Geographies of terror, harvest of fear: chiefs, local administration and politics in Zimbabwe in the 2000s

The emergence of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, in 1999 radically reconfigured Zimbabwe's political landscape. MDC greatly challenged the electoral dominance the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front had enjoyed since independence in 1980. As literature on Zimbabwe's 'crisis' has emphasised, throughout the 2000s ZANU-PF was predominantly preoccupied with repelling this challenge. Central to these efforts were violence and a patronage system involving all state institutions. However, the position of chieftaincy in the new politics has suffered scholarly neglect. This article examines how the government enlisted chiefs and lower-level traditional leaders, through intimidation and patronage networks, in its attempts to make rural areas an exclusively ZANU-PF vote bank. It utilises interviews, newspapers and Hansard, among other publicly available material, to argue that MDC's hegemonic threat forced ZANU-PF to turn to the customary capital of the hitherto neglected chiefs, and that the consequent relationship became an impediment to democracy in Zimbabwe.