Waiting on the margins of the state: Tembo Mvura narratives on development in Kanyemba

Since the 1990s, CAMPFIRE has promised the Tembo Mvura development (clinic, school, bridge and permanent housing). These facilities have been built by NGOs and missionaries, and yet the community does not experience them as development. They continue to wait for CAMPFIREA to deliver on its promises. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork across 6 years to examine what this paradox reveals about the relationship between waiting, governance and subjectivity in Kanyemba. It argues that institutional deferral has reshaped how the Tembo Mvura understand what counts as legitimate development and who has the authority to deliver it. The paper extends the temporal governance framework to a post-colonial conservation context, documents a gendered and intergenerational dimension of waithood rooted in the criminalisation of livelihoods and revises the passive/active distinction in the waiting discourse.