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“Making a plan”: responses amongst
the wealthy to declining socioeconomic
conditions in suburban Harare
Shannon Morreiraa
a Humanities Education Development Unit, University of Cape
Town, Cape Town, South Africa
Published online: 24 Aug 2015.
To cite this article: Shannon Morreira (2015): “Making a plan”: responses amongst the wealthy
to declining socioeconomic conditions in suburban Harare, Social Dynamics: A journal of African
studies, DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2015.1066123
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2015.1066123
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“Making a plan”: responses amongst the wealthy to declining
socioeconomic conditions in suburban Harare
Shannon Morreira*
Humanities Education Development Unit, University of Cape Town, Cape Town,
South Africa
Although the term “crisis”is often used to describe politico-economic conditions
in post-2000 Zimbabwe, the period of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe was also
accompanied by creative responses to declining socioeconomic conditions. In this
paper, I consider the ways in which wealthy suburban Zimbabweans resident in
Harare during this period dealt with the withdrawal of the state from some aspects
of daily life: most notably, experienced through a decline in municipal services
such as the provision of water and electricity. I argue that whilst poor urbanites
experienced socioeconomic conditions as a decline in modernity even while they
engaged in creative responses to those conditions, for wealthier (Black and White)
urbanites the withdrawal of local government services led to a revival of ideas of
innovation (“making a plan”) that were similar to a pre-Independence discourse
of self-reliance in the face of economic sanctions imposed in the 1970s. Ideas of
self-sufficiency and innovation in the present day were invoked by both Black and
White respondents, and can be read as partly rhetorical, given the realities of
complex engagements and negotiations that occurred in Harare between residents
and the municipality and state services. The innovation required to “make a plan”
was always complexly social: although people could no longer rely on local
government for services, they were forced by the erratic nature of service delivery
to rely upon one another, and to engage with municipal institutions and local
government structures in ways that had previously been unnecessary. Attempts to
maintain a “proper”life in Harare involved creating forms of community amongst
the wealthy, and connections between the wealthy and the state, that had not
necessarily existed before the so-called crisis.
Keywords: Zimbabwe; urbanity; middle-class; service delivery; innovation
Introduction: economic decline and the withdrawal of the state
During the period of hyperinflation from 2007 to 2009, the name “Zimbabwe”
evoked images of economic disarray: empty shelves in supermarkets, queues for
bread and piles of Zimbabwe dollars without value. But this was not the only
Zimbabwe that existed during what was a deeply stressful and uncertain time for
residents. Behind the images that circulated in the media, there still existed the
suburban Zimbabwe in which children were fed and put to bed, in which couples
married and celebrated, in which friends met up and had conversations and in which
people found ways to source and cook food, watch television and water their veg-
etable gardens despite the erratic nature of the supply of water and electricity. While
the middle class was able to continue with such life because of residual advantages,
*Email: shannon.morreira@uct.ac.za
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Social Dynamics, 2015
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this is not to deny that the poor were also able to exert agency as they found new
and innovative ways to survive (see Gukurume 2015; Jones 2010; Morreira 2010).
For the wealthy, the middle class and the poor, then, economic crisis gave rise to
imaginative forms of survival and there thus existed a Zimbabwe in which, in short,
social life continued and the stuff of daily life got done. When I first wrote in this
journal about Zimbabwe under the period of hyperinflation (Morreira 2010), my
focus was on the ways in which the urban poor maintained social life in the face of
enormous constraint and difficulty. I argued then that for the poor, the Zimbabwean
crisis
1
was perceived as a decline in modernity, and that new forms of innovation
such as the kukiyakiya economy in which multiple new forms of making do were
normalised (Jones 2010), in combination with social relationships with kin outside
of the country, had become imperative to survival (Morreira 2010). In this follow-up
paper I am interested in examining the effects of the same crisis upon another sector
of the urban population –namely, the wealthier residents of what are locally referred
to as the “low-density suburbs.”These spacious suburbs are composed of large
houses situated on even larger properties, often with attendant private swimming
pools or tennis courts. I grew up as a White Zimbabwean in one of those houses in
one of those suburbs; my informants in this piece thus come from a similar back-
ground to myself in terms of social class, although this paper draws on informants
from across racialised categories. This article then is also a deliberate attempt to
engage with the recent calls made within southern African anthropology to move
away from a focus on “studying down”to “studying horizontally or up”to include
more studies on the everyday lives of the middle and upper class (Nyamnjoh 2012;
cf. Morreira 2012).
Finally, this article also engages with the debate set off by the work of Hughes
(2010) on whiteness in Zimbabwe (Hammar 2012; Hartnack 2014; Hughes 2010),
in a bid to ethnographically illustrate some of the nuances of White Zimbabweans’
interactions with the state and with their Black neighbours that fall outside of
Hughes’s focus. Hughes’s ethnography, whilst providing insightful commentary on
some sectors of the White population, has a dangerous tendency to extend this
analysis to encapsulate “whiteness”more generally in Zimbabwe, such that all
White residents are portrayed as keeping a distance from other Zimbabweans and
forming attachments to land rather than being immersed in the socio-political life of
the country (Hartnack 2014). Hughes further argues that one effect of socioeconomic
crisis was to push White Zimbabweans to cooperate with Black Zimbabweans in
ways that had previously not been necessary. Again, I argue that whilst this is a use-
ful insight with regard to some sectors of the White population, amongst others, the
new forms of community that were engendered by hyperinflation were new in that
they were responding to a new set of factors, but in terms of race relations can be
seen as extensions of previous relationships that had existed prior to crisis. I thus
draw on the experiences of Black and White residents in the same neighbourhoods
in order to illustrate that race was not necessarily a determining factor at all in the
ways in which people were able or not able to “make a plan”and interact with one
another as a means of dealing with the decline in municipal services. Rather, Black
and White Zimbabweans in such suburbs were similarly innovative, similarly relied
upon one another in order to be so and similarly drew upon a shared discourse of
self-reliance and innovation as a means of remaining positive in the face of the deep
stresses and frustrations of daily life. Amongst the wealthy at least, then, a focus on
race can be limiting.
