Rethinking and Unthinking Development

Rethinking and Unthinking Development
Author: Busani Mpofu
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-03-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789201772

Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa’s former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.

Zimbabwe's Cinematic Arts

Zimbabwe's Cinematic Arts
Author: Katrina Daly Thompson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0253006465

This timely book reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that play out in broadly accessible local and foreign film and television, Katrina Daly Thompson shows how viewers interpret these media and how they impact everyday life, language use, and thinking about community. She offers a unique understanding of how media reflect and contribute to Zimbabwean culture, language, and ethnicity.

COVID-19 Manifestation, Ramifications and Future Prospects for Zimbabwe: A Multi-disciplinary Perspective

COVID-19 Manifestation, Ramifications and Future Prospects for Zimbabwe: A Multi-disciplinary Perspective
Author: Munyaradzi Mawere
Publisher: Langaa RPCID
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2021-04-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9789956551354

The advent of Coronavirus (also known as COVID-19) pandemic has caused much distress, despondence, fear and pandemonium across all nations of the world. In Zimbabwe, the emergence of the virus sent a chilling message of insecurity and need for conscientiousness and diligence, as the virus decimated humankind amid untold suffering. The pandemic came as a litmus test for the integrity and meticulousness of all the so-called professionals and institutions of integrity across the country, challenging them to stand equal to their tasks, titles and claimed astuteness. For Zimbabwe and Africa in general, the manifestation and ramifications of COVID-19, has raised so many questions around issues of people's welfare and innovative research, especially amid the reality that the country is dependent on charity and donations from well-wishers for the vaccines it needs, over and above the modest amount it can purchase. This reality and related challenges pose interesting research questions addressed in this volume. A central question on the possibility and extent of home-grown solutions inspired by and tailored to the needs and predicaments of Zimbabwe and the African continent. The richness of the book is in the firsthand eyewitness accounts of scholars caught up in the COVID-19 challenge. The researchers in this volume have sought to capture developments, insights and evolutions as they unfold and progress. The book is handy for scholars in policy studies, risk and disaster management, social anthropology, political science, development studies, African studies and decolonial fields of studies.

Where We Have Hope

Where We Have Hope
Author: Andrew Meldrum
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1555846904

A journalist’s harrowing account of life in Zimbabwe—and the human rights atrocities perpetuated—under President Robert Mugabe’s despotic rule. Where We Have Hope is the gripping memoir of a young American journalist. In 1980, Andrew Meldrum arrived in a Zimbabwe flush with new independence, and he fell in love with the country and its optimism. But over the twenty years he lived there, Meldrum watched as President Robert Mugabe consolidated power and the government evolved into despotism. In May 2003, Meldrum, the last foreign journalist still working in the dangerous and chaotic nation, was illegally forced to leave his adopted home. Meldrum’s unflinching work describes the terror and intimidation Mugabe’s government exercised on both the press and citizens, and the resiliency of Zimbabweans determined to overturn Mugabe and demand the free society they were promised. “[A] remarkable odyssey . . . A compelling and, ultimately, heartbreaking story that demands to be read by anyone concerned about contemporary Africa.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Africa as a Living Laboratory

Africa as a Living Laboratory
Author: Helen Tilley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2011-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226803481

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

Women and Power in Zimbabwe

Women and Power in Zimbabwe
Author: Carolyn Martin Shaw
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2015-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780252081132

The revolt against white rule in Rhodesia nurtured incipient local feminisms in women who imagined independence as a road to gender equity and economic justice. But the country's rebirth as Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe's rise to power dashed these hopes. Using history, literature, participant observation, and interviews, Carolyn Martin Shaw surveys Zimbabwean feminisms from the colonial era to today. She examines how actions as seemingly disparate as an ability to bake scones during the revolution and achieving power within a marriage in fact represent complex sources of female empowerment. She also presents the ways women across Zimbabwean society--rural and urban, professional and domestic--accommodated or confronted post-independence setbacks. Finally, Shaw offers perspectives on the ways contemporary Zimbabwean women depart from the prevailing view that feminism is a Western imposition having little to do with African women. The result of thirty years of experience, Women and Power in Zimbabwe addresses what happened when a generation of African women deferred their dreams of empowerment.