23
This article was downloaded by: [Newcastle University] On: 09 October 2014, At: 06:19 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Southern African Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss20 Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service Jocelyn Alexander a a University of Oxford Published online: 16 Dec 2013. To cite this article: Jocelyn Alexander (2013) Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service, Journal of Southern African Studies, 39:4, 807-828, DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2013.858536 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2013.858536 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

  • Upload
    jocelyn

  • View
    214

  • Download
    1

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

This article was downloaded by: [Newcastle University]On: 09 October 2014, At: 06:19Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Southern African StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss20

Militarisation and State Institutions:‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside theZimbabwe Prison ServiceJocelyn Alexandera

a University of OxfordPublished online: 16 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Jocelyn Alexander (2013) Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service, Journal of Southern African Studies, 39:4,807-828, DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2013.858536

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2013.858536

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2013 Vol. 39, No. 4, 807–828, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2013.858536

Militarisation and State Institutions:

‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the

Zimbabwe Prison Service

Jocelyn Alexander (University of Oxford)

Efforts to understand Zimbabwe’s recent upheavals have brought scholars into productive

conversation with approaches to African politics hitherto neglected in Zimbabwe. These have

included political science analyses of ‘disorder’ and ethnographic approaches to the state at

its unstable ‘margins’. Such analyses have highlighted the reconstitution of power through

the expansion of powerful networks inside and outside state institutions and focused attention

on the social and governmental effects of uncertainty. While these approaches are very

different, they share a tendency to neglect processes of change within the civil service proper.

Using a study of the ‘militarisation’ of Zimbabwe’s prison service, I argue that these

processes are essential to understanding the nature of political transformation. Militarisation

catastrophically undermined the prison service’s capacity to carry out its most basic

functions and divided its staff between ‘professionals’ and ‘soldiers’. Professionals embraced

an historically rooted state ideal built on the value of rules and expertise. They cast both as

essential attributes of statehood just as they were comprehensively subverted by the soldiers

in the name of an ongoing liberation struggle. Civil servants in these two camps no longer

shared a common set of norms or purposes, though they all participated to greater or lesser

degrees in the ‘militarised’ practices that pervaded the service. The unequal battle over the

nature of state authority that ensued was – and remains – crucial to the exercise and

legitimation of state power.

Introduction

In the late 1990s, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU[PF]) faced a series of unprecedented challenges to its rule, culminating in the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999. One of its most significant and enduring responses was its assault on key aspects of what had hitherto made Zimbabwean state bureaucracies authoritative, most importantly their expert, rule-bound character. This assault was necessary to ZANU(PF)’s strategy for retaining political power. It needed to be able to break and remake the law, deploy political violence, and make partisan use of state institutions and resources. While tensions between a professional ethic and partisan claims within state institutions were not new, the scale of this shift and the ‘militarised’ form it took was. It threatened what had been one of ZANU(PF)’s most powerful claims to legitimacy: the delivery of public services and goods (including order) by a professional civil service. ZANU(PF) responded to the threat to its legitimacy through the elaboration of ‘patriotic history’, a sophisticated narrative that opposed the frustrated goals of the liberation struggle and its gun-wielding heroes to neo-colonialism and its traitorous local allies.1 This was a shift

1 T. Ranger launched the debate on ‘patriotic history’ in his seminal ‘Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30, 2

q 2013 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 3: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

808 Journal of Southern African Studies

that required retelling history alongside remaking institutions, and it only very unevenly reconstituted state authority in a new guise.

How to understand the significance of these dramatic changes has preoccupied scholars of Zimbabwe. As I explore below, a range of important work has focused on the political productivity of disorder and uncertainty and explored the burgeoning networks of power beyond, within and on the margins of bureaucratic state institutions. These approaches have offered significant – and distinct – insights, but they share a neglect of the practices and perceptions of the state’s own actors. I explore the significance of this omission through a study of the ‘militarisation’ of the Zimbabwe Prison Service. Drawing on a small number of interviews with prison officers and on media, official and other reports, I argue that militarisation ignited a battle over the normative and institutional constituents of state authority that has powerfully shaped the exercise and legitimation of state power and with it broader processes of political change.

Debating Political Change in Zimbabwe

Efforts to explain the political consequences of ZANU(PF)’s post-2000 strategies have taken diverse forms. Here I focus on two quite different strands, one rooted in political science and the other in anthropology, before turning to a discussion of transformation within state institutions and specifically the attributes of what has been called ‘militarisation’.

Drawing on a strand of analysis established in the 1990s and focused predominantly on West Africa, some scholars have argued that ZANU(PF)’s post-2000 rule produced a new politics in which ‘informal’ and ‘personal’ networks inside and outside state institutions became the principle means of exercising and retaining power, blurring lines between state and party as well as public and private and, in the era of the post-2009 government of national unity in which ZANU(PF) and the MDC sat side by side, constituting a ‘parallel government’.2 Patronage and violence were integral to these networks, and they drew on a shifting cast of non-state actors including veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation war, partisan youth militia, urban gangs, traditional leaders and businessmen, all orchestrated by a party-military elite. This literature brought Zimbabwe into a fruitful – if critical – conversation with the ‘politics of disorder’ and the ‘politics of the belly’, work most closely associated with Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz and Jean-Francois Bayart, and it usefully focused attention on the exercise of power through ‘networks’ rather than the formal institutions of state and party that have long dominated analyses of Zimbabwe’s politics.3

An anthropological literature has developed a distinct set of concerns. It invoked ‘uncertainty’, a concept that has come to pervade an anthropology concerned with ‘conflict,

Footnote 1 continued

(2004), pp. 215–34. For the best recent account of Zimbabwe’s political history, see B. Raftopoulos and A. Mlambo (eds), Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 (Harare, Weaver Press, 2009).

2 See, e.g., S. Maclean, ‘Mugabe at War: The Political Economy of Conflict in Zimbabwe’, Third World Quarterly, 23, 3 (2002), pp. 513–28; M. Bratton and E. Masunungure, ‘Zimbabwe’s Long Agony’, Journal of Democracy, 19, 4 (2008), pp. 44–55. N. Kriger, ‘ZANU PF politics under Zimbabwe’s “Power-Sharing” Government’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 30, 1 (2012), p. 13, 15–19 elaborates on the idea of a ‘parallel government’.

3 See P. Chabal and J-P. Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford, James Currey, 1999); J­F. Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London, Longman, 1993); and J-F. Bayart, S. Ellis, and B. Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Oxford, James Currey, 1999). There are many more contributions to this genre and much diversity within it. For recent uses in Zimbabwe see Maclean, ‘Mugabe at War’, p. 525, and Kriger, ‘ZANU PF politics’, p. 12. For a seminal engagement, see J. McGregor, ‘The Politics of Disruption: War Veterans and the Local State in Zimbabwe’, African Affairs, 101, 402 (2002), pp. 9–37.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 4: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 809

violence, suffering and marginalisation’ rather than ‘order and imponderability’,4 and which took as its vantage point ‘the margins of the modern state where uncertainty obtains’, a margin that was both literal and metaphorical, encompassing the edges of state officials’ reach as well as the gaps between rules and their application.5 In Zimbabwe, scholars have drawn on these approaches to explore a defining element of post-2000 governance – the ‘operation’, a term that encompassed a diverse set of interventions, discussed further below. Jeremy Jones has written about ZANU(PF)’s June 2007 attempt to control hyperinflation by vastly expanding its price control regime. This operation was at once coercive (violently enforced by police and militia), technical (cast as scientific) and narrative (it told a version of patriotic history that sought a return to a past undistorted by illegitimate external intervention). It required ‘confusion’ to be ‘intentionally sown in the interest of order’.6 Joost Fontein focused on one of the most devastating of operations: Operation Murambatsvina. Launched in 2005, it led to the demolition of many hundreds of thousands of urban homes, market stalls and businesses, marking an attack on both opposition strongholds and the informal economy. Fontein argued that the productive power of Operation Murambatsvina rested on the ‘ambiguity and uncertainty’ created by the combination of violent unpredictability and practices recognisably rooted in established – and, for many, legitimate – notions of urban order. Viewing the state from its margins showed both its ‘omnipotent presence’ and the ‘omnipresence of its fundamental insecurity’ as the uncertain meanings of its actions were interpreted in ways beyond the control of ‘ruling elites’.7 These studies alert us to the complexities of modes of governance that combine the violent, technical and narrative, and that invoke different registers (arbitrary; bureaucratic) at one and the same time.

Both literatures reveal new and significant forms of power. Neither, however, seeks to explain the shifting behaviour and beliefs of the public servants who people bureaucratic state institutions. This omission is a weakness of much of the wider ‘politics of disorder’ literature, both conceptually and empirically. In the most hyperbolic case, Chabal and Daloz argue that the African state does not need to be investigated as it ‘is no more than a decor, a pseudo-Western fac�ade masking the realities of deeply personalised political relations’; ‘state structures’ are ‘largely devoid of authority’ while ‘legitimacy is firmly embedded in the patrimonial practices of patrons and their networks’.8 Such views rest on a narrow empirical base and serve to truncate ‘an analysis of how institutions actually work’.9 Recent anthropological studies have noted the weaknesses in this regard of both political science and anthropology itself. Giorgio Blundo, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Thomas Bierschenk

4 H. Vigh, ’Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline’, Ethnos, 73, 1 (2008), p. 12. The anthropological concern with uncertainty has a long pedigree – see J. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York, Milton, Balch and Co., 1929) – and many recent variants, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article. See, e.g., S. Reynolds-Whyte, ‘Epilogue’, in L. Haram and C. B. Yamba (eds), Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives (Stockholm, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2009).

5 T. Asad, ‘Where are the Margins of the State?’, in V. Das and D. Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Oxford, James Currey, 2004), p. 286. Asad elaborates on the multiple meanings of margin, which I have not fully captured here. Also see discussion in V. Das and D. Poole, ‘State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies’, pp. 3–34, in the same collection.

