The Post-Colonial State in Zimbabwe. Nationalism and Patriotic History in the Political Discourse of the Mugabe Era

The article investigates reasons and characteristics of the crisis that Zimbabwe has been going through since 1996. The article focuses about the crisis of legitimacy of the dominant party during the era of Robert Mugabe's presidency and the way the crisis was addressed with the use of languages that referred to anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and to the idea of a new patriotic history. Political languages that emphasized the struggle for liberation as well as the myths on the country's foundation (the land among these), and a new Mugabeisms, that inherited the anti-colonial struggle were used both to government's re-legitimation and to emarginate, even with the use of violence, the oppositions.