2019FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9 (3): 545–564

ARTICLE

Headless queues
Disorder and disorientation in a Zimbabwean market,
2007–2008
Jeremy L. J O N E S , College of the Holy Cross

In this paper, I analyze Zimbabweans’ efforts to make sense of ubiquitous queues for basic goods during a period of record-
breaking hyperinflation. My discussion draws on a series of daily journal entries kept by a resident of the urban informal econ-
omy during 2007 and 2008. Besides opening a window onto everyday life amid economic collapse, his journals show how eco-
nomic and political turmoil was registered in mundane actions (like standing in queues and buying goods on the black market)
and perceived violations of established moral geographies and social processes. He framed this experience using common-sense
notions of disorder, which were themselves internal to ideas and practices of ordered hierarchy. For him and for many others,
then, the country’s so-called “crisis” registered less in explicit historical narrative than in perceptions of reversal and absence.
Keywords: crisis, disorder, queues, everyday life, Zimbabwe

Recently, Bloomberg published an article with the evoc-
ative title, “If you see a queue in Zimbabwe, get in it:
Rule for a new crisis” (Latham 2018). After describing
recent waves of shortages in the country, the article
quotes one Zimbabwean man as saying, “we’re a nation
of queuers . . . we queue for cooking oil, for fuel, for the
bank. If we see a queue, we join it, just because there
may be something at the other end.” He was exaggerat-
ing, of course: Zimbabweans do not join every queue
they see; they just say they do. And in a country that
is still struggling to throw off the fetters of British impe-
rialism, it is uncanny how often people echo the British
conceit that they are a nation of queuers.1 Still, in a
broad sense, he was right: for decades now, queues have
been one of the most prominent features of Zimbabwe’s
social landscape, and scarcely anyone has managed to
avoid them.
Zimbabweans queue for usual things, of course—pub-
lic transport, special events, medical care, and govern-
ment services (Schwartz 1975; Gasparini 1995; Auyero
2012). Those queues can be very long, and some of them,
1. This conceit is notable for overlooking the fractious his-
tory of British queues as well. See Moran (2005).
like the ones for buses and passports, are better measured
in generations than in hours. Every day, for as long as
anyone can remember, they have been there. A more re-
cent and conspicuous variety of queue, however, involves
so-called “basic commodities”: foodstuffs, toiletries, and
fuel. Except for a short period between 2010 and 2014,
many such basics have been in intermittent short supply
since the 1990s, and queues for them are everywhere. Per-
haps most striking of all (not to mention most galling and
enervating) is the bank queue, in which people wait for
hours or even days to lay hands on their own money—
and often a mere fraction of it at that.
As the title of the Bloomberg article hints, the context
for the queues is the so-called “crisis in Zimbabwe”
(Moore 2003; Moyo and Yeros 2007; Mundy and Jacobs
2009; Raftopoulos 2009; Hammar, McGregor, and Lan-
dau 2010; Chiumbu and Musemwa 2012; Ndlovu-
Gatsheni 2012). A great deal has been gathered under that
banner, from graft and political turmoil, to mass emigra-
tion, the burgeoning of a shadow economy, the crum-
bling of physical infrastructure, and the collapse of the
country’s once-renowned basic services. The crisis is
most often traced back to the 1990s. A short version of
that story goes something like this: structural adjustment

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 9, number 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/706803

© 2019 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2019/0903-0005$10.00

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2019.9:545-564.

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 Jeremy L. JONES
and persistent drought early in that decade eventually
gave way to a costly intervention in the Congolese civil
war, pronounced infighting in the long-time ruling party,
ZANU PF, and the rise of a new opposition party, the
MDC, comprised of trade unionists and civil society ac-
tivists. In 2000, the ZANU PF government, allied with
veterans of the liberation struggle during the 1960s and
1970s, began seizing and redistributing nearly all of the
white-owned commercial farms in the country. That pro-
cess, variously termed the hondo yeminda [the war for the
land], jambanja [an ideophone suggesting violent confu-
sion], the Third Chimurenga,2 and the “fast-track land re-
form programme” or FTLRP (Mlambo 2005; Scoones
2010), further catalyzed deeply rooted social and politi-
cal tensions, and produced low-level conflict throughout
the early 2000s. Western countries responded by cutting
off financial support, speculation and corruption grew
rampant, and the economy limped from one year to the
next. The nadir came in 2008, though, when amid state-
sponsored political violence and a cholera epidemic, the
Zimdollar crumbled under the weight of record-breaking
hyperinflation.
In early 2009, a fragile unity government was formed
between ZANU PF and the opposition; one of its first
acts was overseeing a shift to a US dollar standard (Masu-
nungure 2009). The unity government dissolved in 2013
after a further round of contested elections, though, and
months later, ZANU PF began printing a “ghost currency”
ostensibly equivalent to US dollars, but non-negotiable
anywhere outside Zimbabwe (Southall 2017). Then, in
2017, the president of many decades, Robert Mugabe,
was ousted in a palace coup. Many hoped that his suc-
cessor, former vice-president E. D. Mnangagwa, would
usher in a new economic dispensation (Mawere, Ma-
rongwe, and Duri 2018), but in calling it a “new crisis,”
the Bloomberg article echoes the widespread belief that
Zimbabwe is sliding back into the dark days of 2008.