6 J. Jones, ‘Freeze! Movement, Narrative and the Disciplining of Price in Hyperinflationary Zimbabwe’, Social Dynamics, 36, 2 (2010), pp. 344, and see 343–8. Also see his ‘“Nothing is Straight in Zimbabwe”: The Rise of the Kukiya-kiya Economy’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36, 2 (2010), pp. 285–99.

7 J. Fontein, ‘Anticipating the Tsunami: Rumours, Planning and the Arbitrary State in Zimbabwe’, Africa, 79, 3 (2009), p. 392–93. Also see S. Morreira, ’Living with Uncertainty: Disappearing Modernities and Polluted Urbanity in post-2000 Harare, Zimbabwe’, Social Dynamics, 36, 2 (2010), pp. 352–65 and D. Potts, ‘Restoring Order? Operation Murambatsvina and the Urban Crisis in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 32, 2 (2006), pp. 272–91.

8 Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, p. 16.9 P. Nugent, ‘States and Social Contracts in Africa’, New Left Review, 63 (May–June 2010), p. 37.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 5: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

810 Journal of Southern African Studies

point to the dearth of research on formal state institutions, criticising political scientists for being quick to apply labels to ‘the African state’ without ‘empirically exploring its daily functioning and the changes under way in its bureaucratic system’10 and anthropologists for being overly concerned with ‘the “margins” and “interstices” of the state’ rather than ‘the apparatuses of state themselves and their actors’.11

Blundo and Olivier de Sardan find that undertaking ethnographic work on state institutions reveals that both the ‘actual functioning’ and the public expectations of West African states draw on notions of rule-bound bureaucracy that reject a conflation of state as institution and the activities of politicians in private or criminal spheres, a finding at odds with influential analyses such as that of Beatrice Hibou.12 This is of course not to suggest that there are perfectly functioning bureaucracies to be found in Africa – or anywhere else. The focus of Blundo’s and Olivier de Sardan’s book is corruption; Bierschenk emphasises ‘the heterogeneity, the incompleteness and “omnipresence” of statehood’, formed not on the basis of ‘completely different criteria’ to its European equivalents, but much modified by an accumulation of small differences over time.13 The point is not to insist on ideal forms or to measure deviation from them; it is to argue that an important aspect of understanding political change requires asking how formal state institutions are conceived and how they claim and wield authority from the point of view of their actors. This requires a consideration of changes both in civil servants’ practice and in the normative and narrative constructions by which the boundaries of (legitimate) state institutions are marked.

In Zimbabwe, the new ZANU(PF) government inherited a powerful, centralised bureaucratic state and it greatly expanded its size and role in the 1980s, largely as a result of the extension of services to the black majority. Change might be said to have accumulated in Bierschenk’s sense in the 1980s and 1990s, often through contests that broadly opposed bureaucrats’ and politicians’ goals and understandings of state authority.14 The views of these groups nonetheless substantially overlapped and they were usually able to negotiate a shared project of governance based on a comprehension and tolerance of contrasting obligations and purposes and – crucially – on the primacy of a vision of technocratic development delivered

10 G. Blundo, ‘Corruption in Africa and the Social Sciences: A Review of the literature’, in G. Blundo and J-P. Olivier de Sardan with N. B. Arifari and M. T. Alou, Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa (London, Zed Books, 2006), p. 22.

11 T. Bierschenk, ‘States at Work in West Africa: Sedimentation, Fragmentation and Normative Double-Blinds’, Working Paper no. 113, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenburg University, Mainz, 2010, p. 4. Also see Bierschenk’s review of A. Sharma and A. Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 2006), Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, 134, 1 (2009), pp. 134–8 and his ‘The everyday functioning of an African public service: Informalization, privatization and corruption in Benin’s legal system’, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 57, 101 (2008), pp. 101–140.

12 See G. Blundo and J-P. Olivier de Sardan, ‘Everyday Corruption in West Africa’, in Blundo and Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption, pp. 69–109, which includes a critique of B. Hibou (ed.), La Privatisation des E tats (Paris, Karthala, 1999). Even in contexts of prolonged, extreme disruption, ideas of how state institutions should function have proven remarkably resilient. See H. Vigh, Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau (Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2006).

13 Bierschenk, ‘States at Work’, p. 17. 14 Many studies explore these and other tensions in Zimbabwe. Some of the most detailed focus on state-making in

rural areas: see J. Alexander, The Unsettled Land: State-making and the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe 1893 – 2003 (Oxford, James Currey, 2006), and W. Munro, The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State Making in Zimbabwe (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1998). A. Selby, ‘Commercial Farmers and the State: Interest Group Politics and Land Reform in Zimbabwe’ (DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006), offers an account of party leaders’ struggles with technocrats over land reform in the 1990s, while G. Karekwaivanane’s thesis, ‘Legal Encounters: Law, State and Society in Zimbabwe, c. 1950–1990’ (DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012), provides a fresh view on judicial institutions in the 1980s. There are parallels in struggles between politicians and bureaucrats elsewhere in the region. See R. Werbner, Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004) and M. Larmer, ‘Chronicle of a Coup Foretold: Valentine Musakanya and the 1980 Coup Attempt in Zambia’, Journal of African History, 51 (2010), pp. 391–409.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 6: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 811

by a professional bureaucracy. In the second half of the 1990s, this shared project was, however, severely tested by Zimbabwe’s Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) under which civil servants’ conditions of service declined dramatically, leading to major strikes and alliances with the increasingly outspoken umbrella Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, itself then moving rapidly towards oppositional alliances with civic groups and the formation of what would become the MDC. In this context, ZANU(PF) leaders increasingly depicted civil servants as politically disloyal, a far less tolerable source of difference for the ruling party than technocratic ideals.15 After 2000, the speed of change within state institutions accelerated to a dizzying degree, creating a new and violently partisan ‘politics of disruption’ that undermined the ideas and practices that had bound civil servants together, however loosely, in a rule-bound, meritocratic bureaucracy.16 This process often took on a particular form, which I gloss here as ‘militarisation’.

While militarisation did not determine the process of change in all state institutions, it is one of the defining features of post-1997 Zimbabwe, and it is closely tied to broader processes of ‘informalisation’ and politicisation that served to blur the boundaries of state institutions. This aspect of political transformation sets Zimbabwe apart from many of the West African cases that have shaped both political science and anthropological literatures. It is a product of a liberation struggle history that produced specific institutional alliances, practices and historically based claims to rule, centred on war, sacrifice and political hierarchies and loyalties created in the 1970s. In the late 1990s, these underlay ZANU(PF)’s remaking of its vexed relationship with veterans of the liberation war, a move that involved close interaction and material exchanges among veterans in and outside the military and the party elite. At the same time, some party leaders distanced themselves from the technocratic state, explicitly portraying it as an obstacle to realising the goals of ‘the struggle’, a concept that would be elaborated as ‘patriotic history’. These moves constituted building blocks for the politics of the post-2000 period.17

‘Militarisation’ does not mean that state institutions were in any literal way remade in a military mode. Rather, it encompassed four linked processes that were in some ways the antithesis of a professional military ideal – the military could itself be said to have been ‘militarised’ in the sense I use the term here.18 First, militarisation referred to the posting of liberation war veterans and others with strong links to ZANU(PF) from senior ranks in the military to senior positions in state and parastatal institutions. Such postings were used to build and discipline a partisan state.19 Second, militarisation encompassed the decisive

15 See B. Raftopoulos, ‘The labour movement and the emergence of opposition politics in Zimbabwe’, in B. Raftopoulos and L. Sachikonye, Striking Back: The Labour Movement and the Post-Colonial State in Zimbabwe 1980 – 2000 (Harare, Weaver Press, 2001) and McGregor, ‘The Politics of Disruption’, pp. 12–15.

16 The best early study of these shifts is McGregor, ‘The Politics of Disruption’. Her fine-grained account of ZANU(PF)’s ‘assault’ on rural local government in 2000 and 2001 shows its targets to be ‘the institutions of the local state, their procedures, their personnel and their day-to-day running’ (p. 17). Also see A. Hammar, B. Raftopoulos and S. Jensen (eds), Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Harare, Weaver Press, 2003).

17 For a summary of this period, see J. Alexander, ‘Zimbabwe since 1997: Land and the Legacies of War’, in A.R. Mustapha and L. Whitfield (eds), Turning Points in African Democracy (Rochester, Boydell and Brewer, 2009).

18 The military’s ‘militarisation’ was resisted at great cost by its ‘professional’ cadres, as in other institutions. See G. Maringira, ‘Soldiering in Territories: Persistence of Military Being among Zimbabwean Army Deserters and Resignators in Exile in South Africa’ (draft PhD Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2013).

