Mugabe’s Urban Legacy: A Postcolonial Perspective on Urban Development in Harare, Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
pp. 002190962094362
Author(s):  
Abraham R Matamanda
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
Spatial Segregation ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Dominant Feature ◽  
State Capture ◽  
British Colonial

Robert Gabriel Mugabe resigned as the President of Zimbabwe in 2017 after being in office since 1980 when Zimbabwe gained independence from British colonial rule. Mugabe implemented various policies that impacted on the urbanscape of Zimbabwe. Using a desktop approach that is based on bibliography research, the study examines Mugabe’s urban legacy through the lenses of postcolonial theory and the concept of Mugabeism. The results show that power was a dominant feature in Mugabe’s legacy, as he used it to influence the socio-spatial configuration of the urban scape whenever he saw it befitting. His power was rooted in corruption, clientism, patronage, state capture and sanctioning of opponents. Essentially, Mugabe perpetuated the colonial city, in that the postcolonial city was a replication of the socio-spatial segregation which existed during the colonial era, yet this time round it was based on class and not race.

British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 1619-1644 ◽  
Author(s):  
AJAY VERGHESE
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Indian Government ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Princely State ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policies

AbstractBritish colonial rule in India precipitated a period of intense rebellion among the country's indigenous groups. Most tribal conflicts occurred in the British provinces, and many historians have documented how a host of colonial policies gave rise to widespread rural unrest and violence. In the post-independence period, many of the colonial-era policies that had caused revolt were not reformed, and tribal conflict continued in the form of the Naxalite insurgency. This article considers why the princely state of Bastar has continuously been a major centre of tribal conflict in India. Why has this small and remote kingdom, which never came under direct British rule, suffered so much bloodshed? Using extensive archival material, this article highlights two key findings: first, that Bastar experienced high levels of British intervention during the colonial period, which constituted the primary cause of tribal violence in the state; and second, that the post-independence Indian government has not reformed colonial policies in this region, ensuring a continuation and escalation of tribal conflict through the modern Naxalite movement.

scholarly journals PIRIṬṬIṢ KĀLAṈIYA ĀṬCIYIṈPŌTU MALĀYĀVĀḺ TAMIḺC CAMUTĀYAM AṬAINTA MĒLĀTIKKANILAI [THE HEGEMONISM ON TAMIL COMMUNITY DURING THE BRITISH COLONIAL RULE]

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
MANIYARASAN MUNIANDY
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Study Data ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Car Industry ◽  
Rubber Plantations ◽  
South Indian ◽  
British Colonial

Malaya was under colonial rule by the British at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the world. Rubber was considered an essential commodity for the car industry. The UK government approached East India Company entrepreneurs and advised them to set up rubber plantations in Malaya. Those suggestions were accepted and arrangements were made for deforestation in order to plant rubber trees throughout Malaya. The locals retreated to do the work. On the advice of the British rulers, South Indian Tamils ​​were brought to Malaya by the kangani system and by contract system and settled in rubber plantations. The Tamil people destroyed the jungles surrounding Malaya and planted rubber trees. Later, they were hired as rubber tapper in rubber plantations. The Tamil people who worked in this way suffered from the British investors, the Sri Lankan Tamils ​​who worked as plantation managers and the non-Tamil Indians who worked as clerks. C.Vadivelu, a senior Malaysian Tamil writer, has made clear through his short stories the cruelty of the hegemonism of British investors. His three collections of short stories are considered as the primary sources of this study and the historical references of Malaysia as supporting sources of the study. Data collected from short stories have been analyzed based on postcolonial theory. This study reveals the fact that the Malay Tamil people were sociologically and economically dominated by the British colonial rulers.

