KwaMunyasa: Problematising Coloniality of Citizenship in Zimbabwe

This chapter discusses the concepts of culture and citizenship as viewed from colonial and post-colonial perspectives. Both culture and citizenship are vexed and contested concepts for which there is no consensus among scholars. Neither of them is of a natural kind: they are ideologically laden; and products of imaginaries at the service of, especially, dominant, hegemonic forces in their quest for the exercising of power. The focus is on the coloniality of language that mediates cultural and citizenship statuses of migrant labourers in post-colonial Zimbabwe. What was the citizenship status of migrant labourers in the colonial British Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland? And how does their status in post-colonial Zimbabwe betray colonial narratives about citizenship and belonging?