19 ZANU(PF) cast this process as a means of guarding the state from ‘regime change’, increasing state efficacy, and as a simple continuity with the party-military relationship from the 1970s. (For a recent defence of this position by Mugabe, see ‘President’s Speech at Karakadzai’s Burial’, The Herald, 26 August 2013.) However, while veterans were incorporated in state institutions from 1980, they were largely subordinated to a bureaucratic ethic. This changed from the late 1990s as military officers took up top posts in parastatals such as the National Railways of Zimbabwe, the Grain Marketing Board, and the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe; media-related institutions; the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission; the Central Intelligence

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 7: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

812 Journal of Southern African Studies

intervention of the military qua military and as part of the state in electoral politics, most dramatically in the run-up to the June 2008 elections.20 Third, it referred to the entrance of military men (former and serving, in and outside the state and party) into lucrative networks of accumulation and patronage, ranging from the award of government contracts and tenders to businesses owned by military and party leaders to more direct control of production and trade. These practices have a long history rooted in the 1970s, but the 1997 military intervention in the DRC marked a new watershed,21 while the involvement of the security forces in Zimbabwe’s massive diamond fields from 2006 ‘cemented’ their ‘role as the dominant class in Zimbabwe’s business community’.22 For Knox Chitiyo, Zimbabwe’s very ‘political economy’ was thereby militarised.23

Finally, militarisation constituted a style of governance, most clearly embodied in the ‘operation’. As such, it was at odds with the bureaucratic state (and the ethics of a professional military) even if it at the same time invoked ideas of order associated with it, as Fontein and Jones have argued. Since 2000, ZANU(PF)’s most dramatic initiatives have taken this form and have centrally involved the security arms of the state. Operations evoked the governance style of other militarised regimes such as Mozambique’s Frelimo. Frelimo’s reliance on the mobilisational potential of operations was, however, in great part an effort to overcome a lack of effective and legitimate state institutions.24 ZANU(PF)’s operations were in some ways the reverse: they circumvented, challenged and transformed state institutions that were capable, expert and largely if not entirely viewed as legitimate. The judiciary and the ministries concerned with local government and lands were initially targeted. Later operations made more specific interventions and engaged a transformed state in that work.25

Many operations offered opportunities for ‘looting’ and patronage. They were used to intervene in a remarkable range of realms, including land tenure, urban and rural livelihoods, political freedoms, and the distribution and consumption of goods ranging from food to agricultural inputs to housing to diamonds. They were a central means by which an alternative kind of power to that of the bureaucratic state institution was constructed.

Militarisation and the wider processes of which it was a part blurred lines between state, party, and military in ways that were productive of coercive power, private wealth, and certain kinds of social engineering in at times spectacular ways. But it did not erase older notions of state authority, and it was as a result widely contested. The multiple processes of militarisation met popular resistance, underlining the instability of authority in a state of flux as well as the stubborn historicity of ideas about legitimacy long rooted in the ‘functioning

Footnote 19 continued

Organisation and diplomatic service; and a host of ministries and departments. See K. Chitiyo, ‘The Case for Security Sector Reform in Zimbabwe’, Royal United Services Institute, Occasional Paper, London (2009), p. 9; Bratton and Masunungure, ‘Zimbabwe’s Long Agony’; and ‘Zanu PF Intensifies Military Patronage’, Zimbabwe Independent, 12 October 2012.

20 See E. Masunungure, ‘Zimbabwe’s Militarized, Electoral Authoritarianism’, Journal of International Affairs, 65, 1 (2011), p. 55 and passim.

21 M. Dawson and T. Kelsall, ‘Anti-Developmental Patrimonialism in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 30, 1 (2012), pp. 49–66.

22 Chitiyo, ‘The Case’, p. 7. 23 Chitiyo, ‘The Case’, p. 11. Also see Dawson and Kelsall, ‘Anti-Developmental Patrimonialism’, pp. 57–9;

Bratton and Masunungure, ‘Zimbabwe’s Long Agony’, p. 47; M. Bratton and E. Masunungure, ‘The Anatomy of Political Predation: Leaders, Elites and Coalitions in Zimbabwe, 1980 –2010’, Developmental Leadership Program, Research Paper 09, January 2011; G. Mazarire, ‘ZANU-PF and the Government of National Unity’, in B. Raftopoulos (ed.), The Hard Road to Reform: The Politics of Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement (Harare, Weaver Press, 2013).

24 See, e.g., B. Egero, Moc�ambique: Os Primeiros Dez Anos de Construc�ao da Democracia (Maputo, AHM, 1992); J.M. Cabrita, Mozambique: The Tortuous Road to Democracy (New York, Palgrave, 2000).

25 See B. Raftopoulos, ‘The Crisis in Zimbabwe, 1998–2008’, in Raftopoulos and Mlambo, Becoming Zimbabwe, pp. 213–4. On the range of operations, see Chitiyo, ‘The Case’, pp. 4–11.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 8: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 813

bureaucratic state’.26 Such ideas have remained part of ZANU(PF)’s repertoire of legitimising ‘orders’ as we have seen; they have also been offered as critiques of ZANU(PF) and been given new genealogies, most notably in the MDC’s embrace of rights, technocracy and the rule of law.27 What were the consequences of these contradictory models of order for the practices and authority of state bureaucracies? How were these processes understood by civil servants who were both actively engaged in and under attack from militarisation? A focus on ‘the apparatuses of state themselves and their actors’ reveals a battle over the very meaning of statehood.

Militarisation and the Prison Service

The prison service offers a fascinating case of militarisation. Though the service falls under the Ministry of Justice, it came to be counted among those institutions that constituted the ‘security sector’ and it would be unequivocally ‘militarised’ in all the senses outlined above. However, unlike the bulk of the security forces, though with parallels to the police, prison staff interacted in essential ways with civilians and in support of civilian arms of the state, notably the judiciary. The service’s official ‘mission’ is both punitive and intended to effect social change: it is meant to ‘protect society from the criminal elements through the incarceration and rehabilitation of offenders for their successful reintegration into society while exercising reasonable, safe, secure and humane control’.28 The prison service’s militarisation had two profound consequences: it caused a deep division within the service over the institutional and normative constituents of statehood and it rendered the service entirely unable to fulfill its ‘mission’, with horrifying consequences for Zimbabwe’s citizens.

Before proceeding, let me make a brief comment on methods. My analysis centres on the testimony of two prison officers, both of whom I interviewed several times in 2008 and 2009. I came to know them as a result of my wider research on the history of political imprisonment in Zimbabwe. One officer, Herman Chatambarara (the name is an alias), was serving at Harare Central Prison when I interviewed him and the other, Shepherd Yuda, had claimed political asylum in Britain after secretly filming prison conditions in mid-2008.29 Yuda had joined the prison service in 1996; Chatambarara in 1985. Both men identified themselves as professionals and vehemently objected to the project of militarisation, a view that had turned them against ZANU(PF). Yuda had become an active member of the MDC at its inception, serving as organising secretary in 2000 for the campaign of then parliamentary hopeful (and

26 Fontein, ‘Anticipating the Tsunami’, p. 389. Popular resistance rarely arrested the coercive momentum of major operations. See e.g. Fontein, ‘Anticipating the Tsunami’, pp. 376–7, on Operation Murambatsvina and Solidarity Peace Trust (SPT), Operation Taguta/Sisuthi. Command Agriculture in Zimbabwe: Its Impact on Rural Communities in Matabeleland (Johannesburg, SPT, April 2006) on Operation Maguta. The political violence of Operation Mavhoterapapi in the elections of June 2008 marked the apogee of the illegitimate and coercive operation.

27 See Raftopoulos, ‘The Crisis’, pp. 201–32; A. LeBas, From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 5; Maclean ‘Mugabe at war’, p. 525; J. Alexander and B-M. Tendi, ‘A Tale of Two Elections: Zimbabwe at the Polls in 2008’, Concerned Africa Scholars Bulletin, 80 (Winter 2008), pp. 14–16; J. Alexander, ‘The Political Imaginaries and Social Lives of Political Prisoners in Post-2000 Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36, 2 (2010), pp. 487–91.

28 Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs’ prison service ‘Mission Statement’, available at http://www.justice.gov. zw/index.php?option¼ com_content&view ¼ article&id ¼ 58%3Azimbabwe-prison-service&catid ¼ 35% 3Adepartments&Itemid ¼ 55, retrieved on 27 September 2012.

29 Yuda was supplied with a camera by Guardian Films. See P. Lewis, ‘”I was being loyal to a government that was not loyal to its people”’, The Guardian (London), 5 July 2008, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2008/jul/05/zimbabwe1, retrieved on 31 October 2012.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 9: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

814 Journal of Southern African Studies

future Minister of Finance) Tendai Biti. Chatambarara remained a staunch defender of the apolitical civil service.

Yuda’s and Chatambarara’s narratives were intended to convey particular messages and lessons. They are of interest precisely for this reason as well as for the ways in which they echoed a broader discourse of professionalism among civil servants. As was the case within the divided ranks of many other state institutions (including the military), these prison officers countered militarisation by articulating an ideal of the rule-bound institution staffed by ‘professionals’ whose authority lay in qualifications gained through study, training, and service, and whose advancement through a clear hierarchy was determined by merit.30 As in Weber’s ideal bureaucratic type, professionals held that their position and promotion was owed to expertise, their independence to rules, and their ethical position to public service. The personal potency of the professional ideal lay in the way these attributes defined a worthy identity, in Weberian terms a ‘persona’. The political potency of the ideal was expressed in a historical narrative regarding what the state had been and should be, an ideal much amplified in the present by the illegitimate inverse constituted by militarisation. In constructing such binaries and ideal pasts, these stories simplified and selected, mirroring the elisions of patriotic history. But they were not just political ‘counter-narratives’: they were also anguished descriptions of abuses and suffering. Where I use them in this mode I have been careful to find corroboration in the testimonies of prisoners, lawyers and others I have interviewed, and in a range of media, parliamentary, and human rights reporting.31

Writ large, the prison officers’ narratives offered a chronicle of rapid decline dating back to the promotion of retired Major General Paradzai Zimondi to the post of Commissioner of Prisons in 1997. Zimondi was a veteran of ZANU’s armed wing and had been a provincial commander in the liberation struggle. He replaced Langton Chigwida, who was something of a prison officers’ prison officer, having joined the prison service in 1967 and risen through the ranks to become the first black director in 1984.32 For Yuda and Chatambarara, Chigwida’s displacement by a military man was the moment the professional prison service – what they tellingly called the ‘real’ prison service – came under attack, setting in train a catastrophic collapse.