Elphinstone and the Afghan-Pathan Elision

2019 ◽  
pp. 299-318
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Leake
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Northern Pakistan ◽  
Regional Politics ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Great Game

Mountstuart Elphinstone's writings on Afghanistan have had lingering effects throughout the twentieth (and into the twenty-first) century. Even with the end of British colonial rule in 1947, western interest in Afghanistan, and particularly the Pathan borderlands spread across southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, has remained. Both British and American observers have continued to value this region for its strategic locale, even as both have wrestled with the "tribal" nature of the local Pathan population and its longstanding autonomy from neighboring states. While Cold War competition replaced the rivalry of the Great Game, colonial-era understandings of Afghanistan and local and regional politics continued to color western policies towards this region. This chapter reflects on the legacies of Elphinstone's work for western policymakers, particularly in the aftermath of partition and in the emergent Cold War. Using the works of Olaf Caroe and James W. Spain, it considers how Elphinstone's ideas and rhetoric concerning Afghan politics and tribal society and organization have resounded in western conceptualizations of Afghanistan, and neighboring Pakistan. It compares British and American understandings of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and their relative reliance on Elphinstone's ideas. Ultimately it considers the similarities and differences in the ways that British and American officials have perceived and valued Afghanistan's place in a broader world political order.

Postcolonial Spatiality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Sim
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Port City ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Postcolonial Identity ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Spatial Discourse ◽  
Structural Influence ◽  
Historical Origins

This chapter examines the ways in which Singapore’s geographically inflected condition finds its way onto the national cinema’s expressive palette. It examines the country’s spatial epistemology from its historical origins as an island and colonial port city, to the modern state’s management of urban development and land scarcity. Singapore’s real and imagined relationship to British colonial rule exerts a structural influence, and impresses itself onto the architecture of its built environment, infrastructural design, and artistic production. Inspired by Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema, this study defines the national hermeneutic that results, through the discovery of pregnant codes and signs, along with activated signals of direction and scale. Singapore’s postcolonial identity thus infuses feature and short filmmaking with spatial discourse in three forms: aerial cartography, affective maps, and colonial atlases.

scholarly journals THE TOWN DEVELOPMENT IN TELUK ANSON DURING BRITISH COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION, 1874-1957

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Tuan Waheda Tuan Chik ◽  
Khairi Ariffin
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Commercial Agriculture ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Town

This study is about the emergence and development of the town of Teluk Anson or is now known by the name of Teluk Intan located in the Lower Perak district from 1874 to 1957 during the British colonial administration. Urban development was booming during the British administration due to colonial economic and political activities. This has led to several areas of economic activity in Perak emerging and expanding to a city while establishing a western-oriented urban concept. In terms of development, it had a positive impact on the urban development and socio-economic of society in Teluk Anson. Therefore, the study was fully carried out by using qualitative methods through document analysis approaches such as the Perak Secretariat and Perak Annual Report obtained from the National Archives of Malaysia. The use of secondary sources such as books and writings of studies on the economics and history of the town during the British colonial era was also used to reinforce the findings. The findings show that a number of economic activities had contributed to the development and transformation of the Teluk Anson urban landscape such as trading activities at the main wharf and commercial agriculture. This indirectly contributed to the development of the Teluk Anson urbanization network. Overall, the British administration policy in the state of Perak has driven the emergence and development of the Teluk Anson town and this was driven by the trade at the wharf and commercial agriculture. Thus, the Teluk Anson town was one of the major cities of trade during the British colonial era.

Tagore’s Perspective on Decolonizing Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mousumi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Colonial