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Whilst economic and political problems in post-2000 Harare have been so
extreme as to affect everyone, across class lines, having a larger pool of resources to
draw upon has obviously resulted in differences between the ways in which the
wealthy and the poor have experienced “crisis”in urban Harare. For Zimbabwe’s
wealthier inhabitants, the continuation of social life has also entailed the mainte-
nance of lifestyles. Keeping lifestyles intact in the face of shrinking infrastructure,
disappearing goods, chronic cash shortages, uncertainty about the future and innu-
merable other difficulties, entailed complex and creative engagements. It is with
these engagements that I am concerned in this paper –in the face of the increasing
unreliability of state services such as water, electricity and refuse removal, what
changed for well-off Zimbabweans? In what ways was a pre-crisis lifestyle main-
tained, and what altered? I argue that whilst poor urbanites experienced deteriorating
socioeconomic conditions as a decline in modernity (Morreira 2010), for wealthier
(Black and White) urbanites, the withdrawal of local government services as water,
electricity and other service provision steadily declined led to a revival of ideas of
self-sufficiency and innovation that were rooted in a pre-Independence discourse of
self-reliance in the face of economic sanctions. Thus, although such a discourse was
originally a “White”one, I argue that it is now being used across racial categories in
postcolonial Zimbabwe. Wealthy individuals were able to a large degree to maintain
their lifestyles during the period of hyperinflation, although it took a lot of effort.
Whilst such control over the domestic sphere occurred in a context of shrinking
political autonomy within the country as a whole, as the democratic institutions of
the country came under increasing pressure under the Mugabe regime such that citi-
zens felt disempowered, attempts to maintain a proper life in Harare also relied upon
political negotiations at a small-scale, local level between residents and representa-
tives of municipalities and municipal services. As becomes clear in the ethnographic
data described below, a “proper”life could be seen to consist, on a pragmatic level,
of access to the norms of first-world domestic modernity –water, electricity, refuse
removal and certain types of goods, whilst on a more symbolic level, it reflected the
desire to live in a predictable world in which it was possible to keep households run-
ning as “normally”as they had done prior to hyperinflation. “Crisis,”then, required
wealthy residents (White and Black) to both become somewhat more self-reliant, at
the level of household arrangements, as well as becoming more engaged with the
postcolonial municipality in ways that had not previously been necessary, as is
explored ethnographically below.
Zimbabwe’s contemporary situation has its roots in complex colonial and post-
colonial histories and events, and the extensive literatures devoted to the state of
affairs in Zimbabwe are beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice to say here that from
1999 Zimbabwe underwent economic collapse (Hammar and Raftopoulos 2003;
Kamete 2008; Murithi and Mawadza 2011; Orner and Holmes 2010). By December
2007, the annualised inflation rate as released by Zimbabwe’s Central Statistics
Office stood at 66,212.3%. Such high rates of inflation had a marked effect on peo-
ple’s lives: a nurse from a government hospital with whom I spoke in December
2007, for example, was earning 26 million dollars a month, while 2 kg of potatoes
cost just over 7 million dollars on January 7, 2008 and 11.3 million dollars on
January 12. In 2008, Zimbabwe entered a state of hyperinflation, which reached its
apex at 6.5 sextillion per cent in November 2008 (Hanke and Kwok 2009). During
hyperinflation, prices would be adjusted several times a day, and most currency deal-
ing took place on the Black market. The Zimbabwe dollar was abandoned in 2009
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following the formation of the Government of National Unity; at present there is no
national currency, with the US dollar being the currency most commonly used. In
addition to economic crisis, from 2000 onward Zimbabwe entered a crisis of the
state. State-run institutions and infrastructure deteriorated to the extent that in 2004
Zimbabwe was categorised as a failed state by some commentators (Hough and
du Plessis 2004). Hyperinflation consolidated state failure, ensuring that infrastruc-
ture was not maintained, let alone improved. Although improvements have occurred
in the economy since the Zimbabwe dollar was abandoned in 2009, and the epithet
“failed state”seems excessive given its continued existence (and given the ways in
which the state functioned extremely efficiently at some levels, such as the security
sector), conditions in Harare remained difficult at the time of writing, with run-down
amenities and infrastructure still very much present.
Such rapid and widespread collapse had considerable effects on the daily lives of
all Zimbabweans, rich or poor. In this paper, I am concerned particularly with the
effects of the deterioration in the delivery of water and electricity in low-density,
higher-than-average-income areas of Harare. This paper is based on two key
methodologies: observations in households in Harare as part of in-depth, lengthy
anthropological fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2010; augmented by ques-
tionnaires and interviews with residents of Harare in 2013 and 2014 which asked
respondents about current circumstances as well as their experiences in the period of
hyperinflation.