I will not attempt to summarize the literature on all of
this, which is rich, varied, and far more extensive than I
can list. Instead, I want to concentrate on the ubiquity
of queuing during the upheavals of the late 2000s, and
more particularly, on people’s efforts to make sense of
queues, as well as their invocation of queues to make
sense of their larger predicament. “Perhaps the most glar-
2. The first Chimurenga was the 1896 revolt against white
settlers; soldiers in the liberation war of the 1960s and
1970s took up the same mantle, as ZANU PF would in
the early 2000s.
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546
ing indicator of the collapse of our country,” one local
journalist wrote in late 2008, “is that you can spend a
whole day in a queue, doing nothing except waiting”
(Biriwasha 2008). “Like lunatics,” he added, “we have be-
come accustomed to the abnormality of our situation.”
His consternation echoed common sentiment, and as I
will show, so did the invocation of madness. In the storm
of cholera and political violence, though, where a simple
banana cost a billion dollars or more, it was remarkable
that queues still stuck out as momentous. They were
not the only sign of the times, of course. The specter of
rising prices, in particular, held nearly everything in its
thrall. One could argue that the notoriety of queuing
was the product of a simple temporal calculus, too: unlike
the violence, which was sporadic and geographically con-
centrated, or cholera, which most people dodged, queues
were an everyday reality and affected nearly everyone, es-
pecially if they lived in town. Still, I believe the signifi-
cance of queues far outweighed the amount of time spent
in them, and that they held a special place in people’s un-
derstanding of wider events. It was not simply a question
of who waited in them or for how long; the real question
was what the queues themselves stood for. To invoke
an anthropological dictum, queues were “good to think
[with].” They distilled a widespread sense that everything
in Zimbabwe was topsy-turvy. The turmoil in the country
was imagined in terms of queues, queues in terms of the
turmoil in the country, and both in terms of a complex
series of domestic and bodily metaphors of confusion
and disorientation—all of which I will discuss in the fol-
lowing pages.
To properly grasp this complex symbolic character,
though, I believe it is necessary to shift out of the analytic
register of “crisis” and into the more anthropological reg-
ister of “disorder” (Taussig 1992; Comaroff and Coma-
roff 2006; cf. Trefon 2004).3 As should be clear above,
the rhetoric of “crisis” has been a crucial component of
political debate in Zimbabwe over these past decades,
and it definitely has local purchase. As an analytic con-
cept, though, it poses a number of challenges. Note, first
of all, that events in Africa are particularly liable to being
“designated and conjured under the sign of crisis” (Roit-
man 2016: 35). That tendency, in turn, often reinforces
conceptions of Africa as a mirror image of the West,
3. I leave aside here the use of “disorder” as a concept in Af-
ricanist political science (e.g. Chabal and Daloz 1999) in
favor of the more ethnographically subtle conceptualiza-
tion in anthropology and related disciplines.
547
discernible only in terms of what it lacks (cf. Achebe
1978). Scholarly ethics aside, this obscures the way Afri-
cans themselves might deploy an idiom of negation and
lack. To wit, Zimbabweans were nearly universal in their
assertion that the times were “out of joint,” but that does
not mean that they were channeling European historical
philosophy. To ascribe negation to a single parochial
form—even a widely circulated one like crisis—is to dra-
matically reduce its scope and importance in social life.
Worse, perhaps, it is not clear what the word “crisis”
actually refers to—and that despite the fact that it is a
constitutive trope of the modern social sciences and
humanities (Starn 1971). As a name for a structural ten-
dency, it threatens to eclipse the very humdrum matters
that many Zimbabweans gathered under its name: queu-
ing, petty dealing, political intrigues, unreported brutali-
ties. As a name for a temporal state, though, it would
seem to account for far too much. One could argue that
a decades-old crisis like Zimbabwe’s is a contradiction
in terms (Goldstone and Obarrio 2016). After all, if crisis
is a point of decision or rupture, as the etymology of the
term suggests, it would seem to have a relatively limited
temporal scope. One could also argue, though, that given
the depredations of colonial rule and the violence of anti-
colonial revolt, Zimbabwe has been in crisis for more
than a century. Greg Beckett (2019) calls this the problem
of the “forever crisis,” a crisis whose boundaries seem to
be inscribed in a particular space rather than a particular
time.
With these analytic challenges in mind, Henrik Vigh
(2008) has argued that for many people, crisis is not ac-
tually a bounded event, but a chronic condition. It names
a persistent—and persistently changing—terrain for so-
cial action, one that demands careful “navigation” (cf.
Makhulu, Buggenhagen, and Jackson 2010: 12–14). I
have argued similarly. Elsewhere (Jones 2010a), I describe
how in the midst of Zimbabwean hyperinflation, a “just-
for-now” logic of everyday activity was laminated onto
a widespread sense that the country’s history was “on
pause.” In part, “navigating” a turbulent present meant
bracketing it as a turbulent present, a time when norms
did not apply.