Decolonization is a historic process that picked up momentum in the second half of the 20th century, whereby several countries of the Global South in Asia, Africa, and Latin America successively gained independence from European colonial rule and became sovereign modern nation-states. However, territorial independence from an external ruling power alone could not bring an end to all the social, political, and economic problems ushered in by hundreds of years of imperialism. This fact was realized long before independence from colonial rule by Rabindranath Tagore within the context of British colonial India. Hence, even before territorial and political decolonization, Tagore sought to decolonize the minds of people through education reform by first setting up his own school in 1901 and then establishing Visva-Bharati University in 1921. In fact, Tagore, who is the author of the national anthems of two independent modern South Asian nation-states, never saw independent India. He died in 1941 as a British colonial subject, six years before the independence of India from colonial rule in 1947. While many indigenous intellectuals of his era adopted violent and nonviolent methods to fight against British imperialism, Tagore devoted much of his adult life to the pursuit of freedom through pedagogic reforms. Tagore’s philosophy and practice of pedagogic reform sought to “decolonize education” in British colonial India. Tagore’s own writings on education beginning in 1892 reveal that his philosophy and practice to “decolonize education” was based on the memory and critical reflections on his own experiences as a student in mainstream schools during the British colonial era in India. Tagore’s philosophy of education, institutionalized through his decolonizing pedagogic reform work in his school and university at Bolepur, Shantiniketan, were concrete responses of a highly creative and critical-thinking indigenous intellectual to the problems of the mainstream education system during his time. Hence, studying Tagore’s perspective on “decolonizing education” can provide us with a deeper understanding of the educational problems posed by British imperialism in India, as well as the evolution of these problems in the colonial metropole, which became global in nature through the process of colonialism, as has been argued by a number of academics, including modern British historian Michael Collins and postcolonial Indian academic Sanjukta Dasgupta.

The Japanese Factor in the Making of North Korean Socialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
Ernest Ming-Tak Leung
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Stepping Stone ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Juche Ideology

This article explores a commonly ignored aspect of Japan–North Korean relations: the Japanese factor in the making of Korean socialism. Korea was indirectly influenced by the Japanese Jiyuminken Movement, in the 1910s–1920s serving as a stepping-stone for the creation of a Japanese Communist Party. Wartime mobilization policies under Japanese rule were continued and expanded beyond the colonial era. The Juche ideology built on tendencies first exhibited in the 1942 Overcoming Modernity Conference in Japan, and in the 1970s some Japanese leftists viewed Juche as a humanist Marxism. Trade between Japan and North Korea expanded from 1961 onwards, culminating in North Korea’s default in 1976, from which point on relations soured between the two countries. Yet leaders with direct experience of colonial rule governed North Korea through to the late 1990s.

Making Africa Legible

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Caitlyn Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Generation Gap ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Standardization ◽  
Children And Parents ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Local Languages

European colonialism and missionization in Africa initiated a massive orthographic shift across the continent, as local languages that had been written for centuries in Arabic letters were forcibly re-written in Roman orthography through language standardization reforms and the introduction of colonial public schools. Using early missionary grammars promoting the “conversion of Africa from the East,” British colonial standardization policies and educational reforms, as well as petitions and newspaper editorials by the local Swahilispeaking community, I trace the story of the Romanization of Swahili in Zanzibar, the site chosen as the standard Swahili dialect. While the Romanization of African languages such as Swahili was part of a project of making Africa legible to Europeans during the colonial era, the resulting generation gap as children and parents read different letters made Africa more illegible to Africans themselves.

scholarly journals Colonial legacies: Shaping African cities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neeraj G Baruah ◽  
J Vernon Henderson ◽  
Cong Peng
Keyword(s):  
City Planning ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
New Developments ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Compact Development ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Dual Mandate

Abstract Institutions persisting from colonial rule affect the spatial structure and conditions under which 100s of millions of people live in Sub-saharan African cities. In a sample of 318 cities, Francophone cities have more compact development than Anglophone, overall, in older colonial sections, and at clear extensive margins long after the colonial era. Compactness covers intensity of land use, gridiron road structures and leapfrogging of new developments. Why the difference? Under British indirect and dual mandate rule, colonial and native sections developed without coordination. In contrast, integrated city planning and land allocation were featured in French direct rule. These differences in planning traditions persist.1

scholarly journals “There'll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Webster
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
National Community ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1950S

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.

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