of 162 South African Rands per month to between two and six
family members in Zimbabwe. All informants but one indicated that the need to
support family members via remittances had been a key factor in why they had moved
to South Africa.8
Mai Tendai was also able to access shelter through kin, and Fadzai drew on her
relationship with her employer to ensure Mai Tendai was able to stay with her. As
Fadzai commented, ‘we are all suffering together’; economic constraints, while not
affecting everyone equally, have created forms of solidarity across class lines. Class
structures, however, remained intact beneath the surface and the government targeted
the urban poor in specific ways that the wealthy were able to avoid, as I shall explore
below.
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358 S. Morreira
‘Foraging’: rural lifestyles in urban areas
A further element of Mai Tendai’s tale, common to all with whom I worked in
Zimbabwe, was food scarcity. Strategies of bartering were common in all households
I spent time in, regardless of wealth. Bartering often centred on food, and purchasing
took both this and the de-valuing effects of inflation into account. For example, one
day, while shopping with an informant, we found milk, a scarce commodity. My infor-
mant carefully counted her cash and decided to spend half of it on milk. Perishable
goods could be frozen, but frequent and long-lasting power cuts posed risks. Bartering
protected against this: of the 10 packets we bought, two were held aside for household
consumption, two were optimistically frozen and the other six were swapped for food
or given away in the knowledge that, some time later, a similar good would be
returned. Shopping was thus a strategic enterprise and was commonly described
lightly, but with an underlying sense of dismay, as ‘foraging’ or, in Shona, ‘kuvhima’
and ‘kupambara’. These terms were used not only for attempts to access food, but also
firewood and water – things that one should not have to forage for in urban or modern
areas. Classificatory systems of types of work expected in urban versus rural areas,
and even farmed versus ‘bush’ areas, had thus become confused.
For Mai Tendai, as for the other households, urban agriculture provided a major
source of food. Every household I visited in Harare, regardless of wealth, was growing
vegetables and maize. Though common in the past (Mbiba 1995), urban agriculture
had become imperative by 2007. Like informal trading, agriculture utilises urban
spaces in ways that contradict state notions of the city. Throughout the 1980s and
1990s, Zimbabwean municipalities attempted to prevent urban agriculture through the
sporadic ‘slashing’ of maize and other crops (Mbiba 1995); around the time of
Murambatsvina, this became more prevalent. Cooking on wood fires had also become
more common in urban Zimbabwe. As paraffin became more difficult to come by
and electricity provision less reliable, cooking on wood fires became a logical alterna-
tive. Access to municipal water was limited. Where residents had boreholes, water
became an exchangeable commodity. Where boreholes did not exist, water was stored
when possible. Some informants reported that there were times when water was
simply unavailable. Rivers in urban areas, though polluted, were used in times of
scarcity.9
Changing urban spaces
Changes in urban spaces post-2000 have led to conflicts between the state and citi-
zens. One result of shifting modes of survival in Harare has been that urban spaces
have become reminiscent of the rural. In Mai Tendai’s words:
When I was a girl, we would go to fetch the water, we would grow our food, we cooked
outside. Now sometimes I joke with Fadzai when we take the bucket to the borehole, we
are going to the river just like we used to. And when I’m not selling vegetables I’m look-
ing after the garden, then we’re cooking on the fire. That man [i.e. Mugabe] has made
Harare just like N____.10
Informants expressed a strong sense that urban Zimbabwe had become excluded from
modernity. ‘While the rest of the world moves on’, commented Nothando, an unem-
ployed informant, ‘we’re moving backwards all the time’. Informants’ descriptions
drew on words such as ‘stagnant’ and ‘paused’, at best, or, as in the previous quote,
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Social Dynamics 359
moving backwards or ‘eroding’. ‘Even during the Chimurenga’, said another infor-
mant, ‘things were not this bad. Mugabe doesn’t want us to know it’s the new millen-
nium. We must live like our grandparents, except we have no land’. Using urban areas
for agriculture was not condoned by the state – thus urban areas, in addition to being
perceived as no longer more modern than the rural, were also seen by informants as
more constrained than the rural. Though informants frequently asserted that Zimba-
bwe was a unique example of collapse, references to an ‘eroded’ modernity bring to
mind James Ferguson’s (1999) work on the Copperbelt of Zambia, in which he shows
that ideas of progress waned in light of economic realities as the copper market
declined.