The story is, however, less neat and linear than this account indicates. Zimondi had not been parachuted into the prison service in 1997: he had served under Chigwida since 1988, having been ‘seconded’ from the army to the post of deputy director. His promotion in 1997 followed his completion of a training course in Britain, at a moment when the service was expanding its compliment of degree-holding professionals. ‘Militarisation’ thus seemed to post-date Zimondi’s rise.33 Moreover, the prison service had been far from a rule-abiding

30 Interview, Shepherd Yuda, Oxford, 14 September 2008. For other post-2000 state institutions, see S. Verheul in this issue on the Attorney General’s office; Chitiyo, ‘The Case’, pp. 12–16 and Maringira, ‘Soldiering in Territories’ on security forces; McGregor, ‘The Politics of Disruption’ on local government; N. Marongwe, ‘Interrogating Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform and Resettlement Process: A Focus on Beneficiary Selection’ (PhD Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2008), on ministries concerned with land and agriculture.

31 On prison conditions, see e. g. Zimbabwe Association for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of the Offender, ‘Human Rights for Prisoners in Zimbabwe’, paper presented to the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights Workshop, Bulawayo, 3–4 October 2008; Third Report of Portfolio Committee on Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs on the State of the Prisons, presented to Parliament of Zimbabwe on 23 May 2006; Sokwanele, ‘On the Death Trail’, 3 May 2004, available at http://www.sokwanele.com/articles/sokwanele/ onthedeathtrail_3may2004.html, retrieved on 31 October 2012; J. Alexander, ‘Death and Disease in Zimbabwe’s Prisons’, The Lancet, 373, 9668 (21 March 2009), pp. 995–6; and the 2009 South Africa Broadcasting Company documentary Hell Hole. For prisoners’ accounts see Alexander, ‘Political Imaginaries’.

32 See ‘Hundreds Bid Farewell to Chigwida’, The Herald, 16 May 2011. 33 Conversely, militarisation might be said at least symbolically to predate Zimondi’s promotion: military ranks

were reintroduced in the service in 1995, a return to Rhodesian traditions. The post of Director of Prisons was renamed Commissioner and the top ranks of the prison service were made up by commissioned officers. Many

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 10: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 815

ideal prior to Zimondi’s elevation, or indeed before independence. In some respects, its failings were owed to its Rhodesian inheritance. Mary Ndlovu, who was closely involved in prison reform in the 1990s, noted a long-standing ‘very punitive and very violent’ prison culture that was ‘difficult to shift’: ‘Prison officers tend to be drawn from families. . . . So there’s a whole culture that’s built up and it’s gone back from before independence’.34 Yuda and Chatambarara, both of whom had been drawn into the prison service by male relatives with decades of experience (a commonplace also among police), readily concurred when pressed on this point. Yuda explained that it was the ‘norm’ to beat prisoners when he joined the service: ‘If you are sympathetic to prisoners you are seen as a bad officer. I have to help beating if I see a prison officer beating’.35 Referring to the humiliating practice of requiring prisoners to address officers on their knees and with honorifics such as chef, mambo and bwana (a telling trio of titles drawn from ZANU’s liberation struggle, the ChiShona term for ‘chief’, and Kenyan settler society), Chatambarara explained, ‘We simply inherited that . . . . [W]e . . . simply drifted into the system without [asking] if this was good or not’.36

In addition to the long-standing acceptance of such practices, in the 1990s prison conditions had declined, owing in part to the budgetary cuts that characterised ESAP. Acute staff shortages and a ballooning prison population led to unprecedented overcrowding, the spread of deadly communicable diseases, a breakdown in basic infrastructure and security, and an escalation in reports of abuses of prisoners and corruption.37 This was notably the case at the larger and older prison complexes, some of which were literally falling apart, and one of which – Khami Prison outside Bulawayo – appeared to have become a dumping ground for incorrigibly abusive officers.38 The response to these pressures was led by legal professionals, such as then High Court Justice Paddington Garwe, and took the form of the introduction of community service sentences for petty crimes in 1993, a measure that kept tens of thousands out of prisons,39 open prisons in the late 1990s, and human rights training for prison staff from the mid-1990s, the latter run by the Zimbabwean NGO, the Legal Resources Foundation.40

This combination of derelictions, abuses and reforms was echoed in the mix of views among prison officials. Mary Ndlovu, who participated in a series of four-day human rights training workshops in the years immediately after Zimondi’s promotion to commissioner, described a range of ‘cultures’ within the prison service. At the top was the military style of leadership embodied in Zimondi: he insisted on hierarchy and deference and had expanded links with the military for training purposes in the wake of a series of prison

Footnote 33 continued

African prison services have military traditions. See C. Tapscott, ‘Challenges to Good Prison Governance in Africa’, in J. Sarkin (ed.), Human Rights in African Prisons (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2008), p. 77.

34 Interview, Mary Ndlovu, Bulawayo, 7 October 2008. 35 Interview, Yuda, 14 September 2008. 36 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 37 See reports in The Chronicle on Parliamentary Committee findings of a lack of hygiene, tattered uniforms,

overcrowding and staff shortages, in ‘Prisoners Complain of Appalling Conditions that They Live In’, 9 August 1997, and ‘Prisoners Face Shortages: Report’, 5 November 1998; more widely see ‘Poor Conditions Rile Prison Officers’, 10 May 1999; ‘Police Probe Cell Death’, 7 June 1998.

38 Khami was subject to an official investigation following allegations of fatal beatings and life-threatening conditions made by former prisoners to The Chronicle in 1999. Such conditions were alleged to be of long standing. See reports in The Chronicle: ‘Life in Prison Close To Hell: Inmates’, 27 February 1999; ‘Conditions at Prison “Horrible”’, 24 March 2000; ‘Khami Prison Warders Accused of Brutality’, 21 July 2001; ‘Brutalising of Inmates Worsens’, 26 July 2001; ‘Khami “Dumping Ground for Wayward Officers”’, 31 July 2001.

39 Tapscott, ‘Challenges’, p. 74. In its first seven years, 37,425 community service sentences were handed down. See ‘Programme Saves Government $17 m’, The Chronicle, 25 September 2000.

40 The first open prison was inaugurated at Connemara in 2000 in an effort to address overcrowding. The prison service then held a reported 20,000 inmates, 4,000 over capacity. See ‘Plans to Introduce Open Prison System Advanced’, The Chronicle, 24 August 1999. Regular amnesties for thousands of less serious offenders were also used to reduce overcrowding.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 11: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

816 Journal of Southern African Studies

escapes.41 In contrast, senior administrative staff considered themselves professionals, often had degrees in social work and public administration, and ‘really wanted to do their job’. They were often, however, unwilling to confront abuses within the system. Ndlovu noted, ‘there was a tendency to make excuses . . . to say, “that doesn’t happen. . . . ”’ The men who were ‘running the prisons’, the officers-in-charge, however, readily proclaimed,

‘Of course we do this! . . . We know how to handle these prisoners! You just . . . give them some good whacks on the bottom of the feet! And you find you won’t have any trouble with that guy anymore’. [laughs] . . . . They were more prone to admit than more senior ones.

Such officers maintained the need for violence to enforce discipline, but were willing to concede that the routine humiliation of prisoners ‘wasn’t really right’.42

The prison service was not immediately transformed by policy reform and human rights training, as Ndlovu freely admitted, but nor did its various ‘cultures’ mean it was irreconcilably divided. Differences were bridged in shared debates that drew on influences past and present. Zimondi actively engaged with human rights precepts according to Ndlovu, and he sought to implement reforms. Yuda remembered that he had ‘tried to stop the beatings of prisoners’ in the 1990s only for his efforts to run aground on ‘the political situation’.43

Moreover, a self-proclaimed professional such as Yuda could embrace the offer of military training in the 1990s as a means of acquiring skills and rising in the ranks – only later was it linked to the multi-faceted project of militarisation.44 This was the messy stuff of negotiation and incremental change in which civil servants shared substantial common ground – the ‘functioning bureaucratic state’ being the most compelling of mutual touchstones, as it had long been under ZANU(PF) rule.

People, Practices and Purposes: Remaking the Prison Service

If the reality of the prison service in the first decades of independence was one of debate and incremental change, where do we locate the sources of militarisation’s dramatic polarisations? Beneath Yuda’s and Chatambarara’s overarching narratives, the roots of division were to be found in the repeopling of the service with military men who proceeded to introduce a new set of practices and purposes that fell well outside the shared, if messy, state project that had previously joined civil servants in a common purpose.

For Yuda and Chatambarara, militarisation was initially embodied in Zimondi’s appointment of liberation war veterans from the military at senior levels of the prison service while qualified, experienced officers were forced out or left.45 They dated this process to 1998 and noted its dramatic escalation between 2000 and 2002. In this period, Zimondi appointed military officers, usually with ranks of major and above, to head up the vast majority of the service’s departments at Prison National Headquarters in Harare. Subsequent appointments

41 Two of these workshops were held at resorts in the eastern highlands. On outings, Zimondi insisted on driving at the head of the convoy and made all others follow behind him on walks up the mountains. Interview, Ndlovu. Zimondi cited a notorious escape from Chikurubi maximum security prison in 1997 to justify military training of prison officers. See ‘Chikurubi Officers to be Probed’, The Chronicle, 4 October 1997; ‘ZNA to Train Prison Officers’, The Chronicle, 21 June 1998; ‘Prisons Security Under Microscope’, The Chronicle, 7 July 1999; ‘Undisciplined Prison Officers Blasted’, The Chronicle, 6 August 2001.

