2021-22 Abstract: Policing Citizenship: Roadblocks and the Making of the State in Zimbabwe  

Following an intensification of policing in Zimbabwe since 2012, Zimbabwean police have often been accused not only of seeking bribes form motorists but of valuing money over empathy (Herald 2016). This project conducts an in-depth analysis of policing encounters along Zimbabwe’s roads, to better understand the ways expectations of a particular form of moral personhood among police reshapes conceptions of citizenship. Taking police officers as the most visible instantiations of the state in contemporary Zimbabwe, it studies the ways ideas around citizenship are negotiated in encounters with the police. It takes an ethnographic approach, centered on the semiotic, affective, and lived experiences of policing, in a context in which ordinary residents have been heavily policed since 2012. It grounds this in-depth study of contemporary life in historical analysis which draws on archival material, on the institutional and ideological histories of policing in Zimbabwe and its colonial precursor, Southern Rhodesia. Asking what it means for police to be seen as lacking hunhu, the study examines the ways Zimbabweans’ experiences of and expectations around policing bring together indigenous philosophies of moral conduct and the overlaying of postcolonial aspirations on a historically colonial form.