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List of contents
1. Legacies of liberation: postcolonial struggles for a democratic southern Africa 2. Culture and resistance in Swaziland 3. The Zimbabwean People’s Army moment in Zimbabwean history, 1975-1977: Mugabe’s rise and democracy’s demise 4. Liberating development? Rule and liberation in post-independence Tanzania 5. From liberation movement to party machine? The ANC in South Africa 6. A parallel universe - competing interpretations of Zimbabwe’s crisis 7. Land resistance in Zambia: a case study of the Luana Farmers’ Cooperative 8. Geologies of power: blood diamonds, security politics and Zimbabwe’s troubled transition
About the author
Carolyn Bassett is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. She has published in Canadian Journal of African Studies, Third World Quarterly and Review of African Political Economy.
Marlea Clarke is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, Canada, and a research associate with Labour and Enterprise Research Project (LEP), University of Cape Town, South Africa. She has published in Law, Democracy and Development, Canadian Journal of African Studies and Work, Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, and co-authored Working Without Commitments.
Summary
National liberation, one of the grand narratives of the twentieth century, has left a weighty legacy of unfulfilled dreams. This book explores the ongoing struggle for legitimate, accountable political leaders in postcolonial Southern Africa, focusing on dilemmas arising when ex-liberation movements form the governments. While the spread of multi-party democracy to most countries in the region is to be celebrated, democratic practice often has been superficial - a limited, elitist politics that relies on the symbols of the liberation struggle to legitimate de facto one-party rule and authoritarian practices. Using country cases from Tanzania, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Zambia, the collection explores three subthemes relevant to postcolonial governance in Southern Africa: how the struggle for liberation shapes the character of political transformation, the nature of rule in one-party dominant states headed by former liberation movements, and the processes of governance and resistance in post-liberation contexts.
This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.