A changing cityscape: the low-density suburbs of Harare
In the beginning people were surprised by the way things were falling apart around us
in Harare […] we thought the functioning city was normal. But now we’ve gotten used
to it. This is what a genuine African city is. Things don’t work and we make a plan.
(Conversation with a white Harare resident, 2013. Emphasis mine)
Harare’s low-density suburbs originated in the colonial city, and were intended lar-
gely as the residential areas of White settlers (Yoshikuni 2007). They were envi-
sioned by these early city planners as spaces of “countrified suburbia”(Seirlis 2005,
414) where cultivated gardens would win out over the wild bush that surrounded the
city. The ideal of landscape here can be seen to reflect a colonial imaginary. For rea-
sons both aesthetic and practical, the low-density suburbs grew up around a planned
water supply infrastructure. Salisbury (now Harare) was founded in 1890, and piped
water and electricity supplies were introduced between 1907 and 1911 (Yoshikuni
2007). As with other aspects of colonial planning, the state’s provision of water and
electricity in Salisbury was divided along spatial and racial lines, such that the low-
density (White) areas enjoyed a better supply than the high-density (“African”) areas
of the city (Musemwa 2012). Low-density areas also tended to have septic tank
sewerage systems, which ensured that the decline in municipal services after 2000
did not result in the sewerage problems that occurred in more densely populated
areas of the city.
The geography of Salisbury did not always fit well with the ideals of colonial
planners. Although electricity was introduced in each of the new suburbs as they
were formed, access to water was more complicated. Water supplies around
Harare were not ideal, and as new low-density suburbs developed in the 1950s,
planners were not always able to install reticulated water, forcing homeowners to
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drill their own boreholes (Musemwa 2012). Over time, dams were built around the
city, such that the “White”suburbs all had access to regular water supplies by the
1960s (Musemwa 2012). However, boreholes remained a popular means of watering
gardens in a landscape often stricken by drought. In the post-2000 period, boreholes
would again come to the forefront as the means of providing water for all aspects of
household use, not just for gardens.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Harare was well run: the city won awards for
being the cleanest in Africa (Meredith 2003) and had a functioning network of
roads, traffic lights and refuse removal. As such, the aesthetic of the modern city –
clean, orderly, domesticated –was maintained. In the post-2000 era, this changed.
As the economic crisis took hold, potholes became common,
2
traffic lights failed
and were not repaired, and refuse removal became erratic. One effect of economic
decline was the failure of infrastructural maintenance, such that water pipes corroded
and electricity substations broke down with increasing regularity. Although, “power
cuts”and “load shedding”had been a feature of life in urban Harare throughout the
1980s and 1990s, in the post-2000 era, the electricity supply became even more
intermittent. Similarly, water provision (which had been fairly stable in the low-
density suburbs of Harare in the 1980s and 1990s) became sporadic, such that many
areas went without municipal water for months, or even years, at a time. Water qual-
ity also declined, due to lack of funds for maintaining treatment plants and for
procuring chemicals. The water crisis in Harare has its roots in the colonial era: the
situating of Harare upstream from its main water supply is not ideal, and both colo-
nial and postcolonial city planners did little to avert the difficulties that would come
with an increasing population (Musemwa 2012). In the post-2000 period, the lack of
maintenance brought the situation to a dire point.
Whilst the racial demographic of the low-density suburbs changed over time,
particularly after independence in 1980, they remained the spaces of the middle class
and the wealthy. The effects of severe water problems and other service delivery
failures upon poor urban Zimbabweans has been fairly well documented, particularly
in the aftermath of various cholera outbreaks in Zimbabwean cities (Bond and
Manyanya 2002; Mate 2005; Musemwa 2012), but the same has not been done for
wealthier urbanites. The inhabitants of low-density areas have experienced the
Zimbabwean crisis very differently to fellow citizens in high-density suburbs.
3
While lack of access to water, electricity, refuse removal and to many goods ensured
that the inhabitants of low-density areas had to adjust, what is of interest is the
degree to which wealthier Zimbabweans managed, through creative and innovative
means, to maintain their lifestyles. This shows the degree to which it is possible for
inhabitants of a city to function in the face of deeply unreliable municipal inputs
(given a certain level of private resources) and highlights the importance of social
networks in so doing. The priorities chosen by wealthy Zimbabweans –water, elec-
tric power, some basic and some luxury goods and the upkeep of homes and gardens
–also show us what is considered integral to maintaining a proper life. When the
municipality no longer regularly supplied services, urban inhabitants “made a plan”
to ensure that they got them. “Making a plan”required that Harare’s wealthier resi-
dents –across race lines –engaged with each other and with municipal institutions
and local government structures in ways that had previously been unnecessary whilst
simultaneously becoming more self-reliant at the level of household arrangements.
Such engagement, however, drew on already existing relationships, many of which
were across race lines. Attempts to maintain a proper life in Harare thus involved
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consolidating forms of community amongst the wealthy, and creating connections
between the wealthy and representatives of the state, that had not necessarily existed
in such forms before the so-called crisis. It also involved maintaining control over
domestic worlds. The following section presents an ethnographic consideration of
responses to service delivery collapse.
Hapana magetsi!