42 Interview, Ndlovu. Prisoners described the routine use of falanga.43 Interview, Yuda, 15 September 2008.44 Interview, Yuda, 10 September 2008. Yuda was a proud beneficiary of training by the paramilitary Police

Support Unit’s elite Special Tactics Team. 45 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. The loss of qualified prison officers had started earlier: Mary

Ndlovu noted that in the late 1990s many posts went unfilled; others left after gaining qualifications. Interview, Ndlovu.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 12: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 817

extended to the four regional headquarters. Others who had military backgrounds and had held junior posts in the prison service ‘jumped’ ranks without attaining qualifications.46 There was in addition a massive recruitment drive to fill thousands of posts at the bottom end of the prison service.47 According to Chatambarara, many new staff were drawn from among the youth militia, then being churned out in their thousands by ZANU(PF)’s Border Gezi training camps.48 Finally, new appointments were made on the basis of nepotism as the senior veterans who had come to dominate the service brought in and promoted unqualified family members.49

There was thus a move at both ends of the prison service towards the employment of ZANU(PF) partisans – military men, militia, kin – lacking in expertise pertinent to prison work while experienced and qualified officers left voluntarily and involuntarily in a context of rapidly declining conditions of service.50 Yuda’s and Chatambarara’s outrage over these appointments homed in on what they saw as their ignorance and ‘dullness’: they had no claim to the expert authority that defined the identity and standing of professionals and the state they imagined. Yuda explained, ‘They know nothing about the prison service. Most don’t even have basic education requirements . . . . [But] they were put as heads of departments . . . . So this destroyed the prison service’.51 Chatambarara added: ‘the biggest damage was . . . when it comes to promotion, this requirement of saying one is an ex-combatant, a war veteran, that criteria. It has brought down the whole system . . . . Most of them are dull . . . . [M]ost of them are in administrative posts when in actual fact he knows nothing’.52 Youth militia were described even more derisively. They often did not meet the prison service’s minimum educational requirements; they were ‘brainwashed’, not trained.53

The only senior non-military officer to survive this repeopling process and to retain the respect of ‘professional’ officers was Deputy Commissioner Washington Chimboza. Chatambarara considered that Zimondi had kept him in post ‘because they rely on him’ to do the ‘real’ work. In a revealing formulation, he insisted, Chimboza ‘is the prison service. Because he knows everything’.54 The senior soldiers at the top of the service, by contrast, took little interest in the prisons. After 2000, Zimondi rarely visited the prisons while the soldiers appointed as assistant commissioners and commissioners stuck to the Prison National Headquarters building.55 Within the prisons, Yuda complained that the veterans and militia recruits did not understand that the ‘core duty’ of the prison was ‘rehabilitating prisoners’. He lamented that the late 1990s ‘plans to align the prison service with modern practices’ had been derailed by ‘these soldiers’ who had none of the necessary expertise:

46 Interview, Yuda, 15 September 2008. 47 For details see ‘4000 Prisoners Granted Amnesty’, The Chronicle, 18 August 2001; ‘ZPS Embark on Building

Exercise’, The Chronicle, 15 July 2002. 48 Interview, 18 October 2008. In 2005, The Chronicle reported a passing out parade for 893 prison service

recruits, 351 of whom were militia. ‘Mujuru Commends Prison Service’, The Chronicle, 19 August 2005. On the youth militia, see SPT, ‘National Youth Service Training – “Shaping Youths in a Truly Zimbabwean Manner”: An Overview of Youth Militia Training and Activities in Zimbabwe, October 2000-August 2003’, 5 September 2003. On the absorption of militia into state institutions more widely, see Chitiyo, ‘The Case’, pp. 13, 16; Kriger, ‘ZANU PF politics’, p. 15.

49 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008.50 On poor housing and transportation, see e.g. ‘Prison Transport Situation Critical’, The Chronicle, 22 March

2000; ‘ZPS embark on Building Exercise’, The Chronicle, 15 July 2002. 51 Interview, Yuda, 10 September 2008. 52 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 53 Interview, Yuda, 15 September 2008. Also, Interview, Ndlovu. 54 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 55 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008, and see 14 February 2009. Chatambarara estimated that there were

some 500 officers at the national headquarters in 2008, most of whom were military appointments.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 13: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

818 Journal of Southern African Studies

They should know the Prison Act that governs the relationship between prison officers and the outside world. They should know how prisoners are to be treated, the admission of prisoners. Forms must be filled in. They must be taken to court. They must be entered into the admission book. They should be able to calculate the early date of release. There are remissions. . . . What if someone gets sick? How do you take them to hospital? They don’t know anything about that. They don’t even know what a parole board is.56

Instead of becoming ‘prison-aligned’, the soldiers imported military ways of doing things that abrogated long-standing tenets of prison officer etiquette and authority. Yuda continued:

In terms of discipline they should know we’re different from the army. They introduced prison police and they punish prison officers in front of prisoners . . . . Prison officers are dipped in mud in front of prisoners. If you come late you are detained in a cell. They take it from the army point of view that you must detain people if they are not disciplined. This is not according to prison regulations. If I commit an offence I must be charged by the prison board. How will the prisoners respect me?57

Referring to prisoners seeking to escape, Chatambarara vividly illustrated the implications of military views: ‘The soldier tells you, “you shoot to kill.” The other one [a real prison officer] tells you, “No, you shoot to maim.” You see?’58

In Yuda’s and Chatambarara’s narratives, the ‘soldiers’ posed a profound threat to the ‘real’ prison service due to their lack of expertise and military attitudes. This was not, however, the only threat: equally important was the introduction of new purposes for the prison service, key among them private accumulation through corruption on an unprecedented scale. These practices mirrored those in other militarised institutions, in which party-military elites abused tender and procurement procedures, routing orders through a rapidly proliferating body of private companies they or their allies owned, and taking a cut in the process. Yuda explained:

We have a purchasing department for buying vehicles, materials for clothes, food for prisoners. And now, instead of them contacting suppliers they go to a third party and if you investigate the third party you’ll find it’s [a senior veteran’s] company . . . . This went to the extent of junior officers forming their own company. And they priced goods exorbitantly. If you check three companies on a tender you’ll see that all three are from [a senior veteran’s] company . . . . They looted the prison services. In 2004/5 an egg used to cost $2,000 but they’d charge $30,000 and swindle the government. The corruption went on and on until the prison service was on its knees.59

Procurement officers increasingly delivered ‘air supplies’ to the prisons. ‘In most cases’, Chatambarara explained,

they will simply say, ‘We have bought this item’, then make a payment when the item has not been delivered . . . . [N]othing has been supplied except air! . . . They will tell you, ‘Well, we have delivered 50 loads of bread at Harare Central Prison’. The bread hasn’t come but the payment has been made.

Prison officers – and prisoners – were also drawn into ‘Operation Maguta’. The operation was meant to involve the military in agricultural production. In practice it served a host of different purposes, among them the funneling of state-supplied agricultural inputs to party-military elites. Senior prison officers involved in the operation arrived at the prisons with

56 Interview, Yuda, 15 September 2008.57 Ibid.58 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008.59 Interview, Yuda, 15 September 2008. I have removed the names of senior veterans as it is not possible to verify

specific allegations.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 14: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 819

vehicles to demand prisoners (and officers to supervise them) who were used for work such as loading and unloading trucks full of fertiliser intended for the ‘military junta’.60

The militarised prison service had in effect a new purpose, based on a new kind of ‘expertise’: as Chatambarara put it, the military men ‘don’t know how the [prison] system operates’ but ‘those people can loot!’61

State Capacity, Humanitarian Catastrophe and Public Service

The consequences of introducing militarised people and purposes to the prison service were catastrophic. At the heart of both Yuda’s and Chatambarara’s narratives is a dramatic and affecting account of a largely failed but never abandoned struggle to continue to render a public service.

Militarisation together with economic collapse greatly magnified the difficulties the prison service had faced in providing basic care to its wards in the 1990s. Most terrible in its consequences was the collapse in food supplies. The quality and quantity of food had declined between 2000 and 2005; in 2006, a severe crisis began in which many prisoners went without food for days on end.62 The height of the crisis in Harare’s prisons occurred in 2008. Speaking in October 2008, Chatambarara described his and his colleagues’ desperate efforts at Harare Central Prison:

We have to run around to find some mealie meal. You go to the Grain Marketing Board. They will tell you, ‘we have nothing’. And they are supposed to be the sole supplier. Yes, so we have to run around. Probably you go to Bindura Prison, you get a tonne of . . . maize and you have to run to Chikurubi [Prison] with that tonne so that it will be ground into maize meal . . . . And when the lights [electricity supplies] are off [we] won’t have a generator . . . [W]e have got a cooking problem now because we have electric pots. So we have to find some firewood, and where in Harare do you find firewood? The end result is cutting those jacaranda trees. They are now finished.63

Despite these efforts, prisoners

will be lucky if they go with one meal. Sometimes they sleep without. Right now we have got moving skeletons in prison. They’re dying . . . . From January to the present [October 2008] I think we had something like 500 inmates who have died [in Harare Central Prison and Chikurubi]. This was due to hunger . . . . Chikurubi used to bring their sick to Harare Central Prison because there is no water at Chikurubi, and some of them will be moving graves. . . . The hospital is very small so we had to create another cell as a hospital, a ward. So in that ward you could find five dead bodies in the morning . . . because there was nothing . . . . [W]e had our small mortuary which does not have a generator. It holds somewhere around 20 bodies but we had a time when we had something like 60 bodies. The other bodies will be strewn all over the floor. . . . [T]hey had to . . . open up a cemetery for pauper burial at Chikurubi [prison farm] . . . . [W]e didn’t have mortuary facilities to accommodate these bodies. They were rotting on the floor with these maggots moving all around.64

In late 2008, ‘it was the prisoners who were digging the graves for the other prisoners . . . . The situation was unbearable . . . . They didn’t have coffins. It wasn’t a decent burial’. The

60 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October, 2008; 14 February 2009. SPT, Operation Taguta/Sisuthi, details widespread corruption and abuses under Operation Maguta.

