ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the history of the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ), with a particular focus on Great Zimbabwe. We explore how the politics of representing the past has long been imbricated with the politics of encountering its remains. In the early 1980s, in the wake of Zimbabwe's drawn-out struggle for majority rule, NMMZ faced the challenge of reasserting control over the country's monuments and museums. It embraced the professionalization of heritage management, in close co-operation with UNESCO's world heritage system. Although marked by the rupture of independence, and the need to reverse Rhodesian censorship about Great Zimbabwe's past, there were also strong continuities. In the late 1990s, as structural adjustment washed across the region, NMMZ engaged with growing critiques of heritage, adopting new notions of cultural landscapes, intangible heritage and community participation. In the 2000s, the economy floundered and a new nationalist historiography became dominant. NMMZ tried to exploit new opportunities offered by the rise of “liberation heritage” and “patriotic history.” NMMZ's responses to these challenges—particularly those having to do with human remains from Zimbabwe's liberation war—illustrate how contested materialities can affect the politics of representation as much as vice versa.
