Zimbabwe: liberation nationalism - old and born-again

In April 1980 Zimbabwe was born amid equal measures of celebration for the triumph over Rhodesian colonialism and expectation of the challenges that lay ahead. After seven years of armed struggle and decades of economic and political repression, inequality and conflict under white colonialism, the prospect of a new progressive order under two avowedly leftist liberation movement parties pointed to opportunities for substantial redistribution and development, and the establishment of an inclusive, participatory government in place of white minority rule. Under majority rule, the new Zimbabwean state was envisaged as the primary vehicle for this project, with the liberation movements led by Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) providing political guidance and legitimacy, and popular sections of civil society - the labour movement, collective cooperatives, progressive media, churches and rights organisations, and others - providing support in consultation and engagement from below. Thirty years later, the last vestiges of that once inspiring project lie in ruins. Through successive cycles of economic and political restructuring inflected by unsettled and shifting class alliances in the political leadership, ZNU-PF unravelled the development power of the nationalist state, along with the prospects for its constructive and popular confrontation of renewed imperial power. In 2010, at the end of a turbulent decade characterised by the militarisation of politics and the dismal withering of Zimbabwe's once-envied professional state, a new 'nationalist consensus' has emerged in the guise of the securocrat business-politicians who dominate it. ZANU-PF v.2000 - militarised, opaque, elitist, immersed in secretive and corrupt business deals, a model of elite entitlement but not popular delivery - is this the model of 'liberation nationalism' that we should expect to see elsewhere in the region, as the disciplining principles of 'people struggle' gives way to the hunger for elite class formation? Does ZANU-PF reflect the dying days of late nationalism - or its reinvention in a new form that depends importantly on interlinked elite networks of politics and markets extending beyond the country's borders?