Reflection and Conclusion

Abstract

The study that informed the development of this book sought to examine the representation and materialization of iconic architecture in Zimbabwe tapping into the historicity of (heritage) sites and architectural products. For centuries, architecture and space in Africa in general and Zimbabwean, in particular, were subjected to variants of appropriation and materialization with multifarious effects on individual and collective identities. In particular, its forced engagement with colonial powers followed by relatively repressive post-colonial regimes left legacies of multi-layered elitist and totalitarian inscriptions. Guided by a combination of normative structuralism and critical post-structuralism, the collection of chapters provides a narrative and critical review of the ways in which Zimbabwean iconic architecture including historicist buildings, monuments and cityscapes have come about and been mobilized as cultural, economic, religious and political artefacts and artifices producing identities and other complex meanings. There seems to be a consistent pattern between how both successive colonial and post-colonial regimes in Zimbabwe have mobilized and capitalized the affinity between politics, culture and architecture. The book’s central argument is that celebrated symbols of memorialization and heritagization through spatial re-figuration are a form of collective historic preservation for national identity formation, and to some extent pieces of hegemonic statecraft. The mediating effect of power in the modes of architectural representation and patterns of materialization particularly in the construction of these “grand” structures renders many of them to resemble more memory dispositifs than national iconographies.