Living with uncertainty: disappearing modernities and polluted urbanity in post‐2000 Harare, Zimbabwe

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.