In thinking about disorder, though, I take my cue (as it
were) from Janet Roitman’s recent effort to develop an
analytic of “anti-crisis” (2014). Roitman argues that crisis
does not actually name an observable process in the
world. Rather, it is a concept that “secures the world for
observation” as abnormal, incomplete, and lacking (Roit-
man 2014: 39). By regulating “narrative constructions”
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HEADLESS QUEUES
(94) and acting as a “signifier of contingency” (94), crisis
provides the frame that allows us to grasp historical pro-
gress as such. I will not parse the intricacies of this argu-
ment here; suffice to say it is dense and intellectually pro-
vocative (see Khasnabish 2014). Instead, I want to suggest
that disorder does similar work: that is to say, disorder
also frames observation and signifies contingency. It
does so, however, in ways that are embodied in the ma-
teriality of everyday practice and that are specific to a
given social and cultural context. It is not limited to nar-
rative constructions, nor is it grounded in them. As I
will show, in Zimbabwe, disorder was registered in threats
to social hierarchy. People did talk about that threat and
its outcomes, and sometimes they framed threats in ep-
ochal terms, but their experience of disorder owed first
of all to a delicately woven and materially grounded
“feel” for impropriety. That sensibility was itself his-
torical, but it also mapped onto mundane categories
of everyday life—like the division between elders and
youth—that expressed powerful but often tacit forms
of historical consciousness.
From Mary Douglas (1966), we know that disorder is a
predicate of any ordered system. The meaning of purity
depends on the possibility of dirt, the meaning of conven-
tions on the possibility of their being contravened. A long
tradition of social analysis makes it clear, too, that nor-
malized (and even institutionalized) forms of disorder
are a constitutive feature of social life (Turner 1977; Bab-
cock 1978; Stewart 1979; Beidelman 1980; Stallybrass
and White 1986). Far from opposing a world of mean-
ingful practice, then, the capacity for creating and read-
ing disorder is key to our grasping it (Needham 1963).
So too, in many cases, is the related “form”: confusion
(Guyer 2015). As Clifford Geertz famously put it, “in
an ordinary, quite un-Hegelian way, the elements of a cul-
ture’s own negation are . . . included within it” (Geertz
1973: 406).
For analytic as well as empirical reasons, queues offer
an especially compelling instance of this logic. First, note
the paradox: as signs of disorder go, queues are remark-
ably ordered. In fact, a queue with no order is not a queue
at all, and many take them as icons of order. Queues
in Zimbabwe therefore marked out a fascinating grey
area between order and disorder. Looked at from one di-
rection, they indexed normativity, looked at the other,
they were an “indicator of collapse.” Second, and again,
queuing practices owe almost entirely to mute bodily ori-
entations and the (often tacit) social distributions sur-
rounding such orientations. The order (or disorder) of
 Jeremy L. JONES
queues therefore runs especially close to the bone. As a
species of focused gathering, a queue is replete with affect
and heightened spatiotemporal awareness. Zimbabweans
not only stood in queues, they sat and slept in them, ate
and drank in them, talked and laughed in them, argued
and fought in them, and in some cases, gave birth and
died in them. That meant in turn that efforts to make
sense of queuing drew from a deep well of ideas and as-
sumptions not about history per se, but rather about
bodily, affective, and spatiotemporal disorder, and how
such disorders were to be handled (cf. Comaroff and
Comaroff 1992; Weiss 1997; Shaw 2002).
In order to explore these themes, I will be working
through a series of journals kept by a Zimbabwean lock-
smith between 2007 and 2008. I will call him “Dondo.”
His take on queues—and much else besides—was broadly
consistent with what I heard from fellow members of
the urban “povo” i.e. “masses.” But even those who dis-
agreed with his verdicts would have recognized in his ac-
count a set of shared assumptions about the shape of dis-
order. In addition to contextualizing that account, and
showing how it relates to queuing, I will then explore
his attempt to “domesticate” a new and troubling social
landscape by casting it in terms of older categories of or-
der and disorder. My analysis to that effect will follow a
brief outline of queue literature and a few words on the
journals themselves. I will close by showing how his efforts
to domesticate disorder collapsed in the face of what was,
by any definition, an unprecedented set of circumstances.
Normal queues
Queuing is a universal (or near universal) feature of the
modern world, and thus, in a sense, our common lot.
The pervasiveness of the form owes in part to a slim
and easily transferable set of formal features. Queues le-
verage an ordinal logic (“first, second, third . . .”) to reg-
ulate individual access to a common objective: buying a
good, using a service, acquiring a status, reaching a desti-
nation. As the maxim goes, “first come, first served.” Par-
adigmatically, the temporal series is also mapped onto
space, so that the “first” position is also the “head” of
the queue trailing behind it [“queue” derives Latin cauda,
“tail”]. Many of us experience such queues most often
while sitting in traffic. But queues need not take physical
form. The virtual kind ranges from simple waiting lists to
elaborate algorithms for managing network connectivity,
hotlines, runway control, and much else besides. Many
familiar technologies have been designed specifically to
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548
stem the formation of queues, too: numbered ticket dis-
pensers and displays, ATMs, toll road transponders,
Global Entry, express lanes, and self-scanning booths—
even the humble lane stanchion with its retractable belts.