4
Dealing with difficulty in the low-density suburbs
The property was an acre in size, with the house situated at the end of a driveway
that wound under Msasa trees. The house (a large one with three bedrooms, two
lounges, two bathrooms, a kitchen and scullery and a private bar) was surrounded
by lawn and, at the front, well-tended flowerbeds. Situated in Chisipite, a well-to-do
neighbourhood in Harare East, the (White) couple who live here have done so since
1985. Mike and Di
5
told me that they were both “Zimbabwean born and bred,”
(though when they were born Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia, and had not yet
begun the path to UDI
6
and, ultimately, liberation struggle and independence). Mike
was drafted in the Rhodesian war; he fought for the White minority Smith regime,
which ultimately lost to Black Nationalist forces. He remained in the new Zimbabwe
in the 1980s, in the face of President Mugabe’s words of reconciliation. Their two
children grew up in the house. Like many of their countrymen, upon finishing
school these children moved away to find work elsewhere: one to England and the
other to South Africa. They come home to visit every few years. I visited the couple
in 2010, introduced by a mutual friend. I was invited for lunch, and when I arrived,
I was offered a drink: a cold glass of beer. This was bought locally; the wine that Di
drinks, however, was brought into the country by her son when he visited from
South Africa. We were also offered a snack –imported olives that, to the best of my
knowledge, weren’t available in regular supermarkets at that time. In a Zimbabwe of
frequent shortages, it is standard conversation to ask where people have found a par-
ticular product. Curious, I did so, and was told that they buy a lot of things through
a private “shopping club”they belong to, which imports goods from South Africa at
premium prices.
In the conversation before lunch, I joked that they must have a gas stove if they
were brave enough to have guests around for a cooked lunch. Mike laughed and
said that they do, “and more besides. We are very organised here!”As always, I was
curious about household arrangements; in this instance, I was lucky as Mike was
proud of the measures he took and liked to give new guests a tour. We began
outside: Mike took me to the back of the house, where he showed me the large
generator that sat against a back wall. This was useful but not ideal, he told me, as
it was noisy, smelly and relied on scarce diesel. When the electricity goes out, the
generator was used to power a few lights and the computer and fridge/freezer.
The freezer is really the most essential: with the door shut things will keep cold for a
while, but if the power is off for days or weeks then we have to keep it cold somehow.
But sometimes we’ve failed in that, and we lose our frozen things.
The family kept milk (often hard to find at the time), meat (though easier to find, a
very expensive product) and assorted vegetables from their garden in the freezer.
Mike took me through the kitchen door into the house, where he showed me the
large gas stove they use for cooking even when the electricity is on and for boiling
water when it is off and their electric kettle becomes useless. They also had a row
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of thermos flasks to keep water hot once it had been boiled. Larger plastic containers
were used to store drinking water: the house had not received municipal water for at
least a decade. Even were municipal water to be available, the couple would not
trust it to be safe for drinking. As it is, they drink borehole water or containers of
water bought from a shop in the nearby industrial area of Msasa.
We then moved into the lounge, where an inverter attached to a car battery pro-
vided back-up power to the television. A spare plug point on the inverter’s adaptor
was reserved for emergency powering of the two laptops in the house, and the cou-
ple’s cell phones. We moved out of the lounge into a passage that led towards the
bedrooms: here, on the walls, were a series of battery-powered LED lights that came
on when pushed so that the couple could have light when they walked to their bed-
room or if they woke during a power cut without a torch or candle. This seemed
unlikely as on each of the tables on either side of Mike and Di’s double bed, there
was a head torch: a battery-powered LED light attached to a piece of elastic that can
be slipped over the wearer’s forehead so that one can operate in the dark with both
hands free.
There was a bathroom off the main bedroom –the shower here was attached to
a separate geyser to the rest of the house; one that was solar powered so that they
could have hot water even when the electricity was out for a long time. We moved
outside where Mike showed me the solar panels on the roof: large and imposing,
they cost the couple a lot of money “but it’s worth it for a hot shower.”Having had
a cold shower myself that winter morning due to a lengthy power failure, I could
see the attraction. We then moved to the couple’s vegetable garden: row upon row
of spinach, multiple varieties of lettuce, carrots, coriander, basil and cauliflower
stood proud in the lunchtime sun. In the garden, there were also avocado, lemon
and guava trees. “At other times of the year we grow tomatoes and potatoes too. We
eat fresh whatever we can and bottle or freeze the rest, or swap it with friends and
neighbours for whatever they have too much of.”The vegetable garden was fed with
compost from the household kitchen waste –“once the rubbish trucks stopped com-
ing, and once veggies were hard to find in the shops, we got into composting big
time. Kills two birds with one stone.”When I asked what they do with the rest of
the rubbish, he replied that some they recycled through a private local initiative,
some they burn and some they took themselves to the dump in the back of their
bakkie (open truck). There was a neighbourhood rotation system for trips to the
dump: once every two weeks someone went with the accumulated rubbish from a
number of households who had banded together to make the arrangement.
Finally, at the top of the garden, we came to the last stop on our domestic self-
sufficiency tour: a large green water tank that was fed by borehole water and held
10,000 L. They put the borehole in 5 years ago, when municipal water became
extremely erratic. At first I was confused: if they have a borehole and are thus not
reliant on municipal water, why have a storage tank? Mike shook his head: the bore-
hole pump relied on municipal electricity to operate; without the tank there would
be no water when the power was out. Mike laughed and patted the side of the tank:
“We call her JoJo,”he said, indicating the name of the company that made “her”
which is printed on the side, “and the generator is Jenny, of course. I don’t know
where we’d be without JoJo and Jenny. Hungry and thirsty in the dark, I suppose.”
