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Institution

University of Zimbabwe

EducationHarare, Harare, Zimbabwe
About: University of Zimbabwe is a education organization based out in Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The organization has 4378 authors who have published 6800 publications receiving 160720 citations. The organization is also known as: UZ & University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.


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Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2000-Geoderma
TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of changing fire regime on the stocks and isotopic composition of soil organic carbon (SOC) in a tropical savanna ecosystem at Matopos, Zimbabwe were investigated.

158 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors employ a national probability sample survey to analyze the popular reactions of ordinary Zimbabweans to the government's Operation Murambatsvina (OM), a state-sponsored campaign to stifle independent economic and political activity in the country's urban areas.
Abstract: In May 2005, the Government of Zimbabwe launched Operation Murambatsvina (OM), a state-sponsored campaign to stifle independent economic and political activity in the country’s urban areas. This article employs a national probability sample survey to analyze the popular reactions of ordinary Zimbabweans to this landmark event. It shows that the application of state repression succeeds at some goals, fails at others, and has powerful unintended effects. We report that the scope of OM was wide and that its main victims of OM were younger, unemployed families whom state security agents saw as potential recruits for social unrest. While OM undoubtedly disrupted the informal economy, we show that it did not succeed in banishing urban dwellers to rural areas or permanently shutting down informal trade. Moreover, the crackdown thoroughly discredited the police and other state institutions. We also demonstrate that state repression backfired by emboldening its victims, deepening polarization between political parties, and fortifying the ranks of Zimbabwe’s opposition movement. Copyright Afrobarometer v Popular Reactions to State Repression: Operation Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe Rulers resort to repression when they run out of options for governing. They employ the coercive instruments of state mainly when unable to win popular support using more legitimate methods. The application of state violence is an extreme and unpredictable policy choice that is almost always adopted under conditions of political or economic crisis. Rulers generally prefer to use persuasion or patronage to win the loyalty of followers but, if they lose elections or confront an empty treasury, then the urge to cling to power may tempt them to call out armed forces against their own citizens. By mid 2005, there is little doubt that Zimbabwe faced twin economic and political crises. The Zimbabwe African National UnionPatriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government of Robert Mugabe, in office without interruption for a quarter century, had exhausted its capacity for good governance. It was able to extend its tenure only through a series of increasingly disputed elections marred by intimidation, vote buying, and ballot fraud. For harassing its political opponents, the ZANU-PF government was driven into international isolation, mainly by the Western powers but also from selected members of the African Union. And, by embarking on an ill-considered and chaotically implemented program of land seizures, the Mugabe government had also turned the country from an agricultural exporter to a needy recipient of foreign food aid. By 2005, as a result of gross economic mismanagement, the government was essentially bankrupt and desperate to gain access to dwindling supplies of foreign exchange. In May of that year, in the aftermath of parliamentary elections that confirmed that ZANU-PF had lost political control of Zimbabwe’s urban areas, the government cracked down. Its security apparatus launched a massive “urban clean up” campaign called Operation Murambatsvina that was justified as a strategy to eradicate illegal dwellings and eliminate informal trade. As with earlier attacks on journalists and opposition parties, colonial-style legislation was invoked to regulate how people could house themselves or make a living. Analysts and observers inside and outside the country commented that the crackdown was conducted in an indiscriminate manner and with unjustified force. Because it breached national and international laws guiding evictions and undermined the livelihoods of large numbers of people, the operation was broadly condemned as a gross violation of human rights. This paper measures the popular reactions of ordinary Zimbabweans to Operation Murambatsvina (OM) by means of a national probability sample survey. Administered in October 2005 as part of Afrobarometer Round 3 in Zimbabwe, the survey instrument contained a battery of questions about the impact of the OM campaign on the residential and economic circumstances of respondents. These data cast light on important questions: Who were the victims of OM? What hardships did they experience? How did they react to repression? By comparing the economic conditions and political affiliations of Zimbabwean citizens in late 2005 with the results of previous surveys, it is also possible to arrive at conclusions about whether the ZANU-PF government helped or hurt itself by cracking down. As an instrument of governance, state repression is crude and costly. If the balance of power favors the government, then deployment of the police and army against citizens may achieve certain short-term objectives. For example, the crackdown in Zimbabwe may have temporarily met the primary policy goal of preempting political protest. It may even have had a wider scope of indirect effects – for example, in deepening the psychological trauma of Zimbabwean citizens – than initially intended. But it clearly failed to meet key official objectives. According to our survey data, Operation Murambatsvina did not lead to a massive relocation of populations from urban to rural areas or to the permanent demise of the informal economy. Most importantly, the use of repression prompted a backlash of unintended consequences. In Zimbabwe, a strategy of coercion ultimately undermined the legitimacy of key state institutions, notably the police force, and boosted overt political support for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Copyright Afrobarometer 1 the main opposition party. It may even have emboldened the populace, particularly the very victims of state repression. Anatomy of a Crackdown On May 17, 2005, contingents of Zimbabwe Republic Police swooped down on street vendors who were plying their trade on the streets, squares and corners of Harare’s central business district. They confiscated or destroyed the goods on sale – including food, flowers, clothes, shoes, and curios – arrested the traders, and assaulted anyone who resisted. The campaign against informal trade soon spread to suburban flea markets in Harare’s elite northern suburbs and into the sprawling, southern “high density areas,” where the taxi operators who sustain the commuter transport system were prevented from purchasing scarce fuel on the black market. “Police will leave no stone unturned in their endeavour to flush out economic saboteurs,” police spokesman Chief Superintendent Oliver Mandipaka told the state media. Within days, public anger at the raids boiled over. Faced with an economy that had shrunk by nearly half over five years, over 70 percent unemployment, and triple-digit inflation, many Zimbabweans had turned to the informal sector as a source of livelihood and survival. Government policies that misguidedly tried to control consumer prices had driven basic commodities from the shelves of the country’s supermarkets and into the hands of private entrepreneurs who sold them more or less covertly at higher market prices. Indeed, many Zimbabweans benefited from informal trade, whether via proceeds from sales or by gaining access to otherwise unavailable goods. When the authorities sought to remove these economic opportunities, some people took to the streets in protest, for example barricading township roadways and engaging in running, stone-throwing battles. The government retaliated by putting security forces on high alert: convoys of armed soldiers were sent into the townships and police roadblocks were set up at entrances to the city. At the same time, the scope of the onslaught widened, now targeting, without warning, the homeless and the poorly housed. On May 24, the City of Harare Commission announced that residents must demolish all illegal structures, including roadside kiosks, backyard workshops, rental rooms, and shack dwellings, no matter how sturdy. Across the extensive squatter settlements that surround Harare, police bulldozed unapproved structures and set fire to furniture and other household goods. Hapless family members – old and young, male and female alike – were loaded onto lorries and trucked to hastily established and unprepared transit camps where they were left in the open with minimal shelter – often no more than plastic sheeting – in the winter cold. And, beyond the capital city, the crackdown extended to urban areas countrywide; it was especially harsh in Bulawayo and Mutare; but it also reached other provincial centers like Gweru, Kadoma, Kwekwe, Chinhoyi, Marondera, and Victoria Falls. Those who were evicted were instructed to return to their “homes” in Zimbabwe’s rural areas regardless of whether they were born and bred urbanites or secondor third-generation descendants of immigrants from Malawi and Mozambique. The authorities explained the cleanup campaign, codenamed “Operation Murambatsvina,” as an effort at urban renewal aimed at ending the filth and crime associated with the more unsavory parts of the informal economy. The official translation was “Operation Restore Order,” though this appellation emphasized a rehabilitative goal and arose only after pockets of popular resistance emerged. A more accurate translation from the Chishona would be “one who refuses dirt” or, more colloquially, “Operation Drive Out Rubbish,” which conveys the cavalier disregard with which the government treated its own citizens. As always, Zimbabweans invented their own nicknames, dubbing the scorched earth strategy “Operation Murambavanhu” meaning “Operation Anti-People.” Or they called it a “tsunami,” which was an apt description of the flattened landscape left behind in Mbare musika (the central market) in downtown Harare. Copyright Afrobarometer 2 Why did the government resort to such severe internal repression? The most plausible interpretation is that Operation Murambatsvina was an effort by ZANU-PF to reassert economic and political control in the aftermath of the March 31, 2005 parliamentary elections. Economically, the government had tried to stock the shops wi