These technologies often draw from the appropriately
named “queuing theory,” an area of statistics with appli-
cations in both computer and management science.
Scholarship on queuing as a social form has focused
most intently on two related issues: the norms underlying
queuing practices, and the processes of normalization re-
sponsible for the spread and observance of those norms.
Take the first. In his Critique of dialectical reason, Sartre
uses a fictional bus queue to illustrate the stultifying ef-
fects of what he calls “prefabricated seriality” (Sartre
2004: 265).4 Queuers are interchangeable but for the se-
quence in which they arrived, he claims. Ergo, queues re-
produce the main features of the nameless “masses.” In
that, they are linked to the dark side of bureaucracy.
For many other scholars, though, interchangeability is
precisely the point: queues, they assert, are unique among
everyday social forms in being built on a norm of distrib-
utive justice rather than on the specific attributes of a per-
son or a hierarchy of social identities (Wiseman 1979).
Social psychologists, in particular, have studied the queue
as a kind of social system in miniature, claiming that it of-
fers a “classic illustration of how individuals create social
order . . . in a situation that could otherwise degenerate
into chaos” (Milgram et al. 1986: 683; cf. Mann 1969). Re-
cent work in legal theory has operated on the same theo-
retical terrain, seeking to explain how an effort to satisfy
individual desires can exist in the same space as norms of
fairness (Gray 2007).
From an anthropological perspective, this framing is
quite reductive, even at the level of micro-interaction.5
More than that, though, efforts to establish a universal ra-
tionality of queuing miss the context in which queues oc-
cur and first developed. The best one gets is an admission
that maybe some cultures appreciate queuing more than
others (Mann 1969: 354). Take India, though, where the
commitment to queuing is often said to be less than ex-
emplary. As elsewhere, queues in India are a “peculiarly
public performance of governmentality” (Corbridge
2004: 192), linking state form to a certain self-discipline
4. My discussion of this passage follows the incisive sum-
mary and application in Gandhi (2013).
5. See, for instance, Erving Goffman’s (1983) discussion of
queuing in his analysis of the “interaction order.”
549
or ethics of the self. For decades, successive Indian re-
gimes have sought to impart (or enforce) a wider “mod-
ernizing” self-discipline of exactly that sort, using the
queue as both instrument and measure (Gandhi 2013).
In communist-era Romania, on the other hand, people
resigned themselves to constant queuing, even though
it amounted to a “state-imposed seizure” of their time
that Katherine Verdery terms the “etatization of time”
(1996: 46). In both cases, queuing can only be grasped
as a historical practice, with direct links to social and po-
litical structure.
That socio-historical quality, in turn, ramifies right
down into the micropolitics of queuing—the same micro-
politics that some would render as bare normativity. No-
tably, the wealthy do not wait in queues, and many of the
most important signs of wealth concern, precisely, avoid-
ing waits and making others wait instead. As Barry
Schwartz puts it, “the distribution of waiting time coin-
cides with the distribution of power” (1975: 44); it is the
relatively powerless—by dint of class, age, or gender—
who are condemned to “uncertainty and arbitrariness”
of waiting in queues (Auyero 2012: 19). A key corollary
is that unequal social relations are inscribed in a particular
bodily experience, while queuing itself comes to be asso-
ciated with particular kinds of bodies: women, ethnic mi-
norities, foreigners, refugees.
I will not attempt to provide a history of queuing in
Zimbabwe, here, nor will I give an exhaustive account
of patterns of interaction in Zimbabwean queues.6 My
focus, again, is what queues came to mean, as both an
immediate and historical experience. Here too there is a
precedent: literature about queuing in the Eastern bloc
suggests that queues can be raised to the level of national
symbols, or manifestations of a national chronotope: a
slow wait for an uncertain future (Bogdanov 2012). I be-
lieve a similar position emerges from the observations of
my friend and subject, “Dondo,” and it is to those that I
now turn.
Normal guy, abnormal times
Dondo lived in Chitungwiza, a sprawling city and former
dormitory township located some thirty kilometers out-
side the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. He operated his
6. Jane Guyer (2004: 108–11) offers an illuminating (and
inspiring) amalgamation of the two in her discussion
of fuel queues in Nigeria.
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HEADLESS QUEUES
locksmith business from a battered metal table in a mu-
nicipal market of no particular fame, which I will call
“Pamberi market.” Like many people in Chitungwiza’s
informal economy, he worked nearly every day of the
week, throughout the year, sometimes ten hours a day.
He once quipped to me that he was a “doctor of keys,”
and the title fit: he could pick locks, resuscitate broken
door handles, and miraculously convert a key for one
thing into a key for something else altogether.