Mike and Di’s investments in complex household arrangements were not unusual
in the low-density suburbs of Harare. As electricity and water supplies became more
erratic, as goods disappeared from the shops, as the rubbish trucks stopped coming,
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people began to “make a plan.”As Tim, a White informant from Borrowdale, an
upmarket suburb, said,
It used to be that having power and water was just something you expected, something
that came with normal life in the twentieth century. But now that we’re in the twenty-
first century, that’s not true anymore! Nowadays it’s really unusual to have both power
and water at the same time. So at some point we just had to acknowledge, this
responsibility is ours now. If we want water, we need to put in a borehole or a tank. If
we want power, we need a generator, and batteries, and an inverter, and a gas stove. If
we want to take our rubbish to the dump, we need to band together with our neigh-
bours. This is not something that the municipality will provide any longer.
A 100% of the 29 respondents to a questionnaire I administered to residents in low-
density suburbs experienced cuts in their electricity supply regularly, with 80% stat-
ing the power went off at least three times in a week. Once the electricity went off,
respondents indicated that it would be back on within half a day only about 25% of
the time. More often, it was off for longer than this –sometimes for as long as a
week. “There was a ZESA announcement the other day,”joked one Ndebele respon-
dent who also lived in Borrowdale in Harare, “it said that due to logistical issues
there won’t be any light at the end of the tunnel in Zimbabwe until further notice.”
ZESA, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority, is a state-owned company with
the remit of generating, transmitting and supplying electricity in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe does not generate enough electricity for its needs, and has to import elec-
tricity from its neighbours. The power outages that have occurred across the country
with increasing regularity in the post-2000 era result from a combination of factors
–inability to pay for electricity imports; old and faulty infrastructure and insufficient
coal supplies to the country’s power plants at times. The net result is an unreliable
electricity supply, with scheduled load shedding occurring in combination with
unscheduled cuts due to equipment breakages.
Equipment breakages resulted in the need for neighbours to band together to do
repairs themselves, as the state could not afford to replace equipment. For example,
one Chisipite-based, White informant stated that
Once we had a major ZESA power fault in our suburb. In brief, one of our neighbours
went to the ZESA offices responsible for the area and brought them to check the sub-
station. They found that a large fuse had blown and it was very expensive to replace,
and they did not have any in stock anyway. So the residents involved were asked to
donate a certain amount of money each so that the fuse could be bought from an elec-
trical shop in Harare. If the residents did not co-operate, we simply would not have
had power restored. Everyone was keen but when it came to paying everyone wanted
power back so the fuse was bought by the lady organising. The power was restored
once she brought the ZESA workers to do the job and install the fuse. Needless to say,
some neighbours reneged on honouring the payment, because they had power now!!
The people who paid had to pay a larger share. To this day, three residents (us
included) on our road have a set of keys for the substation by the recommendation of
the ZESA technicians, who said that it would be safer that way, as there were some
dishonest workers within the ZESA Department who went around draining the oil from
the transformers in the substation so that they would sell it to other stations and pocket
the money that residents were paying for the oil to be put in their sub stations.
This example illustrates that such new forms of communal spirit were not perfect,
with some residents reneging on promises to others. Nonetheless, to get repairs done
required group effort.
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Even where substations were working, load shedding occurred on a daily basis.
Respondents had implemented numerous strategies to bypass the effects of having
no electricity, or to generate power themselves. Observation and survey data showed
people’s electricity needs to be divided into a number of categories, which in them-
selves reflect the twenty-first century lifestyles of their users. Electricity, when avail-
able, was primarily used for lighting; cooking and food storage; heating water and
powering televisions, computers and other electronic devices. In the absence of a
reliable electricity supply, respondents’strategies included an extensive combination
of low-tech and high-tech means.
To deal with the lack of lighting, respondents made use of candles; gas lamps;
paraffin lamps; torches (the preferred torch type was a wind up variety that did not
require batteries to be replaced, but was powered by batteries that were recharged by
the user through a crank mechanism, or through shaking) and solar lights. Cooking
difficulties were bypassed through the purchase of gas ovens and an increased use
of outdoor fires (“a braai [barbecue] used to be something you just had for fun,”said
one respondent, “but nowadays it’s a necessity. Just like you used to only use
torches when you went camping. We have become expert braaiers –my wife can
cook anything on a fire now, anything. And my son! He’d win that braai competi-
tion they have in South Africa hands down.”). Like Mike and Di, most respondents
who had a means of heating water when the power went out used solar panels; some
had not put in this infrastructure and either, “we have a cold shower or go dirty for
a day or two. If it gets very bad I’ll go to a friend who has hot water. They know
the favour will always be returned another day.”
Going to the house of a friend or family for a bath or shower was also a com-
mon strategy for dealing with cuts in the water supply, though it was not as common
as it was in the past. “We’ve got more and more organised as time has gone by,”
said Tsitsi, a Shona inhabitant of the northern suburb Mount Pleasant.
You begin to realise that this situation is not changing, so you save money towards
a tank, or an inverter, or whatever. As time went by we got more and more
self-sufficient. So now, as they say in America, we’re off the grid. Zimbabweans know
all about being off the grid. We have to be self-sufficient now.
