Settlerism, Liberation, and Neo-liberalism: Narratives and the Dialectics of Resource Redistribution in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe

Abstract The article explores the cardinal role that narratives, ideas, and discourses play as reference points to guide policy traction and trajectory. The study focuses on the interplay amongst the settler, liberation, and neo-liberal narratives as they informed the political economy of post-colonial Zimbabwe. Because the agency of these narratives memorialises race, privilege, native subalternism, restitution, and white hubris and neo-colonial obduracy, the article argues that the concepts of sovereignty and nation-state-building have become highly contested. Interpreted in the present but rooted in the colonial past, the indigenisation drive has become a conflicted discourse, torn between continuities and discontinuities—narratives and counter-narratives of liberation, post- colonialism, and black empowerment as against the Empire's neo-colonial modes of domination which have sanctioned a kind of “conflict in perpetuity”. Therefore, in deconstructing the contradictions of transitional politics, policy instrumentalisation, state predations, and unprecedented political contestations that make up the Zimbabwean predicament, this article argues that the trajectory of Zimbabwe's indigenisation drive reveals the saliency of ideas either as a source of legitimation, a source of contestation, or as contours for a nuanced analysis of Zimbabwe's political economy.