The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage

Almost all metrics, used to measure strife and human suffering, indicate times are very difficult in Zimbabwe.In the past year, reporters from the The New York Times and The Guardian have documented "super-hyper-inflation" with percentages in the millions, outbreaks of Cholera, and political unrest associated with widespread accusations of voting irregularities in favor of long-time president and elder of the dominant Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party Robert Mugabe.Just as an uneasy power-sharing agreement began to take hold between ZANU-PF and the main opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was severely injured and his wife killed in a massive car accident near Harare (McGreal 2009).Accounts of political turmoil describing Zimbabwe are plentiful in the popular media.Likewise, academic paths leading to Zimbabwe are well-worn by researchers investigating major political and economic restructuring and related issues of regional unrest.The narratives of such events often focus on the action of colossal figures such as Mugabe and Tsvangirai and the concentric waves of political power and intrigue radiating around them.In a similar fashion, the iconic archaeological site of Great Zimbabwe, from which the modern state derives its name, has most often been chronicled in terms of its importance to early international trading networks and the impressive wealth that pooled in elite areas of the site as well as pejorative --and now debunked --arguments that groups from outside of sub-Saharan Arica constructed and managed the site.In The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage, Joost Fontein attempts to shift the investigative gaze away from the actions of national political figures and away from regional and trans-regional political economies to an intensely local level.This, he accomplishes through rendering a local history of Great Zimbabwe that documents how local Shona speaking communities (i.e., the Nemanwa, Charumbira, Mugabe clans) living near the site "construct" it as a font of historical memory and a politicized landscape around which authority is contested.The engagingly written monograph is a revised version of Fontein's dissertation, which was supervised by Jeanne Cannizzo.Fontein conducted research for the project between 2000 and 2004 and focused his study in the area immediately surrounding