Paper short abstract:

After 2000, student protest was driven by a moral outrage that their hopes for the future were being robbed by economic collapse and ZANU(PF)’s ‘patriotic’ project. Today this ‘moral economy of hope’ has given way and been replaced by new, insecure forms of student-hood.

Paper long abstract:

Between 2000 and 2008, student leaders mobilised thousands of university students to protest the government in events that were convened in partnership with civic society and the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. The majority of these students were outraged at the damage caused by economic and political crises on their education and hopes for the future. This paper argues that the engine of the mass student protest was the government's ideological transgression of the 'moral economy of hope' that underpinned people's investment in their education and which had a long history in Zimbabwe.

The futures that many students imagined for themselves, and the country at large, were being robbed: the formal economy shrunk dramatically, statutory funding of public institutions declined and currency instability wrecked havoc with household finances. Compounding the economic realities was the ruling party's attempts to restructure professional state institutions and private sector companies in accordance with 'patriotic' values that meant employing people that supported ZANU(PF). These realities were drawn into anti-ZANU(PF) political campaigns by student leaders, who often used their activism to gain material resources and to imagine political careers for themselves.

Using ethnographic material and several life histories, this paper argues that the failure of the Government of National Unity to bring about the reinstatement of an older meritocratic social and economic order has inaugurated a new era of politics in Zimbabwe, one in which protest is secondary to patronage, and in which mass student activism plays a much diminished role.