Product details
- ISBN 9781032841168
- Weight: 710g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book considers the historical and spatial dimensions of civil society in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland region, an area suffering from severe development and democratic deficits over many decades.
Transcending an organisational conception of civil society and a simplistic state-civil society dualist understanding, it recognises the dynamic character of civil society as a social space, inclusive of less formalised associational forms of collective life, as well as the colonial character and legacies of civil society both analytically and empirically. This book facilitates a nuanced understanding of the specificities of the social, political, and economic evolution of Matabeleland in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe, and the region’s troubled relations with the central state. Historically, it traces civil society in Matabeleland from the region’s resistance against the colonial-settler state to contemporary struggles for justice given the unresolved Gukurahundi legacy. Civil society is depicted as constituted by a set of complex and shifting struggles for justice, not simply between Matabeleland and the central state, but also internally within Matabeleland along multiple fault lines including class and culture. The relevance of understanding civil society in Matabeleland, for Zimbabwe and Africa more widely, is brought to the fore.
The book will be of interest and value to scholars of civil society, politics and democratisation across the African continent.
Mandlenkosi Mpofu is a senior lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Eswatini in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), where he is also the Chair of the Faculty Research Committee.
Dion Nkomo is a professor of African language studies at Rhodes University where he holds a research chair on the intellectualisation of African languages, multilingualism and education.
Kirk Helliker is Emeritus Research Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rhodes University where he also established and heads the Unit of Zimbabwean Studies. He has published widely on Zimbabwe including with specific reference to civil society.
