Youth, Politics and Participation in Zimbabwe: A Case Study of Highfield Suburb, Harare

The thesis explores youth political participation in Highfield, a low-income urban case location in Harare, Zimbabwe. It explores changes over time in the ways in which political parties have sought to engage youths and the rationales behind individual and group choices to engage or not to do so. The study focuses particularly on the harmonised elections of 2023 and on the political category of youth, exploring the agency of youths in precarious employment and in times of crisis. It uses ethnographic methods to assess when and why youths in Highfield engage in civil action, participate in political violence, and engage or disengage from all party politics. The thesis explains what drives varying political attitudes and behaviours, and how and why people might shift between these types of political behaviour and combine or transcend them. The thesis develops a series of propositions about the evolving dynamics of youth political engagement in urban Zimbabwe. • First, it proposes a novel perspective on ‘membership’ of political parties, a concept commonly used by political analysts as well as commentators and party managers in Highfield. Political strategies employed by the two main parties to engage youth have evolved significantly from traditional party-building methods, such as selling cards and building branch structures. This study uncovers a shift away from formalised party structures and towards ‘short-term membership’ recruitment and the formation of leader-follower groups. • Second, the thesis develops an argument about party primary elections and how they worked in the latest 2023 election, with a major focus on youth. The study contrasts the processes between the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) and the ruling party the Zimbabwean African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) and describes how improvised, anti-bureaucratic street politics enabled CCC to select popular candidates supported by young people and to involve larger numbers of youths in the primary processes. This enabled the party to avoid the image of time-served party activists being selected through structures or ‘gatekeepers’ whose reputation in the constituency could not be cleansed of associations with factionalism and elitism. The study observes that, in contrast to when party membership alone was previously an asset to a political career, loyalty to the party leader, separate from partisan affiliation, has become increasingly popular. This way, proximity or perceived loyalty to the party leader is regarded as a central resource for obtaining nominations and winning party positions. • Finally, it argues that political party campaign activities in the immediate run-up to the election reflected both a restrictive political environment and the legacies of elite decisions to de-emphasise youth violence and demobilise ‘security wings’/youth militias/militant party foot soldiers. Both parties eschewed the previously popular 'mass rally' style of campaigning in Highfield. In the face of the prevailing authoritarian political environment, in the absence of militant youth structures, and limited party resources and capabilities, CCC adopted a shadow-boxing campaign process over a conventional mass rally approach. Meanwhile, although they never faced restrictions in Highfield, ZANU PF was also nervous about having its unpopularity exposed. Both parties thus adopted less rally-centric approaches to campaigning, with a few big-wig rallies, but made up for the loss of contact through innovative forms of ‘face-to-face’ contact with voters and by convening fast-moving, informal types of street mobilisations. These new styles of electoral politics were, in part, brought into being by national politicians with a particular view of the lessons of previous elections. To the extent that they succeeded (and CCC won the Highfield seat comfortably, despite its overall loss of the 2023 elections), this is explained by the fit or otherwise with the personal ideologies and the life hopes of youth activists.