In 2006, I had started conducting research in Chi-
tungwiza on the economic lives of young men. Dondo
was not a young man, even by the comparatively flexible
definition of “youth” in Zimbabwe. He had a wife of
two decades and several children, the oldest of whom
married in 2009. We had first met in the late 1990s, before
I started graduate school, and in a nod to local conven-
tions, which privilege kinship connections, we addressed
each other using the polite terms for in-laws. I spent much
of my downtime sitting with him, drinking beer and talk-
ing with him and a revolving cast of shared friends.
The idea for a journal owed to my personal circum-
stances: in mid-2007, I went to South Africa for several
months, and I wanted somebody to keep track of events
in and around Pamberi market while I was gone. During
the first part of the year, as political conflict between
ZANU PF and the MDC deepened, shortages had gone
from being normal to being definitive. Every level of
the economy turned on either resolving them (through
government policy or by bringing goods in from else-
where) or exploiting them to extract rents and profits.
ZANU PF had long argued that shortages and price rises
were caused by “illegal Western sanctions” and consti-
tuted evidence of economic sabotage. By raising prices
and channeling goods to the black market, party officials
argued, the MDC, businesses (held to be “white-owned”)
and their Western backers would make the government
unpopular and precipitate a popular revolt. In late June,
after prices increased nearly six hundred percent in the
space of a fortnight, the government instituted a price
control regime that covered every single good and service
in the country. Thousands of business owners were ar-
rested and charged with overpricing. Within weeks, for-
mal sector retailers had no stock remaining on the
shelves, and warehouses were left empty (Jones 2010b).
Like most people at Pamberi market, Dondo as-
cribed the new shortages, like the old ones, to ZANU
PF misgovernance. What I wanted from him, though,
was an account of the local fallout: what prices and sup-
plies were like, and what people were saying about the
 Jeremy L. JONES
situation. It is not clear whether he was familiar with
the “diary” genre, but he was amply attuned to local
conventions of reportage. He clearly would not have
started keeping the journals if I had not asked, but after
filling a few notebooks while I was away in South Af-
rica, he continued to write off and on till August of
2008, eventually penning just over 240 entries.
His entries provided far more than a daily news report.
They were a roiling mix of indignation, wonder, reported
speech, and aphorisms, punctuated with dramatic capi-
talizations and rhetorical questions. Nearly all of them
were expressed in the voice of the Zimbabwean every-
man, echoing a common genre of talk at Pamberi mar-
ket.7 Topically, the majority concerned political intrigue
or economic matters, but a fair number saw him reflect-
ing on other subjects, ranging from global terrorism and
domestic dramas to personal disputes (including his
own), wildlife, and even the weather.
Years later, he told me he enjoyed the task. Although
his willingness to put pen to paper made him unusual
among his fellow traders—I asked two of my youth sub-
jects to keep journals for me and the results were far more
fragmentary—he was hardly alone in giving an incisive
account of matters affecting the country. Conversations
in the market ran the gamut, from haggling and shoptalk
to sexist banter, but they could be intensely intellectual,
too, even philosophical, and traders spent hours of every
day dissecting the finer points of politics and history. Be-
yond manifesting his own unique personality, then,
Dondo’s reflections were mostly exceptional in being
written down.8
7. The main difference was his use of English, peppered with
terms and phrases in Shona, the lingua franca in and
around Harare. This pattern is the exact opposite of market
speech. Dondo knew I could read Shona, and we largely
spoke to each other in that language, but he seemed to pre-
fer writing in English, and he had a strong command of it.
8. Of course, the act of writing has profound effects—even if it
consists of something more like “jotting,” as seemed to be
the case here. Again, though, the main genre in which
Dondo wrote—i.e. performing himself as a rational every-
man—was part of everyday speech in the market, and to a
trained ear, much of what he said preserved the oral quality
of that speech. Relatedly, except where noted, his use of
“we,” “you,” and various forms of exhortation should be
read as rhetorical; they are part of the same genre conven-
tions. He definitely wrote for me, but only rarely to me, and
he positioned me more as a fellow witness than as an out-
sider—an act of interpretive generosity on his part.
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550
“Tired and confused”
On April 4, 2008, he began an entry as follows:
Jerem[y] [you] gave me a task of collecting information
in and around Harare. NOW you know what is happen-
ing is I am tired and confused of the information con-
cerning the elections. You know even if you were in Zim-
babwe you were going to be confused as well . . .9
On one level, this entry was entirely in keeping with
the persistent theme of anger and bewilderment that
ran through his journals. In addition to “confusion,” his
entries were littered with terms like “NONSENSE,” “Sur-
prise,” “Disappointment,” “Miracle,” “Why?” and “Un-
believable.” What made it remarkable was the fact that
he was directly addressing me—one of just a few times
that he did so. The reason for his confusion—and the un-
usual aside—was simple. As he hinted, four days earlier,
on March 30, the country had held joint parliamentary
and presidential elections, and the government was re-
leasing the results in a suspiciously slow manner (Masu-
nungure 2009). Like most others at Pamberi market, he
believed that the intervening time was being used to rig
the results in favor of ZANU PF. As far as they were con-
cerned, their suspicions were borne out a month later,
when the presidential figures were finally released. They
showed that the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai had bested
President Mugabe but had not managed to capture a sim-
ple majority. That forced a run-off, to be held at the end
of June.
