IDCPPA Research Seminar - 23 May 2026 - Dr. Nhlanhla Moyo - Democracy, Violence & Ethnicity: Matabeleland and Bulawayo’s Subjectivity in Zimbabwe’s Second Republic

Thursday,  21 May 2026, 14:00 – 15:30 SAST.

CSSR Seminar Room 4.29

Robert Leslie Social Sciences Building

University of Cape Town

Please request a video link if you wish to attend online.

Speaker

Dr. Nhlanhla Moyo

PhD, Department of Anthropology UCT

Democracy, Violence & Ethnicity: Matabeleland and Bulawayo’s Subjectivity in Zimbabwe’s Second Republic.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which political subjectivity is formed and expressed in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe in the region of Matabeleland. The dissertation argues that Zimbabwe’s political history - characterized by colonialism, ethnic exclusion, and state violence - has produced a volatile and exclusionary form of democracy that many citizens relate to as violent and alienating. Not surprisingly, in this context, everyday acts of resistance are not articulated by the formal politics of opposition but rather as informal, symbolic, and tactical practices centered around economic survival and cultural assertion. The study emphasizes the central themes of democracy, violence, ethnicity, and political subjectivity to demonstrate how one’s past remains influential in shaping their present, in both observable and insidious ways. The research was conducted ethnographically with data gathered in Bulawayo combining interviews, participant observation, and digital or online ethnography. The study draws on four domains - forex trading, football fandom, informal vending and politics - and demonstrates how marginalized people resist and reimagine the state through quotidian acts of negotiation, evasion, and subversion. In theory, the dissertation engages Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, James Scott’s theory of everyday resistance, Michel de Certeau’s tactical subjectivity, Frantz Fanon’s critiques of colonial violence, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s coloniality of power to understand how citizens coexist with and contest power from the margins.

Bio

Nhlanhla Moyo has just completed his doctoral studies in the Centre for African Studies and Anthropology department at the University of Cape Town. He has a background in Mining Engineering and has also Majored in Psychology at Undergraduate level up to Honours at the University of the Witwatersrand and then studied Anthropology at Masters level before moving to UCT. With this Myriad of disciplines, he also considers himself as a de-colonial scholar. Amongst his accomplishments he has contributed a chapter to a book titled “Rioting and Writing: Diaries of Wits Fallists” published in 2016, and has two pending journal articles awaiting publication, work which makes a critical decolonial analysis. His focus area is on Democracy, Violence and Ethnicity under Nationalism in a Post-colony, with particular focus on minority groups.