The Politics of Memorialisation in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Africa is now in a new era of state produced nationalist history. Alessandro Triulzi has recently argued that:

public history in many parts of Africa has largely overcome academic explorations of the past, while its strongest ally, an ill-defined ‘public memory’, under the guise of state rituals and public memorialisation of past events, has come to dominate the public arena filling the fluid space which exists between memory and history with a disturbing asphalt-like cover of enduring cement. In this wide-ranging and politically-oriented process, the State often acts as a primary agent of history, if not its main promulgator and interpreter. As professional historians are relegated to a secondary role, or at times dismissed as public agitators, a forcefully-shared vision of the nation’s ‘collective memory’ is drafted in government offices by state intellectuals in order to settle accounts with the country’s troubled past … The ensuing result is the moulding of state-driven policies of memory aimed at rewriting the national script by enhancing unwritten norms of exclusion which set apart citizen from subject, freeborn from bondage-bound, patriots from sell-outs. (Triulzi, 2006, citing Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe, 1993)