158 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In its traditional or new form, antenatal care ignores the experiences and views of women and the way they make sense of pregnancy and the care of pregnancy, it is concluded.

157 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
19 Feb 2008-AIDS
TL;DR: The BED method can be used in an African setting, but further estimates of ϵ and of the window period are required, using large samples in a variety of circumstances, before its general utility can be gauged.
Abstract: OBJECTIVE: To validate the BED capture enzyme immunoassay for HIV-1 subtype C and to derive adjustments facilitating estimation of HIV-1 incidence from cross-sectional surveys. DESIGN: Laboratory analysis of archived plasma samples collected in Zimbabwe. METHODS: Serial plasma samples from 85 women who seroconverted to HIV-1 during the postpartum year were assayed by BED and used to estimate the window period between seroconversion and the attainment of a specified BED absorbance. HIV-1 incidences for the year prior to recruitment and for the postpartum year were calculated by applying the BED technique to HIV-1-positive samples collected at baseline and at 12 months. RESULTS: The mean window for an absorbance cut-off of 0.8 was 187 days. Among women who were HIV-1 positive at baseline and retested at 12 months, a proportion (epsilon) 5.2% (142/2749) had a BED absorbance < 0.8 at 12 months and were falsely identified as recent seroconverters. Consequently, the estimated BED annual incidence at 12 months postpartum (7.6%) was 2.2 times the contemporary prospective estimate. BED incidence adjusted for epsilon was 3.5% [95% confidence interval (CI), 2.6-4.5], close to the 3.4% estimated prospectively. Adjusted BED incidence at baseline was 6.0% (95% CI, 5.2-6.9) and, like the prospective estimates, declined with maternal age. Unadjusted BED incidence estimates were largely independent of age; the pooled estimate was 58% higher than adjusted incidence. CONCLUSION: The BED method can be used in an African setting, but further estimates of epsilon and of the window period are required, using large samples in a variety of circumstances, before its general utility can be gauged.

156 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, two questionnaire surveys of fuel use by low-income households in Zimbabwe were conducted in four small towns in 1994, and in these towns plus four larger towns in 1999.

154 citations


Authors

Showing all 4433 results

NameH-indexPapersCitations
Didier Raoult1733267153016
Roy M. Anderson11652665549
Vikram Patel11665459717
Richard M. Cowling9639230042
Ken E. Giller9255536374
Leif Bertilsson8732123933
Johan Rockström8523657842
Alex Aiken7729520254
Frances M. Cowan7645619984
Robert J. Biggar7323118474
Charles A. Thornton7118217195
David Wilson6961818780
David Katzenstein6928021239
Bruce M. Campbell6722717616
David Sanders6549217119
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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Institution in previous years
YearPapers
202327
202289
2021485
2020393
2019291
2018326