Making Sense of Mugabeism in Local and Global Politics: ‘So Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe’

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Third World Quarterly, 2009, vol. 30, issue 6, 1139-1158

Abstract: President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has emerged as one of the most controversial political figures since 2000, eliciting both admiration and condemnation. What is termed ‘Mugabeism’ is a summation of a constellation of political controversies, political behaviour, political ideas, utterances, rhetoric and actions that have crystallised around Mugabe's political life. It is a contested phenomenon with the nationalist aligned scholars understanding it as a pan-African redemptive ideology opposed to all forms of imperialism and colonialism and dedicated to a radical redistributive project predicated on redress of colonial injustices. A neoliberal-inspired perspective sees Mugabeism as a form of racial chauvinism and authoritarianism marked by antipathy towards norms of liberal governance and disdain for human rights and democracy. This article seeks to analyse Mugabeism as populist phenomenon propelled through articulatory practices and empty signifiers. As such it can be read at many levels: as a form of left-nationalism; as Afro-radicalism and nativism; a patriarchal neo-traditional cultural nationalism and an antithesis of democracy and human rights. All these representations make sense within the context of colonial, nationalist, postcolonial and even pre-colonial history that Mugabe has deployed to sustain and support his political views.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436590903037424 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:30:y:2009:i:6:p:1139-1158

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ctwq20

DOI: 10.1080/01436590903037424

Access Statistics for this article

Third World Quarterly is currently edited by Shahid Qadir

More articles in Third World Quarterly from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().