ABSTRACT
THE TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS OF CHILD SPONSORSHIP discussed in the previous chapter situate NGOs such as World Vision in an international “civil society.”1 Alongside the dynamics described in Chapter 3between donors and recipients of humanitarian aid-are the political tensions of sovereignty and governance that exist between NGOs and the Zimbabwean state. This chapter is about the national political-economic context of religious NGOwork in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s. My research directly preceded the racialized political struggles of 2000-2001 Zimbabwe, which included statesponsored violence and farm invasions. Although this chapter does not account for (or explain) the violence of 2000 directly, it does document a bubbling discontent, both economic and political, that was pacified through NGO programs of economic development. NGOs worked in collaboration with the Zimbabwean state to offer these programs while at the same time espousing a discourse that transcended national politics. This discourse, drawing on two themes-a Christian discourse of “A Kingdom of God,” and a neoliberal discourse of “free markets”—facilitated what I call a politics of transcendence. However, as my ethnographic examples will demonstrate, the Zimbabwean state at this time was a weak and desperate state-one that depended heavily on the welfare work of World Vision and Christian Care to pacify a nation in economic decline.2 In 1996-97, NGOs were working to assist rural communities in becoming economically self-sufficient in the wake of reduced social services; the state was weakened at that time by ESAP (cf. Hanlon 2000) and neoliberal programs of economic reform that had drastically reduced welfare service for Zimbabweans (Bond 1991, 1998). Dependent on international forms of charitable aid, the Zimbabwean state was in a precarious relationship with internationally funded Christian NGOs. The tensions rum bling during my research were evident every day in growing violence that was manifested in increased crime, mobs that publicly disrobed women for being scantily dressed, weekly riots at the University of Zimbabwe, and heavy-handed state attempts to quiet them. It was also present in the protests of war veterans, at that time organized against Mugabe, before he agreed to pay their pensions. The analysis in this chapter speaks to debates on supposed “civil society” and the state in Africa,3 on church-
state relations,4 and on the ways that development has historically intersected with the extension of state power in Zimbabwe.5 It also builds on recent critiques of neoliberal efforts (like structural adjustment programs) and their social consequences.6