All survey respondents had some kind of infrastructure in place to deal with water
cuts: 55% of survey respondents had a borehole, or had access to a shared neigh-
bourhood borehole and 45% had a water tank or access to a shared tank. Some
respondents bought water, getting thousands of litres at a time delivered to their
tanks or buying smaller quantities of drinking water. “Where are we living when
drinking water –WATER! –is sold in the shops because the taps are dry?”asked
Tafara, a Shona informant from Belvedere, a middle-class suburb. “But what can
you do? It’s not like having no water is a problem you can just ignore.”Other
respondents reported the presence of “renegade water sellers”who bought borehole
water from people for resale, leading to a potential long-term problem in the form of
a depleted water table and boreholes running dry. Nonetheless, such a strategy was
deemed necessary in the present, and reflects the links that were made across class
lines during the period, where wealthy inhabitants sold water to the poor who
became water “renegades.”
How, in the context of inflation and a collapsed economy, did people save
money towards a tank or inverter? One means was through the (illegal ) accumula-
tion and trade of foreign currency. Those informants who were business owners had
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complicated networks in place to ensure they had access to foreign currency; those
who were employed were often given at least a portion of their salaries in (illegal)
foreign currency. They were then able to change money into Zimbabwe dollars only
as soon as they needed it. This was also done through social networks: all infor-
mants had a person, or a series of persons, whom they trusted to trade Zimbabwe
dollars and foreign currency. In my experience, these networks almost always
crossed race and class lines. Mawowa and Matongo’s in-depth examination of the
informal roadside currency trade in Bulawayo –locally referred to as “the World
Bank”(Mawowa and Matongo 2010)–showed that roadside currency trade was
used by people across the economic spectrum. Although most foreign currency flo-
wed into these “banks”through cross-border traders, it was also brought in by busi-
ness people, civil servants, NGO employees and through remittances from the
diaspora. The recurrent advent of cash crises, as inflation worked to ensure that there
was not enough physical cash in the country for people’s needs, complicated this
somewhat. Often, local business owners who had to do business in Zimbabwe dol-
lars would accumulate their dollars and sell it on to foreign currency traders up to a
few times a day; or would do direct deals with people they knew who had foreign
currency and needed some cash.
As people saw themselves as operating without municipal assistance in many
ways, they also commonly voiced an opposition to paying municipal rates to a
municipality that provided very little. “In 2007 or 2008,”wrote Jonah, a Shona
respondent from Mabelreign,
I stopped paying my rates. I even stopped paying ZESA bills because they made no
sense to me, the figures weren’t linked to my usage. I didn’t receive water, so I
wouldn’t pay for that. I started paying again in 2010, with the new government, but
then the charges were unreasonable again, so I stopped.
During the years of hyperinflation, then, people became used to operating beyond
the boundaries of the municipality: access to water, electricity and to money
happened without state intervention much of the time. It was in this context that
informants developed a discourse of “self-sufficiency”in which they emphasised
their independence, as seen in the following quotes:
We have to do it all for ourselves because otherwise it’s not going to get done. So, you
do what you can, you live the best life you can, and you don’t expect anything from
the government. If you expect anything you’ll just be disappointed!
What I say to my kids when they come back here and are shocked by how things have
deteriorated, is ‘Africa’s not for sissies!’We live in Africa
7
. You have to expect these
things. You have to just do it by yourself.
We have lived through a lot in this country over the years. So, we know how to be
inventive, to make a plan on your own when things go wrong. We have to.
Such self-sufficiency, however, did not mean strict individualism. Respondents
needed relationships in order to “make their plans,”as seen in the above case study.
Furthermore, despite popular talk about self-sufficiency, informants also developed
relationships with state employees that they did not have prior to the energy and
water crises. As John, an Indian respondent from Mount Pleasant, said,
You need to know the ZESA guy who services your area so that when the substation
blows, you can call him. And you offer to fetch him, and then in the car you start to
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talk, and you ask after his children, you take an interest. So, there are positives: we
have all gotten to know each other much better than we did before.
One morning after interviewing an informant in her home on another matter entirely,
I stayed behind for tea with her and some acquaintances, all of whom lived in the
same area. When it transpired that my informant had had a water leak the day before
which had flooded her house, and she had had to phone (and collect in her car)
municipal maintenance workers, there was a scurry as the other people present
reached for their own phones. “Do you have the number?”asked one informant.
When it transpired that she had the personal cell phone number of one employee,
everyone present took note of it with great excitement, as they now had a personal
connection to the municipality that they could use when things went wrong. “Self-
sufficiency,”then, was not complete; and referred to a perceived independence from
the state (although even this was never viewed as entire), not from other persons.
Life in the low-density suburbs relied very heavily upon social networks –which
usually crossed race and class lines –in order to work.
Simultaneous domestic autonomy and new webs of reciprocity
How might we think through these responses to a less-predictable form of urbanity,
where access to water, electricity, goods and even cash was not in any way reliable?
Mike’s choice of wording when he first began to take me on a tour of his home is a
useful starting point here: like many other people I met in Harare, Mike emphasised
how “organised”his household arrangements were. In the face of an increasingly
chaotic, economic and political landscape, where things did not behave in the ways
in which people were accustomed to them behaving, new and old technologies were
harnessed as a means of organising the domestic world. Although the electricity
might not work, social life was still ongoing, and when children needed to be fed,
or guests needed to bathe, a plan had to be made. This was true as much for the
poor as it was for the wealthy: Jones (2010, 285) describes kukiyakiya as the “multi-
ple forms of ‘making do’” by which poorer residents of Harare maintained their
social worlds, and argues that such forms of illicit economy spread, during the per-
iod of hyperinflation, from the economic margins to become widespread across eco-
nomic relations in the middle classes. The urban wealthy, with their greater access
to resources than the urban poor, were also able to ensure that things still “worked,”
albeit with a great deal more personal effort and input than was previously the case.
