The Small Matter of “Sellouts”: Chiefs, History, Politics, and the State at Zimbabwe’s Independence, 1980–1985

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the relationship between chiefs and the state in Zimbabwe's immediate post-independence years. Focusing on the period 1980 to 1985, it discusses how the advent of independence in 1980 engendered tensions between the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) government and chieftaincy. Through a series of legal and policy instruments, the new government transferred the little power chiefs had over grassroots land and judicial processes to bureaucratic and party functionaries. Literature has largely emphasised the state's “socialist,” modernising, and democratising agenda to explain this emasculation of chiefs. However, this article foregrounds political motivations, whose base lay in colonial history, and argues that this was also a punitive response against chieftaincy's entanglement with the colonial state, particularly in the era of mass nationalism. Using archival records, newspapers, interviews, and parliamentary debates, the article demonstrates continuity in the manner in which the post-independence state related with chiefs: as in the colonial era, the relationship continued to be defined by the political interests and strategies of the governing regime.