Second, the rise in the informal sector and government attempts to police it have
resulted in a proliferation of unsafe spaces within urban areas. Kamete has shown the
attempts made by state bodies as diverse as the Harare Municipal Police, the Zimba-
bwe Republic Police (ZRP), the ZRP Police Support Unit (‘riot squad’) and the ZRP
Criminal Investigations Department to control the ‘spatial unruliness’ (Kamete 2008,
p. 1721) of informal markets. He argues that Zimbabwean planners subscribe to a
‘modernist’ ideal of the postcolonial city – in other words, one that is orderly and
formalised. Contradictions can be seen between the ideas of modernity held by state
and citizens; while informants viewed the informal economy as a pipeline to moder-
nity, the state viewed informality as unbefitting to a modern city.
Despite rapid economic decline, people experienced their lives as stagnant. A
world that is viewed simultaneously as unsafe and stagnant, where ideals of progress
have failed, creates a great degree of uncertainty. Urban areas in the 1980s were asso-
ciated with jobs in the formal market and with increased access to municipal services.
Post-2000 Harare did not offer these securities. Potts (2006) conducted four large-
scale surveys in Harare in 1985, 1988, 1994 and 2001, and found in 2001 that more
than half of respondents did not know what they were going to do in the future. This
was nearly three times as many as were uncertain in the 1990s. Jeremy Jones (2010)
argues that the situation in Zimbabwe resembles that of Cameroon in the 1990s, as
described by Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman (1995, p. 323), in which stagnation,
or what they call ‘the pause’, marks a temporal hiatus. The result is a feeling that ‘the
country is no longer part of the evolution of history’ (Jones 2010, p. 9).
The modes of survival that people employed to deal with daily exigencies led
urban informants to question the place of Harare within the trajectory of modernity.
Joyce, a vendor at an informal market commented,
Fifteen years ago, I came to Harare because it was the place of the future, where there
were jobs for women and you could get money. I didn’t want to be a girl from the home-
stead any longer! But now…now the city is no better than the rural areas, there are no
schools, we have no clothes, we have no food. Now, Zimbabwe is a failure.
Urbanity no longer held the potential for informants to become, or even remain,
modern, and progress was thus no longer a symbol that informants could live by in
urban Zimbabwe. Whereas during the 1980s urban areas were perceived as spaces of
potential, Potts’s (2006, p. 547) analysis showed that
[b]y 2001 the sheer intensity and scale of urban economic decline had so undermined the
economic advantages of the city that, in terms of rural versus urban living standards,
most recent migrants judged that it had either not been ‘worth’ migrating to the city or
felt they had not gained anything.
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360 S. Morreira
Local imaginaries of urban versus rural areas have thus shifted as economic realities
have changed.
Urbanite as political category
Economic difficulties and a perceived erosion of modernity were not the only
challenges facing informants, nor the only elements of what it meant to be urban in
Zimbabwe. For the poor urban population, the difficulties caused by structural
violence were compounded by the state’s attitude towards urbanites. The MDC’s
initial power base was drawn largely from urban populations and, as such, has lead
to a symbolic dismissal of their positions as citizens or ‘Zimbabweans’ by the ruling
party. Didymus Mutasa, ZANU–PF organising secretary, commented in 2002: ‘We
would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support
the liberation struggle. We don’t want all these extra [MDC] people’ (cited in
Solidarity Peace Trust 2004 p. 2). Irikidzayi Manase (2009, pp. 62–63) argues that
government-directed media programmes in Zimbabwe have ‘placed rural and
agricultural values at the centre of their [ZANU-PF’s] anti-Western imperialist rheto-
ric’. Urban dwellers, with their assumed urban values, thus perceived themselves to
have been placed below the rural population in a symbolic hierarchy of proper
‘Zimbabweanness’. This imagined agrarian ideal is neither reflected by conditions
within rural areas, nor even by state behaviour towards rural dwellers, who have
experienced high degrees of violence at the hands of the government (Human Rights
Watch 2006).
The events of Murambatsvina starkly illustrated to urban Zimbabweans ZANU–
PF’s attitude towards the urban poor. One effect of Murambatsvina was to disperse
the urban population into the ZANU–PF-controlled rural areas (see Solidarity Peace
Trust 2006). The precise effects of this are uncertain – while some people did relocate,
many stayed, and of those who relocated, many returned. ‘Mobility’ in this instance
was often involuntary and was perceived as a punishment for being urban. As Francis,
who was living in a high-density suburb at the time of Murambatsvina, commented:
‘They wanted to send us away. They tore our houses down and destroyed our livings
because we were poor urban people. Because the urban people disagreed with what
the government was doing’.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Zimbabwean government, unlike many other
Southern African states, had been successful in minimising informal housing and
settlements in urban areas (Potts 2008) and the formalisation of some areas that had
begun as informal was common. Although resettlement of urban dwellers from illegal
residences had occurred in Zimbabwe before Murambatsvina (see Potts 2008), the
scale of Murambatsvina’s was far greater. Murambastvina directly affected 700,000
people, with knock-on effects impacting 2.4 million people, one-fifth of the total
population of Zimbabwe (Tibaijuka 2005). As Potts (2008, p. 53) notes, ‘a major
objective of Operation Murambatsvina was to displace, forcibly, to rural areas those
urban people whose houses were demolished’. This was predicated, however, upon
the assumption that all urban dwellers originated from rural areas and, as Potts notes,
implicitly assumed that rural areas could support such an influx.
