Fighting and Writing during Zimbabwe’s Interregna: Part II – a Political Murder and the Death of Politics

Part I intended to investigate Zimbabwe’s ‘interregna’ theoretically via a review article. But a political murder illustrating Zimbabwe’s horrific authoritarian impasse took over. Part II was to briefly close the case by summarising the murder trial and the victim’s funeral, then resuming Part I’s goals. However, the judge’s trial and sentence statements – in context – proved intriguing for three reasons. First, the accused changed his ‘warning and cautioned’ statement of ‘guilty’ on arrest to ‘innocent’ at the trial. Second and simultaneously with the trial’s end, the main opposition party’s leader abandoned his shattered party. Third, the exceptionally arbitrary and cruel way Zimbabwe’s rulers treated politician and lawyer Job Sikhala – this tale’s main political protagonist, incarcerated for nearly 600 days awaiting bail and trial – is symptomatic of the fate for activists in Zimbabwe’s opposition and the annihilation of Zimbabwe’s liberal and/or social democratic dreams of the early 2000s. As these aspirations approached finality, an ‘uprising’ challenging Mnangagwa’s efforts to extend his presidential term seemed worthy of inclusion. Part III will return to discussion of ‘interregna’ globally and locally, beginning by interrogating Nadine Gordimer’s 1983 New York Review of Books article on such matters (as the Transformation III editors’ introduction recalled).