Abstract:
The article explores Zimbabwe’s history of racism,
ethnicity, and other forms of “othering” from 1890 to
2020 and argues that, although scholars of Zimbabwe’s
past have, hitherto, shied away from using the term,
these pathologies amounted collectively to xenophobia.
It calls on scholars of the country’s colonial history to
investigate the degree to which the above pathologies
were, arguably, xenophobic. The article argues that
xenophobic tendencies in colonial and post-colonial
Zimbabwe emanate from a number of key historical
developments. These include the establishment
of artificial colonial borders at the turn of the 19th
century and the creation of an artificial nation-state
called Southern Rhodesia, which engendered a new
colonial identity that eventually crystallised into an
exclusivist Zimbabwean nationalism and the divide and-rule segregationist racial colonial policies that
promoted national disharmony. Also significant was the
development of the settler colonial economy and its
insatiable hunger for cheap African labour, which led
to labour migration from neighbouring countries and
the socio-economic tensions this unleashed. Last was
the role of an increasingly parochial Shona nationalism,
which claimed the Shona as the real owners of the
land and whose proponents advanced a particularistic
rendition of the past that is known in Zimbabwean
historiography as “patriotic history”. The article then concludes by sketching out the various manifestations of xenophobic tendencies in the
country in the period under study. The study is essentially a reappraisal of Zimbabwean
history and not a product of new research and fieldwork.