61 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 62 See e.g. the account of MDC MP William Madzimure following his tour of seven prisons in early 2007 in

Godwin Gandu, ‘High Ups Use Free Prison Labour’, Mail and Guardian (South Africa), 5 March 2007. 63 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 64 Ibid. Also, interview, Yuda, 15 September 2008 and see the 2009 SABC documentary Hell Hole and prisoners’

accounts in Alexander, ‘Political imaginaries’.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 15: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

820 Journal of Southern African Studies

bodies ‘were simply covered in plastics . . . , and some were decomposing. You could end up having a head in your hands’.65

Disease compounded the deadly nature of the prisons. Prison populations had long had high levels of HIV infection as well as diseases such as tuberculosis.66 Malnutrition meant pellagra became a major killer too. In mid-February 2009, Chatambarara estimated three to four prisoners died of malnutrition-related disease each day in Harare Central Prison: ‘They are ill these people . . . . They are very weak . . . They are not getting medicine. They are not getting enough food’.67 In November 2008 the death toll had been inflated by a cholera epidemic that killed on average four to five people a day in the prison, with a high of 18 deaths on one day.68 Cholera had spread to the prison following an outbreak in the townships. Chatambarara suspected that it was the result of relatives bringing contaminated food to the prison in an attempt to keep imprisoned family members from starving. The prisons service’s ability to treat any of these conditions was virtually nil: medical staff rarely appeared; medicines were almost non-existent, and even if they had been available the lack of food and hygiene rendered them ineffective.69

The deaths and prolonged suffering of prisoners due to starvation and disease were the most horrifying consequences of the prison service’s militarisation amidst economic collapse. But there were other, related, effects too. In the years after 2000, rehabilitation programmes were scaled back as resources needed to run workshops and farms disappeared. In some institutions prisoners did not have uniforms of any kind and so could not be taken to work outside the prison. As Yuda commented, ‘There are no clothes so you can’t take nude people to do farming, you see’.70 From 2004, prisoners were increasingly sent to work not on prison farms but on what Chatambarara called ‘the junta’s farms’, many of them acquired as a result of post-2000 land reform, in an echo of settler rule-era uses of convict labour.71

In the years after 2000 other aspects of prison capacity deteriorated badly, in tandem with the judiciary as a whole, grossly compromising prisoners’ access to justice. Transportation became a major problem. From the early 2000s, court dates were regularly missed due to a lack of working vehicles and fuel. The result was a huge backlog of cases as prisoners were remanded in absentia again and again while state witnesses were sent home without testifying. A shortage of or simply absence of magistrates and prosecutors compounded the problem. Paperwork was lost and mislaid, leaving remand prisoners trapped for years in ‘illegal detention’.72 In 2008 Harare Central Prison and Chikurubi relied on just one

65 Interview, Chatambarara, 14 February 2009. 66 See official numbers of deaths due to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases in 1999 and 2000, and

complaints regarding the dearth of prison doctors and health costs of severe overcrowding in ‘Number of Prisoners Catching HIV Rises’, The Chronicle, 29 January 2001.

67 Interview, Chatambarara, 14 February 2009.68 Ibid.69 Ibid., and see Deputy Commissioner Chimboza’s account of health conditions in ‘Judiciary Must Protect

Prisoners – Makarau’, The Zimbabwe Times, 11 July 2009, available at http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/jul 12_2009.html#Z6, retrieved on 19 July 2013.

70 Interview, Yuda, 11 September 2008. Also see footage from Hell Hole in which prisoners are dressed in rags, scraps of blankets or nothing at all. Clothing deteriorated from the early 2000s: see ‘Prisons Overcrowded, Inmates Ill-Treated’, The Chronicle, 25 December 2002, and ‘Prisoners in Zimbabwe’s Jails Go Naked’, Mail and Guardian, 4 April 2006.

71 See ‘Harare Prisoners to be Hired Out’, IOL News, 26 September 2004, available at http://www.iol.co.za/news/ africa/harare-prisoners-to-be-hired-out-1.222671#.UQkHg6X7UUs, retrieved on 30 January 2013, in which Deputy Commissioner Chimboza justifies the policy. According to Chatambarara, Vice President Joice Mujuru paid the prisons in cabbage for labour in 2008, a boon for prison officers who had no relish to give their wards. Interview, 14 February 2009. Also see Fontein, ‘Anticipating the Tsunami’, p. 374, on Mujuru’s use of prison labour in 2006 and the 2007 report of ‘hundreds’ of prisoners regularly being sent to farms owned by ZANU(PF) and military elites in Gandu, ‘High Ups’.

72 Ibid. See complaints from judges and parliamentary committee reports on failures to bring prisoners to court from 2000: ‘Prison transport situation critical’, The Chronicle, 22 March 2000; ‘Judge criticises prison

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 16: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 821

ambulance to transport everything from food to dead bodies.73 By February 2009, there was ‘not even a single vehicle’ to take prisoners to court or hospital: ‘Prisoners, they just die whilst you are looking at them. It’s so pathetic’, lamented Chatambarara. When the high profile political prisoner Jestina Mukoko had to be taken to court at this time, she ‘had to be ferried using the big maChefs’ vehicles, personal cars’.74

Unsurprisingly, morale and discipline among prison officers declined sharply in this context. Trying to survive on a fast-shrinking wage while overseeing thousands of starving prisoners with little capacity to ameliorate conditions was deeply distressing and frustrating work. Officers responded by seeking out alternative postings within the Ministry of Justice and opportunities in Operation Maguta. Chatambarara explained:

This strategy, we created on our own. Most of the prison officers, they’d rather [work] at the Ministry of Justice. Some of them they are clerks . . . . [T]hey end up loving working at the Ministry of Justice . . . . [Then] there’s this Maguta project . . . . We have got prison officers there. So they’re given hampers and those little packs [of fertilisers] . . . . They would love to go to Maguta instead of spending the whole day behind bars.75

Such perks assumed huge significance as the value of prison officers’ pay dwindled to next to nothing (as for all civil servants) due to hyperinflation. As Chatambarara explained, many left: ‘Some they went for greener pastures, some they crossed the Limpopo’. Others could not afford the bus fare to work, leaving the prisons severely understaffed. Chatambarara pointed out that he had been paid 70 trillion Zimbabwe dollars in January 2009 (shortly before Zimbabwe’s currency was replaced by the US dollar), a sum that would not buy one copy of The Herald, Harare’s state-owned daily paper: ‘we have to take a Principal Prison Officer and a Prison Officer Grade 2 to buy a simple newspaper. [Laughs] That’s what it meant! . . . So the situation is not conducive for living’.76

As staff numbers in the prisons dwindled and their presence became erratic, prison officers relied increasingly directly on prisoners to create order, a system that was open to abuse. ‘Cell staff’ had free rein within cells in the frequent absence of prison officers while ‘trusties’ were given greater responsibilities like controlling prisoners during meals.77

Managing prisoners with a reduced number of officers was not, however, difficult after the food shortages became acute. Chatambarara explained: ‘In most cases they’ll be seated, hoping against hope that they’ll get a decent meal . . . . They’re too weak to give us trouble’.78

The economic pressures on prison officers also exacerbated the spread of corruption as survival strategy among the rank and file: as officers’ penury grew, they were increasingly open to material inducements. Deputy Commissioner Chimboza noted that the lack of accommodation for prison officers meant some had rented houses or rooms from prisoners.79

Chatambarara explained:

discipline has deteriorated on both sides – the prison officers and the prisoners. The two are now fraternising to the extent there’s no discipline . . . . So the prison officers end up trafficking with these prisoners now . . . . So once you get in the trafficking business with a prisoner, the prisoner

Footnote 72 continued

officials’, The Chronicle, 22 June 2000; ‘Fuel Crisis Hits Prisons’, The Chronicle, 20 December 2000; ‘Prisons Overcrowded, Inmates Ill-Treated’, The Chronicle, 25 December 2002; ‘Transport Shortage Hits Khami Prison’, The Chronicle, 13 February 2003; ‘Diesel Blues Ground Wheels of Justice’, The Chronicle, 5 November 2003.

73 Interview, Chatambarara, 14 February 2009. 74 Ibid. 75 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 76 Interview, Chatambarara, 14 February 2009. 77 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 78 Interview, Chatambarara, 14 February 2009. 79 ‘Judiciary Must Protect Prisoners – Makarau’.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 17: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

822 Journal of Southern African Studies

tends to control you instead of you controlling the prisoner . . . . They can be businessmen or some hardcore criminals, successful criminals! [Laughs] Nowadays it’s too prevalent.80

Corruption came to pervade all aspects of the justice system. While working in the courts in Chitungwiza, Chatambarara witnessed the bribery of magistrates and prosecutors. He argued, ‘In most cases, Zimbabwean prisons, they are full of poor people. The rich, they are not there – they pay their way out. It’s only the poor who are in prisons, those who cannot bribe the magistrate and those with petty offences’. He gave an example of three men imprisoned the previous day for the theft of maize cobs, having failed to pay a small fine. For them, a petty crime had become a potential death sentence.81

The perversity of this situation was not lost on the ‘professionals’ but they despaired of finding a solution. The militarisation of bureaucratic institutions meant rules were enforced where they no longer made sense. The checks that should have righted wrongs did not function: magistrates no longer conducted prison inspections, but continued to hand down custodial sentences as if prison conditions were not lethal; prison officers locked up prisoners they could not feed or ferry to court and watched them die.82 Enforcing rules amidst the depredations of militarisation caused prison officers ethical and emotional anguish, at times forcing them to act and feel in new ways. For Yuda, the starvation of prisoners lay behind the secret filming he did inside the prisons, a desperate act that would force him into exile. For Chatambarara, it caused a breach in the emotional arsenal of the ideal prison officer: ‘We . . . prison officers never felt pity for prisoners but nowadays you feel pity. You can even go to the extent, when you are having your meal, you simply give the prisoner some food’.83

For Chatambarara the changes to the prison service were signs of a deeper lawlessness that had changed Zimbabwe ‘too much’: ‘they’ve let corruption go to the roots without any prosecutions taking place. And now, once you corrupt a junior officer, the lowest rank, to uproot that corruption [is] a mammoth task . . . . That is not possible, no. Because all Zimbabweans are corrupt now’.84 Professionals readily admitted to being deeply compromised: the institution they served had in practice lost many of the defining attributes of statehood as they understood it. They nonetheless kept their faith in the ideal of the bureaucratic state, holding it up against its militarised inverse, and making sense of their position through a narrative of decline blamed on the illegitimate rule of the ‘soldiers’. Such prison officers desperately struggled to maintain a professional ‘persona’ in near impossible circumstances. They engaged in a daily battle to maintain some level of institutional functionality, participated in petty corruption to survive, and struggled with the ethical dimension of their position.