In the months that followed, Dondo gave a biting play-
by-play of the country-wide campaign of intimidation
that ZANU PF engineered to ensure Mugabe’s victory
(Masunungure 2009). He explained how ZANU PF
youth harassed and beat people who failed to respond
correctly to party slogans. He explained how they force-
marched residents to all-night political rallies, and threat-
ened war if Mugabe lost. And he explained how all of this
was done under the watchful eye of the police. In early
June, after several weeks of confrontation, the same youth
evicted Dondo and his colleagues from the municipal
vending stalls at Pamberi market, which they then turned
9. In this and other quotations, I have rendered his words
as he wrote them, complete with capitalizations, special
punctuation, grammatical errors, etc. His dating follows
British convention (day/month/year). Any round brack-
ets (. . .) are his, but where necessary I have added mate-
rial in square brackets [. . .] for clarity.
551
into a base camp for their activities. On June 23, he spec-
ulated that girls taken to the camps were being subjected
to “nasty [and] ungovernable” things, by which he meant
rape and sexual abuse. On June 24, he wrote about how
they kidnapped and “touchered” [tortured] our shared
friend, a minor figure in the local MDC structures, just
feet from his own table at Pamberi market.10
In the meantime, the economic situation became truly
dire. The last official inflation figures were released just
after the presidential run-off and put the annual rate at
231 million percent (Berger 2008). According to an unof-
ficial account, though, the annual rate actually reached
89 sextillion percent by the middle of November, four months
later (Hanke and Kwok 2009). That works out to about
a hundred percent per day. Prices continued to grow ex-
ponentially, too, until the government retired the Zim-
dollar in March of 2009 and effectively dollarized the
economy (Pilossof 2009). Holding terms constant, a bus
ride that cost around eight Zimdollars in early 1999 cost
thirty septillion Zimdollars (3  1025) a decade later.
How did he make sense of it all? Not by direct refer-
ence to crisis. Only once in 240 odd entries did Dondo
use the word, and then only in an offhand way. He was
certainly familiar with it. As I said in the beginning, the
rhetoric of crisis was common, especially among MDC
figures and civil society organizations.11 While it is possi-
ble that Dondo wanted to avoid being identified as an op-
position supporter, though—either for safety reasons, or
to maintain his “above-the-fray” self-image—I think his
reticence about the term likely owed to a different way
of conceiving events.
First of all, when reaching for a name for the historical
present in everyday talk, he and many others often landed
on either “the situation” [in Shona, mamiriro ezvinhu,
“how things stand”] or “these days” [mazuva ano], or a
combination of the two (Jones 2010a; Morreira 2010). In-
sofar as a “situation” was a problem to deal with, it cer-
tainly hinted at what Roitman calls, apropos of crisis, a
“negative occupation of an immanent world” (Roitman
2014: 9). That negative resonance was even stronger with
the phrase “these days.” As a run-of-the-mill demonstra-
tive, it could be made to refer to almost any time period
(e.g. “he’s not here these days . . . he moved a year ago”).
10. This account was corroborated by multiple informants,
including our friend himself.
11. See the NGO aptly named the Crisis in Zimbabwe Co-
alition (http://kubatana.net/source/crisis/).
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HEADLESS QUEUES
But the Shona version, mazuva ano, is also a longstanding
gloss for “modern times,” and more specifically, for colo-
nial modernity, the culture-dissolving kind. Like the older
terms, chizvinozvino and chimanjemanje [both reference
an emphatic “now”], then, mazuva ano usually appears in
the vernacular school curriculum as a cautionary sign, in-
dexing the disordering power of foreign (i.e. “white”)
practices (including slang and the English language).
That suggestion was certainly not at play every time peo-
ple used the phrase, but it lingered in the background, like
a “hook” for meaning making.
This nebulous phraseology of historical time was just
one ingredient in his story, though. Dondo’s grasp of
the present was primarily inscribed in relations, objects,
and practices, as well as everyday talk about them, and
none of that needed to be spelled out in epochal terms
to be meaningful or consequential. As often as not, his ex-
pressions of confusion, anger, and surprise were spurred
by quotidian violations, and even when he drew negative
comparisons to the past or to other countries, those com-
parisons turned, first of all, on features of day-to-day liv-
ing: what people ate and wore, how they oriented and
comported themselves, the play of social identities, modes
of speech and address, and, perhaps most importantly,
the prosaics of power and authority.
Developing negatives
So then: to the queue. Dondo discussed the subject fre-
quently, including in his very first entry:
17-08-07 Scarcity of Beer
Because there is scarcity of beer in the Country[,] my
friend and I we went to buy [i.e. find] beer. In the pro-
cess My friend bought [a] Quart [of] Eagle [lager] at
$40,000. After opening the quart he f[ou]nd that the
beer was flat, then he decided to return the beer. What
amused me was that a certain man in the queue asked
my friend what was wrong. He was told that the beer
was flat. Instead he took out $40,000 from his pocket
and gave [it to] my friend and then took the quart
and started drinking the flat quart while still following
the queue so as to buy another quart.