The assumption that all people had a rural home is erroneous. Potts (2008) has
shown that about 60% of Harare’s urban population at the time of Murambatsvina was
urban-born and, as such, had little more than a symbolic connection to a rural ‘home’.
Zimbabweans seeking asylum in South Africa claimed that even those with a rural
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Social Dynamics 361
connection found it difficult to reactivate rights in rural areas. Those displaced during
Murambatsvina who did have connections to rural ‘homes’ and attempted to return to
them often found that they were not welcome. To some extent this was due to food
shortages, but it was also due to the fact that purely by having spent time in urban
areas one was assumed to have MDC affiliations.
There is little published information pertaining to people’s success or failure in
relocating to rural areas. Testimonies from South Africa, while they cannot show
how many people did find rural homes, can reveal the reasons behind difficulties
experienced by those who did not. For example, Sekai, a 59-year-old Shona woman
who originated from a rural area, had been living with her husband Farai in a high-
density suburb of Harare for 25 years by 2005. In mid-2005, Farai was working as a
carpenter and Sekai sold chickens and eggs that she raised in her backyard. During
Murambatsvina, however, their home was demolished, the chickens confiscated and
Farai injured his hand and could no longer work. After a few days outside their
demolished home, they decided to return to Farai’s rural place of origin, ‘because
there was nothing for us in Harare. We had lost everything’. Though they had
retained links to the rural areas throughout the 25 years they had lived in Harare,
they found that relocation was not easy, ‘as they [the rural community] thought since
we had been evicted we must be MDC. We were a danger to them’. The couple
stayed in the rural areas for six months, relying mainly on food sent from their
daughter in South Africa. During this time, Farai died after being beaten by ZANU–
PF youths. Their urban histories meant that Sekai and her husband were considered
dangerous by the family and broader community in the rural site and were not
accepted: though they followed government policy and relocated, they found them-
selves to still be ‘tsvina’ (‘filth’) in the rural areas. In contemporary discourse,
urbanity, therefore, is at times a form of pollution which can follow people great
distances.
Of the 50 migrants I worked with in Cape Town, 37 had originated from urban
areas. Of those, 23 had been displaced by Murambatsvina. Only 10 of the latter had a
strong enough rural connection to attempt relocation. All had been unsuccessful,
resulting in an eventual move to South Africa. In all 10 cases, this was partly due to
the economic situation in rural areas, but six informants also mentioned, without
prompting on my part, that neighbours’ attitudes towards them reflected a fear of
political reprisal for ‘being MDC’.
In addition to the actual events of Murambatsvina, the meaning of the Shona term
(‘Drive out the filth/dirt/rubbish’) made it clear to poor urban populations precisely
how they were symbolically conceptualised by the government. Though officially
translated as Operation Restore Order, thus reflecting state conceptualisations of a
‘proper’ city versus an improper populace, the word ‘tsvina’ has a broad semantic
extension with implications beyond dirt to bodily excretions, such as sweat and human
excrement (Clement Chihota, personal communication, April 2009, also see Harris
2008). Informants considered themselves to have been discarded by the ruling party
and to be openly despised; to be ‘tsvina’ was to have your personhood questioned. ‘It
was like they were saying we were worse than nothing’, one informant commented.
‘It’s not enough to translate it as “rubbish” as some people have. It meant more than
rubbish. It meant they thought we were so low. They tore down our houses like we
were not people’.
In the 2002 re-release of her classic 1966 text Purity and Danger, which explores
how ideas of dirt and contagion circulate within societies, Mary Douglas outlines the
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362 S. Morreira
ways in which the notion of pollution became applicable to the political sphere in the
decades after the book was originally released:
The examples of taboos that I gave to illustrate the themes of Purity and Danger are
mainly conservative in effect. They protect an abstract constitution from being
subverted. If I had anticipated the political implications of taboo, I could have mentioned
radical taboos. Some taboos reinforce redistributive policies and others prevent
government or individuals from accumulating power. (Douglas 2002 [1966], p. xx)
Murambatsvina was above all concerned with power, and constituted an actual and a
symbolic assertion of the power of the state over poor urban citizens. As Maurice
Vambe (2008, p. 3) notes,
Operation Murambatsvina forced the people of Zimbabwe to rethink the very notion of
citizen and subject…Murambatsvina showed that citizenship is a social construct, that it
is brittle and can be subject to revision, especially in contexts of political contestations.
