Pan African Studies

Texts written by some white Zimbabweans in the post-2000 dispensation are largely shaped by their authors' endeavor to contest the loss of lands they held prior to the onset of the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP). Written as memoirs, these texts are bound by the tendency to fall back on colonial settler values, Rhodesian identities, and Hegelian supremacist ideas in their narration of aspects of a conflict in which tropes such as truth, justice, patriotism, and belonging were not only evoked but also reframed. This article explores manifestations of this tendency in Eric Harrison's Jambanja (2006) and Jim Barker's Paradise Plundered: The Story of a Zimbabwean Farm (2007). The discussion unfolds against the backdrop of the realization that much of the literary-critical scholarship on land reform in post-2000 Zimbabwe focuses on texts written by black Zimbabweans and does not attend to the panoply of ways in which some white-authored texts yearn for colonial structures of

Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) electoral 'victories' in post-2000 Zimbabwe are often attributed to the ruling party's reliance on violence, intimidation and other strong-arm tactics. This is only part of the story. With the advent of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999, ZANU-PF emerged with a power-retention matrix in which variables such as violence, patronage, memory, cronyism, regionalism and identity are marshaled to present its destiny and that of the nation as inseparable. In the elections of July 2018, for instance, ZANU-PF's remembrances of the past intersected with its perception of itself and the MDC as mutually exclusive, giving rise to self-other discourses that saw the former sliding into historical denialism and selective amnesia. As this article demonstrates, ZANU-PF self-exculpated by emphasizing that Mnangagwa's ascendancy to power symbolized the advent of a new socioeconomic , cultural and political dispensation. In advancing this argument, ZANU-PF held Mugabe responsible for all its failures and shortcomings between 1980 and 2017 and contested the MDC's monopoly over face-of-the-change-that-will-deliver-Zimbabwe identities by discrediting the opposition party as incapable of originating sound policies and realizable promises. This article investigates the operationalization of these counter-discourses in ZANU-PF's 2018 election manifesto and the pronouncements of its senior officials at political rallies to critique power dynamics in contemporary Zimbabwe.

The Aswa Shear Zone (ASZ) is a major NWeSE trending structure of over 1000 km length in East Africa. In Uganda, the ASZ is a steeply NE-dipping, up to 11 km wide mylonitic shear zone that shows multiple stage brittle reactivation. On outcrop-scale, the fabric in the ASZ is characterized by a well-developed NW eSE striking and subvertical or steeply NE or SW dipping mylonitic foliation and a subhorizontal to moderately NW-or SE-plunging stretching lineation. Sinistral kinematics and fabric are very consistent along strike. The strain is heterogeneously distributed and partitioned into lens-shaped lower strain zones dominated by folding and characterized by pure shear, which are surrounded by high strain zones, some of them thick ultramylonites, with intense simple shear combined with flattening and strong transposition of pre-existing fabrics. Ductile shearing occurred during bulk EeW shortening, commenced at amphibolite facies conditions and continued with similar kinematics at greenschist and even lower grade conditions. A number of (sub-)parallel shear zones occur to the NE and SW of the main zone at a distance of up to 20e45 km. They show similar fabrics and kinematics and are thus related to activity along ASZ reflecting strain partitioning into simple shear and pure shear domains on a regional scale. Samples of mylonitic gneisses from the shear zone have been analyzed with UePb LA-MC-ICPMS and show Neoarchaean crystallisation ages between 2.66 and 2.61 Ga. Timing of ductile sinistral shearing is poorly constrained by lower intercept ages of 686 ± 62 and 640 ± 44 Ma. The fabric and structural relationship of the ca. 660 Ma Adjumani Granite exposed in the northern segment of ASZ suggest that the age of shear activity can be further limited to ca. 685 and 655 Ma. The Aswa Shear Zone is interpreted as an intra-cratonic, crustal-scale structure close to the northeastern margin of the Congo Craton, possibly inherited from previous continental extension. Early Aswa Shear Zone activation is linked to underthrusting of the Congo Craton and coeval high-grade meta-morphism and intense deformation in the orogen interior. During EeW convergence between ca. 690 and 650 Ma, the NE-dipping ASZ was activated as an oblique ramp leading to deflection of the transport direction and concentration of non-coaxial strain and sinistral shear along the shear zone system. During progressive convergence, between ca. 645 and 620 Ma, sinistral shearing along ASZ changed to ductile ebrittle deformation mechanisms, while thrusting took place in Pan-African belts in eastern and western Uganda. Late-orogenic brittle sinistral reactivation of the ASZ can be regarded as the result of continent collision and closure of the Mozambique ocean further to the east, that potentially caused lateral escape manifested in NWeSE striking sinistral shear zones in Kenya and the southern Arabina-Nubian Shield between 620 and 570 Ma.