Like the poor, this was done through both illicit and more formal means. I would
argue, then, that the effort that informants put into maintaining their lifestyles
reflects both a pragmatic and a symbolic response to the urban crisis in Zimbabwe.
On a pragmatic level, it is helpful to be able to have a warm shower and to cook
food on one’s own schedule rather than on the random whim of ZESA. On a sym-
bolic level, the politico-economic landscape of Zimbabwe was a deeply unpre-
dictable and stressful one that impacted in particular ways upon the unpredictability
and stresses of the domestic sphere: over time, wealthier Zimbabweans took this
sphere of life into their own hands, such that it became less uncertain. “I used to
spend half of my day trying to figure out how to make things work properly,”said
Cheryl, a 37-year-old mother of two who worked part-time:
I would leave work and collect the children; then we’d go around the shops for hours
trying to find something to eat for supper, and then find nothing, so I’d rack my brain
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about what I could make with things from the garden that was slightly different to
what I’d made the day before. And then I’d hit upon it, and I’d have a plan! And then
the power would go out, or there would be no water, and that plan would fall through.
I remember cooking rice one night in water from the swimming pool! So it just wasn’t
manageable, we had to make a better plan. So we got a tank, and a gas stove, and all
those things that made our lives a bit more manageable, and that meant that I made the
decisions, not ZESA. And the robots [traffic lights] still don’t work, and reading a
newspaper still makes you weep, but now my home is home, my home is peaceful.
With the autonomy of the domestic sphere, then, one was able to step beyond
Zimbabwean politics and economic collapse for a time, to a space removed from the
chaos of the daily world.
Such domestic autonomy, however, did not signal a “removal”or “distancing”of
the residents from daily life within Zimbabwe, and from engagements with each
other and the state as part of that daily life. Rather, it was simply a means of assert-
ing control over one element of life –one’s private world –which of course still
operated within webs of reciprocity with other private and public worlds. For exam-
ple, systems of food procurement within neighbourhoods involving neighbours,
local shopkeepers and local domestic workers may well be part of the means by
which private domestic worlds were maintained; or, as discussed above, networks of
currency conversion which were used as a means of averting the cash crisis would
draw in multiple persons from different areas of the city and different backgrounds.
Often, these networks were cross-border ones –as with the poor, remittances from
outside the country often formed part of wealthier households’incomes, particularly
when something very expensive, such as a water tank, was needed. In contrast to
Hughes’s(
2010) argument about whiteness in Zimbabwe, then, which was largely
based on the experiences of farmers, in suburban Harare it was necessary for all resi-
dents to draw upon (or develop) and maintain networks of trust with other residents
–White and Black. Hughes’s analysis is based upon White Zimbabweans who have
closely identified with nature as a response to shifts in the political landscape. These
White Zimbabweans, Hughes argues, constructed belonging via investments in land-
scape and environment rather than via investments in relationships with Black citi-
zens. Although it is clear from the above examples that informants in Harare had
indeed invested heavily in their domestic worlds, it is equally clear that this did not
come at the expense of investment in social relationships across race lines. These
relationships were not entirely new either –but rather were extensions of previous
ones with friends and neighbours from the same area. Furthermore, domestic worlds
were not the only spaces with which informants engaged, but were rather one space
amongst many –indeed, it would not be possible to maintain those domestic worlds
without engagement across multiple spaces and with multiple actors.
For example, the following narrative shows both the strength of feeling people
had about maintaining domestic worlds, and the complex engagements with neigh-
bours and state actors that were needed in order to do so:
My mother and her neighbours had a pastor of one of these big pentecostal churches
move into a large property across the road. He immediately started breaking all sorts
of by-laws relating to building, number of people, noise, traffic and so on. The resi-
dents –racially mixed but mostly middle class –organised a petition for the local
council so that he could be prevented from bringing the neighbourhood down. The fear
was that he would turn the property into a crowded compound and that the church he
planned (not zoned) would be very noisy and spoil the quiet nature of the road. One of
the most active residents in this process was our black neighbour. Well, the council
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refused to do much as they said he was politically connected and there was not much
they could do. Nevertheless, my mother and her neighbours continued to visit the
Town Office and complain now and again.
My point is really that in my experience, ordinary whites trying to maintain a ‘proper’
lifestyle did try to lobby the local government in various ways, sometimes together
with black neighbours –with limited success it must be said, but the attempt was still
made. In other words, they expected the local authorities to keep up ‘proper’standards
in these suburbs, even though they feared the local council could or would not do so.
This narrative reveals the ways in which shifts in the political landscape ensured that
residents had to act together in order to attempt to maintain their lifestyles. That this
was not always successful should not belittle the engagements that took place at the
level of neighbourhood and at the level of political structures. Keeping up “proper”
standards was not a race issue as much as a class issue, such that residents moni-
tored their suburbs in attempts to keep them from becoming “disorderly.”Notions of
the proper life, then, invoked ideas of order; such ideas of orderliness have also been
used by the Zimbabwean state as justification for violent campaigns against the
urban poor and the increase in informal trade within the postcolonial city (Kamete
2008).