‘Real’ prison officers had in addition to contend with the efforts of their soldier colleagues to discipline political loyalties, another integral aspect of militarisation that would threaten professionalism.

80 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 81 Interview, Chatambarara, 14 February 2009. Also see discussion of corruption in the judiciary in Verheul, this

issue. 82 Objections were occasionally raised. In 2007, an officer from the Attorney General’s office told a reporter that

his office was granting ‘easy bail’ to those charged with minor crimes because, ‘“We can’t just send people to die of hunger’.” That is, however, precisely what judicial officers did in thousands of cases. See Gandu, ‘High Ups’. Also see account of High Court judge Charles Hungwe in ‘Judiciary Must Protect Prisoners – Makarau’. There are some references to small rebellions by prison officers. For example, in Gweru in 2005 officers refused to take suspects remanded into custody on the grounds that the prison was full and they had no fuel to return to court. See ‘Prison Officers Refuse to Take Suspects’, The Chronicle, 12 November 2005.

83 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. 84 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. This was a common view in 2008: e.g., Bratton and Masunungure,

‘Zimbabwe’s Long Agony’, p. 47, noted, ‘Corruption now pervades all levels of the Zimbabwean state . . . [D]aily survival in Zimbabwe has become unavoidably criminalized’. Compare to Jones, ‘“Nothing is straight”’.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 18: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 823

Militarisation and Political Discipline

Militarisation brought overtly partisan practices to the prison service, an extension of the battle within the civil service as a whole mooted in the 1990s. The service’s military men played a key role in enforcing allegiance to ZANU(PF), as did their counterparts in other state institutions. They persecuted imprisoned opposition figures and were deployed on behalf of ZANU(PF) during elections. In the run-up to the June 2008 election, prison officers were made to vote under the watchful eye of the soldiers while senior military men were relieved of their duties to ‘go campaigning’ in this most violent of moments, functions for which they were rewarded publicly and materially.85 These roles provided the context for the quotidian surveillance and disciplining of members of the prison service itself. Such attempts met resistance while also strengthening an association between professionalism and oppositional political loyalties that had emerged from the labour struggles of the previous decade.

If professionals considered that the soldiers were not ‘real’ prison officers, the soldiers considered that the professionals were by definition subversive: professionalism contained the notion of an alternative political project incompatible with militarisation and rhetorically linked to a ‘regime change’ agenda led by the MDC and its foreign allies. In defence of the militarised state, Zimondi had introduced a new security section to the prison service, led by Senior Assistant Commissioner Chihobvu, a retired major. The security section served as an intelligence unit; it reported directly to Chihobvu, circumventing the prison administration, and worked closely with the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO).86 Chatambarara held that the security section compiled files on officers and used prisoners as informers. Simply being critical of the way the prison service was run was enough to be labelled MDC and to be persecuted for it. In fact, prison officers’ loyalties were often suspect, whether they simply saw militarisation as an illegitimate project or actively supported the MDC. Chatambarara fell into the former category. He was reported to the security section for objecting to the politically inflected title ‘comrade’ and for refusing to comply with ultra vires demands made by Chihobvu. He lost an advantageous posting and watched as other colleagues were persecuted and fled. Nonetheless, he maintained, ‘I don’t feel threatened because I can stand my ground. I know the prison regulations, what they entail. You only feel threatened when you don’t know what you are supposed to do’.87

85 Interview, Yuda, 15 September 2008. On the persecution of opposition political prisoners, see Alexander, ‘Political Imaginaries’; Human Rights Watch (HRW), ‘Our Hands are Tied’: Erosion of the Rule of Law in Zimbabwe (New York, HRW, 2008), pp. 19–23. Yuda filmed the manipulation of prison officers’ votes. See D. Campbell and P. Lewis, ‘Exclusive: Secret Film Reveals how Mugabe Stole an Election’, The Guardian, 4 July 2008, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/04/zimbabwe1 (the video is available here), retrieved on 1 November 2012. For the involvement of militarised members of the prison service in the 2008 campaign, see HRW, ‘Bullets for Each of You’: State-Sponsored Violence since Zimbabwe’s March 29 Elections (New York, HRW, 2008), pp. 1–2, 14, 21; ‘Zimbabwe Prison Service in Terror Campaign’, The Zimbabwean, 7 June 2008, available at http://www.thezimbabwean.co/news/13272/zimbabwe-prison-service­in-terror-campaign.html, retrieved on 6 May 2013; A. Chimora, ‘Zimbabwe: Zanu PF Agents in Uniformed Forces Get Double Salaries’, Afrik-News, 20 July 2010, available at http://www.afrik-news.com/article17998. html, retrieved on 19 June 2013. Junior officers who were not part of the ‘junta’ were tasked with ‘guarding’ nighttime meetings held in ZANU(PF) bases, as recorded in Yuda’s Guardian film footage. These roles were rewarded at all levels. See‘Mugabe promotes key men in election scandal’, Times Online, 12 August 2008, available at http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/aug13_2008.html#Z3, retrieved on 1 November 2012; Chimora, ‘Zimbabwe’.

86 Interviews, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008; Yuda, 15 September 2008. Also see Chimora, ‘Zimbabwe’, in which a police source contends, ‘Most of these people who are in this [security] department are Zanu(PF) agents and not real prison officers’. A prison source in the same article emphasised the department’s ZANU(PF) loyalties. Establishing partisan sections of state institutions in order to enforce political loyalty was standard ZANU(PF) practice, e.g. in the police and military. See discussion in Chitiyo, ‘The Case’.

87 Interview, Chatambarara, 14 October 2009.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 19: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

824 Journal of Southern African Studies

This statement of belief in the power of the regulations – of formal institutions – was clearly in part normative and symbolic. The fact that Chatambarara had survived inside the prison service was owed to a variety of strategies; many of his colleagues had not, especially where they had been accused of overt MDC allegiance. Yuda was unusual in that he had stayed within the prison service until 2008 despite being a known MDC activist. His case is revealing of how contesting militarisation could blur the boundary between professionalism and political opposition to ZANU(PF). In Yuda’s account, he was made an ‘enemy’ by the military men in what amounted to a mortal battle. Despite the risks, he refused to leave the service, insisting on appealing to a law-bound authority he associated with – and accessed through – the MDC. He did so with more effect than many because his MDC links were sufficiently senior to give him access to lawyers and courts, and so to spaces where the law had sway despite militarisation. If ZANU(PF) had built partisan networks beyond the state from positions within it, so too had the ‘professionals’, though from a far less powerful position and with a different purpose.

Because of his work in the MDC, and specifically his ties to MDC leader Tendai Biti, Yuda had influential networks on which to draw. In Yuda’s account, he was first accused of MDC loyalties in 2000; Biti found him legal representation and he was acquitted of the charges.88 The following year, Yuda and 15 other prison officers based at the Chikurubi Prisons Headquarters were suspended on ‘allegations of being an active member of the opposition political party MDC’, as the official letter put it. At the time, the men explained to a Daily News reporter that they had been visited by Police Internal Security Intelligence (PISI) officers (a notoriously political arm of the police) and feared for their lives.89 Speaking of that period, Yuda explained,

They were so hostile. They didn’t promote me. They viewed me as an enemy. They put me under surveillance since I was MDC . . . . They were the sons and daughters of people in the ruling party. So their livelihood relied on the government in power. I was even afraid to work. I thought I could be shot and killed at any time. I couldn’t do my job normally . . . . Those in ZANU don’t believe in democracy. If you are in opposition, you are simply opposed to the state. You are an enemy of the prison service.90

Yuda appealed to Biti once more; Biti wrote to Minister of Justice Patrick Chinamasa and Zimondi on the group’s behalf, an affront for which the 16 prison officers were immediately punished:

The letter infuriated them. They were so angry with him . . . . The prison services evicted us from the camp where we lived and put us on half salary. We couldn’t afford to lodge or the transport to prison. We had to report three times a day when we were on suspension. I couldn’t buy anything for my kids. I couldn’t afford school fees. I had to drop them from school. It was so punitive.91

The prison service set up a board of enquiry, which was itself ‘militarised’. Included on the board was Major Vincent Ndlovu, a serving member of military intelligence and a veteran who would join the prison service in 2002, rising to the joint number two post of deputy commissioner in 2007.92 Yuda unsuccessfully challenged his presence. The board brought forward prison officers, largely veterans, who testified that Yuda had been selling MDC cards and T-shirts and organising in the camps where prison officers lived – all of it true. Yuda’s

88 Interview, Yuda, 10 September 2008.89 See Collin Chiwanza, ‘Prison service suspends 16 alleged MDC supporters’, The Daily News, 6 October 2001,

available at http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/oct7_2001.html#link5, retrieved on 1 November 2012. 90 Interview, Yuda, 10 September 2008. 91 Ibid. 92 See ‘Zimbabwe: Ndlovu Promoted’, The Herald, 22 May 2007, available at http://allafrica.com/stories/

200705220563.html, retrieved on 6 May 2013.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 20: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 825

lawyer, however, successfully challenged the board’s charges in the High Court on the grounds that the law was being applied selectively as the witnesses had openly identified themselves as members of ZANU(PF).

