Chimurenga necropolitics: liberation war legacies and electoral coercion in Zimbabwe, 1980 − 2023

Abstract

Abstract

This article examines how specific coercive practices developed during Zimbabwe’s 1966–79 liberation struggle were selectively preserved, reconfigured, and embedded within the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and state institutions after independence in 1980. Building on scholarship on political violence, liberation memory, authoritarianism, and state formation, it argues that key wartime repertoires of rule did not disappear with independence but were adapted into enduring mechanisms of electoral governance. This article traces practices such as compulsory political gatherings (mapungwe/pungwe), loyalty-based classifications, localised surveillance networks, exemplary punishment, and the moral justification of coercion as revolutionary pedagogy. It demonstrates how these practices became routinised within party and state institutions and were deployed to regulate political competition, discipline communities, and shape electoral outcomes. To explain this process, this article develops the concept of Chimurenga necropolitics, a historically specific framework for understanding how liberation-war authority, memories of sacrifice, and coercive power became intertwined in postcolonial governance. Moving beyond interpretations of post-independence violence as episodic and beyond broader debates on guerrilla warfare, insurgency, and terrorism, this study highlights the institutional afterlives of wartime practices and their role in sustaining political rule. Drawing on twenty oral history interviews conducted between 2020 and 2025, archival records, and electoral evidence, it contributes to wider debates on post-liberation authoritarianism by showing how revolutionary legitimacy became institutionalised within enduring structures of governance in Zimbabwe.