It is hard not to laugh; the economy was on the verge
of collapse and he was talking about flat beer. Still, beer
was by no means a minor issue for Dondo and his col-
leagues—he mentions it in a significant minority of his
entries—and this episode was more telling than might
seem. Like similar shopping areas throughout the
 Jeremy L. JONES
country, Pamberi market was anchored by a strip of
formal-sector businesses and a set of covered vending
stalls, owned by the municipality. Vendors, selling every-
thing from fresh produce and construction supplies to
toothbrushes and rat poison, spilled out onto all the sur-
rounding sidewalks and streets. And amid all of this, in a
space equivalent to a few city blocks, there were at least
ten different places to buy beer, some private, some mu-
nicipal, some sit-down clubs and bars, some just count-
ers. That wealth of options reflected a larger fact: for
many people, the geography of the market—and of the
city—was a geography of beer. Men’s daily rounds were
often measured by beer, and their relations with others
were often mediated by it (cf. Bryceson 2002; van
Wolputte and Fumanti 2010). On the flip side, to the ex-
tent that they wanted to convey conventional respect-
ability, many women studiously avoided any association
with beer or the places where it was consumed (Scar-
necchia 1999).
One corollary is that many men at least used the avail-
ability, quality, price, and consumption of alcohol as a
barometer of market and social conditions more gener-
ally. This played out clearly in the story. First, people in
town expected beer to be available on demand, and not
to have to search for it or stand in a beer queue. If none
of the ten or more places at Pamberi had it, what did
that mean? Second, beer was one of the few retail items
that people could easily exchange if it was poor quality.
Third, many men, including Dondo, were picky about
what they drank. One’s beverage of choice signaled a
great deal about class and current financial status (for
instance, Eagle was the poor man’s lager). It was also
common cause that drinking the wrong brand, or mix-
ing brands, could make you sick. Every one of these con-
ventions was broken in Dondo’s story: the man was
willing to drink anything, at any price, even if it was of
sub-par quality, then continue standing in the queue
for more. Why? Presumably because it was so hard to
get beer at all.
Dondo described other queues in the same satiric
tone. A month later (September 7, 2007), he joked that
“It is normal to see miggling [mingling?] and confusing
queues at every shop . . . If we don’t see the lines it seems
life is not normal.” In another entry (September 2, 2007)
he recounted how he overheard a woman dodging an un-
wanted visitor by pointing to her packed queuing sched-
ule: Monday for maize meal, Tuesday for sugar, Wednes-
day—meat, Thursday—soap, etc. . . . all the way up till
Sunday for church.
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552
Dondo’s description of queues was often paired with
discussion of the “black-market.”12 This was no surprise,
as the one suggested the other. Goods that were not avail-
able at regulated prices on the formal market, or which
required a long wait, could be found on the black market
in no time at all, but at a sizeable markup.13 Moreover,
people routinely joined queues with the explicit goal of
reselling the goods on the black market. Strictly, there
was not a black market; it operated nearly everywhere,
more or less openly, day and night. People could easily
identify specific local nodes, though. At Pamberi market,
they included the entrance to a nearby police camp, a par-
ticular stretch of the parking lot, and the backroom of an
adjoining grocery store. Still, who you knew counted at
least as much as where you stood.
Sometimes Dondo decried the black market, and
sometimes he said it was a necessary evil. His descrip-
tions of it convey both shock and ambivalence:
08-09-07 Black-market of Beer Empty Bottles
Black-market of beer and empty bottles is unheard of
in any other country. On this day I went to a certain
bottle store. What I saw was a surprise. There were
some scuds [mass-produced “traditional” sorghum
beer] and Lion [lager] quarts. Two certain people
bought six lion quarts and then kept them under cover.
This was all in my eyes. After 30 minutes it was an-
nounced that there was no beer. The two people then
started to sell there beer at high prices. They bought
the beer at $60 000 a quart and they were selling the
beer at $150 000 and $30 000 [bottle] deposit which
is $180 000 all in all. Because people were in need of
beer all the six quarts were bought[.] the next day I
saw someone selling scuds at $100 000 instead of
$40 000. Just imagine this country.
In another entry, Dondo wrote of leaving a long
queue for flour (“I could not stand the hardship”), only
to see people two hours later, selling flour attained in
that queue at a 2000 percent markup (September 24,
2007). “Is that life?” he wondered.
It would be easy to dismiss his “just-imagine” rhet-
oric; the subjects he discussed seem far too banal to
warrant real shock. But again, I think it is worth taking
12. This English term was much more widely used at
Pamberi than the euphemism, “parallel market.”
13. In the last days of hyperinflation, price differences in
the order of a thousand percent were not uncommon.
553
him seriously. For our sins, we all must resign ourselves
to standing in queues, but the stakes for Dondo were
quite different, materially and symbolically. As far as he
was concerned, the dialectic of queues and the black mar-
ket pointed to more than lost time and high prices; it
pointed to a negated life, as beset by a sense of absence
as it was by material immediacy. That “negative occupa-
tion of the present” begged for an explanation, of course,
but he was less taken by the book variety than those that
emerged from the register of embodied practice.