Yuda was then transferred to a prison in the remote eastern town of Chipinge, to which he had never been. He, his family and all his belongings were piled into the open back of a truck. It rained from Rusape all the way to Chipinge, some 300 kilometres: ‘Everything, all my belongings, were destroyed. All I had worked for was destroyed’, Yuda lamented.93 The officer-in-charge in Chipinge was a veteran: ‘When he saw me, he saw an enemy’, Yuda stated. He was put under surveillance by the CIO and PISI, both forces allied to ZANU(PF). After an altercation with members of PISI, he was arrested in December 2002 and charged with assault. He was placed in handcuffs and leg irons and beaten so badly his collarbone was broken. Yuda once again appealed to the MDC for legal support and was duly found a lawyer. Chipinge’s magistrate let Yuda out on bail over police objections and eventually acquitted him of all charges.94

The following month Yuda was arrested once more, this time under the notorious Public Order and Security Act by Mutare’s Law and Order police, a section of the police known for its political work, on charges of writing a letter denouncing the government. This time he was refused food for six days while he was moved daily between police stations, a practice commonly used to keep lawyers and relatives at bay, and which carried the real threat of disappearance. Yuda ended up in Harare Central Police station. There he serendipitously met a man who was about to be released and who agreed to take a letter for him to Harvest House, the MDC’s Harare headquarters.95

Yuda wrote directly to Morgan Tsvangirai asking that he send a lawyer. That same day Alec Muchadehama, one of the most formidable of Zimbabwe’s human rights lawyers, arrived at the station demanding to see him, a move that infuriated the CIO agents who would interrogate him and threaten his life: Muchadehama’s arrival meant Yuda’s existence within the system could not be denied. According to Yuda, when the case came before the Attorney General he declined to prosecute. Following further instances of harassment, Yuda succeeded in gaining his full reinstatement in September 2003, some two years after his initial suspension. He worked in Chipinge until January 2005, facing constant harassment (including further criminal charges) before he was transferred to a desk job at Prison Headquarters in Harare.96

Yuda’s survival depended on his ability to draw on the legal and other networks of senior members of the MDC such that he could defend himself in state institutions that had some independence from the militarised prison service and ZANU(PF)-aligned arms of the police and the intelligence organisation. He nonetheless paid a heavy price in loss of income and access to housing as well as personal property accumulated over the whole of his career; in beatings, threats and harassment; and in the costs to his wife and children, who were repeatedly threatened, left without resources and uprooted. These were intimate attacks that undermined highly valued social and professional roles. Yuda was, in his words, ‘staying in hell’.97

Yuda’s stubborn refusal to be removed from the prison service despite the high costs and his appeal to rules and rule-bound institutions in his defence starkly illustrated a key form of contestation over authority within the service, based on a commitment to a particular vision of

93 Interview, Yuda, 10 September 2008.94 Ibid.95 Ibid.96 Ibid., and Interview, Yuda, 11 September 2008.97 Interview, Yuda, 11 September 2008.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 21: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

826 Journal of Southern African Studies

statehood. His case also signalled the tendency on all sides to partisanship, if in the name of widely different projects.

Conclusion

Both the ways in which the ‘politics of disorder’ remakes norms and practices within state institutions and the effects on the exercise of power of the ‘uncertainties’ produced by contradictory orders need to be explored from the point of view of state actors. In their narratives, ‘real’ prison officers working in the militarised prison service did not express confusion over responsibility for the institution’s horrifying decline, even where they were complicit in it. The agents of militarisation were visible, known people – the ‘soldiers’ appointed to the service from the late 1990s. Their choices were neither obscured nor justified by the claims of patriotic history. They were portrayed as ‘dull’, greedy, cruel, and wholly lacking in an ethic of public service – in short, they were everything that a professional should not be. From this point of view, the world appeared Manichean, though it had in practice compromised all who inhabited it. Civil servants’ shared project of previous decades had been shunted aside, and the normative and narrative construction of state authority was thereby laid open to question.

Let me briefly return to the questions I posed at the outset. First, what does the prison service tell us about how ‘militarisation’ shaped the ways in which state institutions functioned? Over the 2000s, the rehabilitation of prisoners became largely irrelevant to the militarised prison service, which served instead as a means of accumulation and political control. Remaking it to serve these purposes meant replacing a great swath of prison staff with military men who had little interest in prison work. The senior soldiers at the top ranks of the prison service served as the link to the private companies, militia, relatives and formal military institutions that all had a hand in these processes. The demoralised and impoverished lower ranks (‘professional’ and not) struggled to maintain some kind of institutional capacity, devolved authority to prisoners themselves, and engaged in petty corruption, absenteeism and institution hopping to survive. The result was a new form of state punishment: the awful suffering and deaths of thousands of poor Zimbabweans trapped within the prison walls, many of them convicted of no crime.

Second, what were the consequences of militarisation for the constitution of authority within the state? Militarisation blurred lines in practice, but it also reinforced boundaries between normative claims to authority, notably those made by the prison services represented by the shorthand of ‘soldiers’ and ‘professionals’. ‘Real’ prison officers remembered with nostalgia and pride a rule-abiding and expert state, even if such a state had never existed, and they retained a belief in the legitimacy and protection of ‘the regulations’, though such protection was clearly inadequate even where officers had access to the legal resources availed by opposition networks. The narrative and normative valence of professionalism was nonetheless reinforced over these years by a profound outrage over the injustices delivered by militarisation, an outrage that had for some elided professionalism and political opposition.

These lines of division remained subject to contestation over time. The economic and political nadir of 2008 and the establishment of the government of national unity in February 2009 marked important watersheds. In late 2008, when the fate of Zimbabwe’s government of national unity still hung in the balance, the appeal of militarisation among ZANU(PF)’s foot soldiers in the prison service proved tenuous. According to Chatambarara, many of the more junior veterans and militia who had benefited from militarisation in less lavish ways than their seniors had become sympathetic to the MDC in part because of the effects of economic collapse on their lives, and in part because of the concentration of ‘looting’ at the highest

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 22: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Militarisation and State Institutions 827

levels. Loyalty to ZANU(PF) was increasingly reduced to calculations concerning the possibility of patronage. In October 2008, he explained,

Nowadays they say anything. They don’t give a damn. They don’t care. Because people will say, well, this is a government of national unity. So they say whatever they want. Even those so-called ex-combatants, most of them, they’re now changing their colours, saying, well, these people, they looted. When in actual fact they forget that they were part and parcel . . . . They are very unhappy because these peanuts they are getting as war veterans cannot sustain them.98

In early 2009, Chatambarara held that ‘disgruntlement’ had increased and the vast majority of prison officers ‘belong to the MDC’ – ‘even those who fought in the liberation war, most of them, they’re turning to the MDC now, because they are getting nothing’. Ironically, anger with the MDC among prison service professionals also took hold at this time as it became clear that the Ministry of Justice would remain in ZANU(PF) hands and the prison service under Zimondi’s charge.99

When the unity government took office, the ongoing uncertainties of these several ‘prison services’ was vividly illustrated in the fate of the service’s two deputy commissioners, Washington Chimboza, the most senior ‘real’ prison officer still in post, and Vincent Ndlovu, a war veteran and retired major who had risen within the service as a ‘soldier’. Chimboza took the opportunity of a Zimbabwe Lawyers’ for Human Rights workshop on prisoners’ rights – a less ‘militarised’ venue would be hard to find – to denounce the functioning of the prison service in terms that expressed the frustration, outrage and shame of the professionals. Running through the whole gamut of institutional disasters, he emphasised the service’s failure to meet any of its statutory obligations, the abrogation of the most basic of prisoners’ rights and the scandal of starvation: for him, the service had ‘become an embarrassment to the criminal justice system’.100 Some months later, in 2010, Chimboza and Ndlovu were removed from their posts on allegations of corruption in the handling of a vehicle tender intended to address the service’s crippling shortage of vehicles. The media portrayal of the dismissals built on the notion of the two services, professional and militarised. Chimboza’s removal was read as retribution by the soldiers for his attempts to reassert the prison service’s professional ethos. Ndlovu’s demise was portrayed as the result of falling foul of powerful patronage networks: he had reportedly snubbed a ZANU(PF)-linked businessman for a client of his own in the vehicle tender process, a story entirely in the mode of the militarised

101state.

These are battles that are far from over, and they are central to determining the very purposes of state institutions. If no common ground among civil servants had emerged in the run-up to the unity government and in its early days it was because amidst all the venality, criminality, violence and patron–client relations there was a debate among civil servants over the nature of the public realm and the general interest, rooted in history, expressed in

98 Interview, Chatambarara, 18 October 2008. The increasing sympathies of junior prison officers for the MDC in the 2000s was widely noted by political prisoners. See Alexander, ‘Political Imaginaries’, pp. 494–6. Also see Bratton and Masunungure, ‘Zimbabwe’s Long Agony’, p. 47.

99 Interview, Chatambarara, 14 February 2009. Also, Interview, Yuda, 15 September 2008. See J. Alexander and K. Chitofiri, ‘The Consequences of Violent Politics in Norton, Zimbabwe’, The Round Table, 99, 411 (2010), pp. 673–86 for a discussion of shifting loyalties under the GNU more widely.

100 ‘Judiciary Must Protect Prisoners – Makarau’. 101 See ‘Zimbabwe Prisons Boss Fired for Corruption’, ZimEye, 23 May 2010, available at http://www.zimeye.

org/?p¼17601, retrieved on 21 January 2013; ‘Prisons paltry harvest’, The Zimbabwean, 16 June 2010, available at http://www.thezimbabwean.co/business/industry/31848/prisons-paltry-harvest.html, retrieved on 21 January 2013. Ndlovu’s fate may also have been influenced by jockeying among veterans of the two liberation armies in the context of contracting resources. See ‘Mugabe Clashes with Zimondi over Promotions’, ZimEye, 17 August 2010, available at http://www.zimeye.org/?p¼20919, retrieved on 21 January 2013.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 23: Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

828 Journal of Southern African Studies

narrative, and insisting on the ideal of the professional as an alternative to ‘militarisation’. This placed state institutions and their actors at the very centre of political struggle.

JOCELYN ALEXANDER

Department of International Development, University of Oxford, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford,

OX1 3TB, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

cast

le U

nive

rsity

] at

06:

19 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014