White Zimbabweans helped cause the post-2000 crisis by clinging to colonial identities

Evidence

We also focus on these memoirs on account of the possibilities that they create for a nuanced appreciation of the genesis of what scholars have termed the post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis. Bond and Manyanya (2002), Raftopoulos (2013), and Bratton (2016), among others, present this crisis as the direct culmination of the FTLRP which they see as an occasion for the wanton violation of supposedly sacrosanct white property rights. Their studies promote an account of the crisis that mollifies dispossessed white commercial farmers as helpless victims of the Zimbabwean government’s “rehearsed sense of national history that dichotomizes blacks and whites” (Nyambi, 2015, p. 125). While these scholars have elucidated “the authoritarian politics that has been the modality for the land interventions of the Mugabe regime” (Raftopoulos, 2006, p. 203), their representation of white Zimbabweans as victims of the black-white binary understates the complex ways in which white Zimbabweans contributed to the crisis by fixating their gaze on values and identities of the colonial heyday. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists, 11

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated purpose: this is the framing claim of an analysis of a threatened-dominant white settler group, testing whether their grievance persisted decoupled from political power. — connects to: White Zimbabwean memoirs contest land loss via colonial-era ideology. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 4; White Zimbabwean authors write from a sustained Rhodesian supremacist mindset even after losing land — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 13; White colonials were themselves bound and trapped by empire — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1371 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• White Zimbabwean authors write from a sustained Rhodesian supremacist mindset even after losing land #corroborates (0.90) — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists, 13
• White identity formation has been central to land-taking and nation-building #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 754
• White colonials were themselves bound and trapped by empire #complicates (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1371
• Neoliberal decolonisation policy aimed to keep whites in former colonies as welcome partners. #complicates (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 232