Tyranny, parody, and ethnic polarity: ritual engagements with the state in Northwestern Zimbabwe

Abstract This paper seeks to explore how the post‐colonial Zimbabwean state has engaged in ritual, performative, and ultimately tyrannical demonstrations of power, both at the centre and at the peripheries of rule. Equally, it seeks to explore how the subjects of rule reciprocally interpret and performatively engage with the state. Finally, it attempts to show how ethnicity figures differently in distinct loci of state‐making. Beginning with an analysis of the 1984 Independence Day celebrations, I move to briefly discuss the origins and practice of ethnocidal terror by the Zimbabwean army in Matabeleland beginning in 1983. Then the focus shifts to Gokwe District in the northwestern part of the country, where I review the ways in which the consolidation of ZANU‐PF loyalties through violence was conjoined with authoritarian developmentalist discourse and practice. The latter half of the paper analyzes engagements that occur within minor theatres of bureaucratic power in Gokwe, at cotton delivery depots and agricultural field days. These are shown to be scenes in which the authority of state — and the forms of modernity it embodies and demands — is both performed and acknowledged, asserted and subverted. In these venues and on these occasions, the play of ethnic difference has less to do with exclusive access to an implicitly ‘Shona’ nation, and more to do with the demand to be included within a broader project and ethos of modernity.