Abstract
The book ends with Thabisani Ndlovu’s rich chapter which employs heritage interpretation as a lens to read contestations over the statue(s) of the late Joshua Nkomo with a view to examine the role of statuary in recent Zimbabwean historiography. The process of unveiling the bronze statue of Nkomo on 22 December 2013 at the intersection of 8th Avenue and Main Street, and the subsequent name change of the latter to JM Nkomo Street, was a slow process mired in contestation and controversy. While it took government more than 6 years to sanction the name change as proposed by the city council of Bulawayo, the bronze statue (one of a pair) of Nkomo had to be taken down before its official unveiling in 2010, following complaints by the Nkomo family and Bulawayo public. The government had planned that the second of the two statues would be erected in Harare’s Karigamombe Centre to which there were objections by both the Nkomo family and the owners of the space for the proposed site, revealing the importance of the spatialisation of pubic memory. The focus of the chapter is on the Bulawayo statue, which was (re)erected on the spot where that of Cecil John Rhodes used to be, facing the same direction (North) suggesting some kind of dissonance.
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Ndlovu, T. (2017). Whose Nkomo Is It Anyway? Joshua Nkomo’s Statue and Commemorative Landscape. In: Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (eds) Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo of Zimbabwe. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60555-5_18
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