Land is the Economy and the Economy is Land: Re-assessing Zimbabwe's "Revolution"

Dr Bill Derman, Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Michigan State University, has been carrying out research in Zimbabwe since 1987 after a long period of research in West Africa. His interests are in environment and change, planned rural development, analyses of development projects, and, more recently, decentralization of natural resource management institutions.

Michigan State University at the urging of the Director of its African Studies Center conferred an honorary doctorate upon Robert Mugabe in 1990 for the success of the people of Zimbabwe in their struggle for independence and a successful decade of development.

Why were we, like so many other academic institutions so positive toward the new Zimbabwe? How do the ongoing multiple crises in Zimbabwe pose a set of challenges to those of us who supported various dimensions of the ZANU-PF government since independence in 1980? How do we understand past scholarship on Zimbabwe (for example David Lan's celebration of mhondoros and guerillas in the Zambezi Valley), and to what extent we and I include myself, downplayed or ignored what might now be termed the politics of evil.

In this talk I will briefly outline the origins of the current crisis from the standpoint of an engaged researcher. Second, I will suggest some questions that need to be asked about past research and perspectives in light of contemporary trends. In particular how we did we miss the potentials for committing violence and terror by members of the ruling party and what this portends for the near-future? For example, how do we analyze a government and state that has done so little during the worst pandemic in Zimbabwe's history and is this neglect connected to other forms of violence?