- - Due to technical problems on the day, we were unable to record the visuals from the cameras on the venue and therefore only audio version is available for most of the session. - - -
Zimbabwe’s party-internal ‘coup’ of 2017, and deposed president Robert Mugabe’s death nearly two years later, demand careful, historically nuanced explanation. How did Mugabe gain and retain power over party and state for four decades? Did the suspected and nearly real ‘coups’, the conspiracies behind them, and their concurrent mythomaniacal conceits ultimately, ironically, spell his near-tragic end? Has Mugabe’s particular mode of power reached a finality with his own downfall, as his successors struggle more to balance Zimbabwe’s political contradictions? Will the phalanxes arrayed against Mugabe’s control fray further, as Zimbabwe fades?
Mugabe’s Legacy delves deeply into such questions, drawing on more than forty years of archival and interview-based research on Zimbabwe’s political history and current precariousness. Starting with the mid-1970s, it traces how Machiavellian moves allowed Mugabe to reach the apex of the Zimbabwe African National Union’s already slippery slopes, through the complexities of Cold War, regional, ideological, generational, inter- and intra-party tensions. The lessons learned by the president and the nascent ruling party then turned gradually inward, ultimately arriving at a near-collapse that may now pervade all of the country’s political space. David B. Moore vividly charts this rise and fall, all the way to Zimbabwe’s tenuous chaos today.
Join us for the London launch and panel discussion with author David B. Moore and special guests.
Chair: Dr Nick Westcott, Director of RAS
Moderator: Adam Habib, Director for SOAS
Speakers:
Joost Fontein, Professor of Anthropology
Hamadziripi Munyika, Researcher
Mandipa Ndlovu, Governance Researcher and Development Policy Analyst
Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Junior Research Fellow in African & Comparative Literature
Негізгі бет Mugabe's Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe by David Moore
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