Douglas’s (2002 [1966], p. 36) notion of pollution draws upon the idea of ‘matter out
of place’. State actions against the urban poor constitute violent attempts to return
matter to its ‘rightful’ place – a cold logic that disregards individuals’ citizenship and
personhood. The metaphors employed during Murambatsvina drew upon a discourse
of dirt versus cleanliness that has a colonial history in Zimbabwe (Burke 1996).
Augustine Chihuri, the Zimbabwean Police Commissioner at the time of Murambatsv-
ina, announced: ‘We must clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots’ (cited
in Ncube et al. 2005, p. 1), while a Harare policeman referred to crack-downs on
‘cockroaches’ (cited in Kamete 2008, p. 1728). The use of the term ‘tsvina’ associated
ideas of dirt, rubbish and excrement with urban dwellers – in other words, it drew
upon strong metaphors of pollution as a means of asserting power over a portion of
the population that was unhappy with the ruling party. For informants in South Africa,
at the very least, being tsvina had resulted in a loss of livelihood and property, leading
to forced mobility. In the case of Sekai’s husband, being tsvina resulted in death.
Conclusion: beyond the constraints of the urban
Life in urban areas, and the meanings associated with being urban, can be seen to have
changed with the shifting political and economic context of Zimbabwe. I have argued
that aspects of daily life in Harare had brought informants to question Zimbabwe’s
place within the world of modernity. Further, state-based discourses about (and
behaviours towards) the urban population had brought informants to question their
own place within the political imaginary of the Zimbabwean state. However, this is
not to suggest that informants necessarily subscribed to the state’s assumptions and
rhetoric, or that they were not able to operate beyond the constraints of state and econ-
omy. The very fact that most urban households received remittances shows just one
of the ways in which urban Zimbabweans were able to exercise agency: cross-border
migration allows for the maintenance of urban households and, beyond this, for an
assertion of an urbanity and modernity opposed to that propagated by the state. Studies
based upon the ‘hard’ facts (Hastrup 1993) of migration and economic crisis bypass
the levels of meaning that may be present within such acts. ‘They may think I am
filth’, said one informant, ‘but this is my country. My husband has gone so that we
can stay. And one day he will come back, and we will have kept a place here for him’.
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Social Dynamics 363
In the constant work that is the maintenance of persons, place and meaning, it is often
the symbolic, rather than the factual, that needs to work the hardest.
Notes
1. The research this article is based upon was made possible by the South African National
Research Foundation (NRF). The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily
reflect those of the NRF. I wish to thank Fiona Ross for her continual support, Clement
Chihota and Artwell Nhemachena for assistance with Shona translations and Jess
Auerbach, Thomas Cousins, Patience Masusa, Pamela Reynolds, Patti Henderson and the
two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an early version.
2. All translations are from Shona, the main indigenous language spoken in Harare.
3. I refer here to the ‘poor’ rather than the ‘working class’ as economic decline in Zimbabwe
has obscured the theoretical distinctions between socioeconomic classes. Work in the infor-
mal sector is often classified as ‘self-employment’ and, as such, individuals do not fit the
‘classic’ criteria of the working class.
4. Writing in 2003, Hammar and Raftopoulos rightly employ the term ‘crisis’. My concern in
2010 is partly political, in that neighbouring states have not responded in a manner that
‘crisis’ would suggest they should.
5. See Morreira (2010) for a discussion of the political issues at stake for Zimbabwean
undocumented migrants in South Africa regarding the distinction between mobility and
displacement.
6. Pseudonyms are used throughout to protect the anonymity of my informants.
7. It was widely believed that the official exchange rate allowed the ZANU–PF elite to buy
foreign currency at a low rate and then to sell it on the black market for profit.
8. R162 per month is very low. I believe this reflects the time difference of seven months
between fieldwork in Zimbabwe and South Africa – anecdotal evidence from my fieldwork
suggests that the increased influx of Zimbabweans to South Africa made it harder for
migrants to find work.
9. The cholera outbreak that occurred in late 2008 was a result of lack of access to clean water
as sewage plants closed due to lack of chemicals. By December 2008, there were 58,820
documented cases of cholera and 3095 documented deaths (World Health Organisation 2009).
10. A rural area; name excluded for anonymity.
Notes on contributor
Shannon Morreira is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the
University of Cape Town. Her recent publications are on Zimbabwean migration to South
Africa. Her current research concerns the circulation of human rights discourse in the Southern
African region.
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