The phrase “making a plan”points to the historical roots of ideas of self-
sufficiency, and in so doing also complicates the binaries of whiteness and black-
ness. In the 1970s, White Rhodesia was ostracised by much of the world for its
political policies, and was under sanctions for most of the decade. The Rhodesian
government responded to this with an emphasis on their ingenuity and creativeness,
emphasising that Rhodesia was able to be an autonomous political and economic
entity which had no need of the input of the British or others (Godwin and Hancock
1993). Such a stance was of course an over-emphasis of the self-sufficiency of the
Rhodesian state –nonetheless the rhetoric of resourcefulness and autonomy was a
powerful one in White Rhodesia and was spoken of through the short-cut phrase of
“making a plan.”Ideas of inventiveness and autonomy have carried through into an
entirely different set of political and economic circumstances in the post-2000 era.
This phrase has thus re-entered the contemporary lexicon where it is used by Black
and White English speakers. For some informants, who had previously supported
the Rhodesian regime, the use of such a phrase in response to the Zimbabwean crisis
is unsurprising. It was also used by others, however, who had left Rhodesia rather
than fight in the war and who had returned upon independence; or by Black infor-
mants, including some who endorsed the ruling ZANU-PF. There is thus an interest-
ing distinction to be raised between loyalty to a political party –ZANU-PF –and
the sphere of domestic order, which required alliances of other kinds. We can thus
see a previously colonial phrase as having entered the broader English-speaking
Zimbabwean lexicon through the idea of making a plan. Interestingly, it fulfils a
similar purpose to the idea of kukiyakiya as discussed by Jones (2010), which
entered the Shona lexicon at the same moment in time. The advent of political and
economic crisis in the post-2000 era allowed for such a discourse of inventiveness
and ingenuity to become prevalent. The salient point here is that the use of the
phrase “making a plan”did not signal one’s political standing, or, to be even more
reductionist, did not signal one’s race: rather, it was used across political affiliation
and across race lines as a means of speaking about the innovation required to deal
with the stresses and unpredictability of daily life. Such a shared discourse shows
that race was not necessarily a determining factor at all in the ways in which people
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were able or not able to “make a plan”and interact with one another as a means of
dealing with the decline in municipal services. Rather, wealthy Black and White
Zimbabweans in such suburbs were similarly innovative, similarly relied upon one
another in order to be so and similarly drew upon a shared discourse of self-reliance
and innovation as a means of remaining positive in the face of the frustrations of
daily life.
Conclusion
Informants were often justifiably proud of the steps they had taken to maintain pre-
crisis lifestyles in the depths of hyperinflation and economic and political uncer-
tainty. In the absence of municipal input, the urban wealthy made use of their
resources, both monetary and interpersonal, as a means of recreating and maintain-
ing their urban lives. Although most informants –Black and White –felt themselves
to be politically excluded, they still maintained a strong sense of a Zimbabwean
identity, sometimes voiced through a pride in their capacity for inventiveness and
their ability to live through difficulty. For wealthy urbanites the withdrawal of local
government services led to a revival of ideas of innovation (“making a plan”) that
were rooted in a pre-Independence discourse of self-reliance. Ideas of self-
sufficiency and innovation in the present day, however, can be read as partly rhetori-
cal, given the realities of complex engagements and negotiations that occurred in
Harare between residents and the municipality and state services. The innovation
required to “make a plan”was always socially complex: although people could no
longer rely on local government for services, they were forced by the erratic nature
of service delivery to rely upon one another, and to engage with municipal institu-
tions and local government structures in ways that had previously been unnecessary.
Attempts to maintain a proper life in Harare involved consolidating forms of
community amongst the wealthy, and connections between the wealthy and the state,
that had not necessarily existed before the so-called crisis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation [grant number 82098]; David
and Elaine Potter Foundation.
Notes
1. As I have argued elsewhere (Morreira 2010), the term “crisis”is perhaps misleading in
the Zimbabwean context: crisis implies the need for immediate remedial action, whereas
in post-2000 Zimbabwe, “crisis”dragged on for more than a decade, with a correspon-
dent increase in the uncertainty of daily life. It is also unclear in the Zimbabwean context
what is delineated by crisis –is Zimbabwe still in crisis? Did it end with the
(now-abandoned) Government of National Unity and the disuse of the Zimbabwe dollar?
The uncertainties of Zimbabwean crisis are reflected in the title of a recent edited volume
on Zimbabwe Crisis! What Crisis? (Chiumbu and Musemwa 2012). I thus use the term
here, in keeping with its use within Zimbabwean area studies, to delineate the period of
hyperinflation –but do so with some hesitation.
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2. Pothole repair, once the domain of the state roads agency, has been “privatised”in
Zimbabwe by informal entrepreneurs: these men bring sand and other filling to potholes
to fill in the holes, and ask for donations from passing motorists.
3. For a discussion of the ways in which the urban poor experienced the economic decline
and political crackdown of the 2000s, see Morreira (2010).
4. Translation from Shona: No (electric) power!
5. All names are changed for anonymity.
6. In 1965, Rhodesia succeeded in a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from
Britain. Rhodesia, under Prime Minister Ian Smith, thus maintained White rule until later
than other former British colonies. Following a civil war in the 1970s, the country only
gained majority rule in 1980, when the new state of Zimbabwe came into being.
7. Such a comment of course raises an entirely different set of issues about the ways in
which Africa and the developmental state is represented as typically disorganised or is a
state of disarray. Such assertions don’t necessarily reflect the reality of ‘Africa’more
broadly; or take into account the historical conditions of underdevelopment.
Notes on contributor
Shannon Morreira is an anthropologist in the Humanities Education Development Unit
(EDU) at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests include Zimbabwe, migration,
human rights and the politics of knowledge production.
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