Rebuilding the liberation war base: materiality and landscapes of violence in Northern Zimbabwe

This article examines how war veterans aligned to the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) serving in the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) attempt to use affective experiences at former guerrilla bases dating to the liberation struggle of the 1970s, in conjunction with highly charged but also highly tailored narratives about the war, to constitute certain kinds of political subjectivity and loyalty to the ruling party among trainee officers, and local communities in Bindura South. Yet the very efforts they put into controlling and rehearsing workshops organized at such sites speaks to their own awareness of the excessivity of affective experience, which ultimately denies efforts to control narratives of the past and to constitute particular kinds of political subjectivity. The past has a relationship with the present through affective experiences with landscape and its materials, but such experiences are difficult to contain and channel. Engaging with recent debates about materiality, and the agency, affordances, and affective qualities of objects and landscapes I argue that liberation landscapes of past violence are active and affective, but also not wholly controlled or control-able by war veterans and ZANU-PF leaders attempting to forge particular kinds of political loyalty. This excessivity of landscapes of past violence defies narrative closure, and allows space for other narratives, other performances and experiences of the materiality of milieu.