Domesticating disorder
Consider the following theme, which Dondo began to de-
velop very early on. As will become clear, it did not con-
cern queues directly, but rather a model that could make
sense of them.
7/9/07 Use Control from the word go
A father and mother must not let their children come
home late or do anything they want. Say a child comes
home at 6:00pm, tomorrow at 8:00pm, the next day at
10:00pm and so on. So it means when you [. . .] then
say “I don’t want you to do this,” it becomes a problem
to control them. This is the same as what government
did on the prices of basic commodities, [which] were
rising everyday. And they kept quiet up until they were
uncontrollable.
Then, on April 10, 2008, as everyone waited for first-
round election results, Dondo penned the following
under the heading “A FATHERLESS HOME”:
A fatherless home (family) is a family without dignity.
You will find that such a family is disintegrated. The
mother brings a boyfriend home, the boys bring girl-
friends, the girls as well bring boyfriends at home.
No one will say a word to someone. One can come
home at any time be it the mother, boys, or the girls.
Looking at Zimbabwe today it is a home without a fa-
ther. Companies, private sectors, vendors are now do-
ing whatever they wish because there is no control. A
country without a leader is a dead country.
He would go on to reprise this theme several more
times in 2008, including in this angry report about the ris-
ing price of bread and beer:
7/7/08 SOARING PRICES
Yes, this is unconscious [unconscionable?]. You can’t
believe such type of life. Can you believe that prices of
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HEADLESS QUEUES
basic commodities can go up on daily basis[?] NEVER
on THIS EARTH (WORLD). Zimbabwe is the only
country with such type of happenings. Imagine on 06-
07-08 bread was $50B[illion], now $80B. Beer pint
was $20B, now $180B. Scud was $25B now $140B.
[That’s] just to mention a few items. So [how] many
people can afford this? A home without a father . . .
Of course, inflation of this sort had happened in other
countries (Hanke and Kwok 2009: 353–56), and govern-
ment price controls on some items (like bread and maize
meal) had been in effect almost continuously since inde-
pendence. The failure of those controls owed, among
other things, to the country’s financial isolation, pervasive
arbitrage and rent seeking, and selling at a fraction of cost.
Still, the idea of a “fatherless” or orphaned national family
literally “made sense” for Dondo, because it allowed him
to take a bunch of surprising and confusing details and
frame them against something more familiar: the figure
of the household head (Muchemwa and Muponde 2007).
He drew that figure, I am going to argue, from a wider
doxic system, which was itself rooted in a complex set of
generative assumptions about ordered hierarchy (cf. Bour-
dieu 1984).14 For convenience, and in the absence of a
codified vernacular name, let me call this system “head-
ship.”15 I use the term here analytically, but the prin-
ciples it draws together are actually operative in Chi-
tungwiza, and draw on patterns of speech and practice
common to Zimbabwe’s Shona-speaking population.
Rendered schematically, it works like this:
To start, in any number of matters, ranging from
conventions [mirau] and laws [mitemo] to “ways and
customs” (tsika nemagariro) and everyday speech, con-
temporary Shona speakers depict the physical head as
the locus of thought and judgment and master over
the body. To wit, speech, action, and things that might
be called “reasonable” or even “commonsensical” are reg-
ularly voiced as things that “have a head” (zvine musoro).
Things that lack a head (zvisina musoro) are likewise un-
reasonable or nonsensical. Second, an explicit and oft-
repeated ideology in present-day Zimbabwe has it that
14. See also recent special issues edited by Naomi Haynes
and Jason Hickel (2016) and André Iteanu and Ismaël
Moya (2015).
15. Headship is not to be mistaken with the traditional
Shona office of headman, which is better grasped as an
institutionalized form of a more diffuse set of principles.
See below.
 Jeremy L. JONES
the father figure is the natural “head of the household”
(musoro weimba). In the first instance, that means the
uterine household and any junior collaterals living there.
Mothers, brothers, agnatic designees, and even children
can claim the prerogatives of this “father” in his absence.
However, those households have long been understood to
be nested in a series of larger kin and geographical group-
ings, each of which has its own “head,” which can be
performatively invoked as the situation demands. The
oldest living male in a line of patrikin [dzinza] is the
“head” of it, for instance. These hierarchical relations
are typically expressed by the prefix “sa,” (e.g. “sababa”
[lineage head] “samusha” [head of the extended family
homestead], “sadunhu” [headman of an area]). It is often
translated as “owner,” but the main suggestion is struc-
tural superiority, and with it the prerogative of governing,
controlling, managing, overseeing, etc. Third and finally,
a complex interweaving of these head–body and father–
household relations serves as a model for construing other
kinds of relatedness: ancestors to their progeny, elders
to juniors, teachers to pupils, bosses to workers, chiefs
to their people, landlords to lodgers, pastors to their
flocks, God to humans. The presumption is that that ev-
ery “body” or entity must have a “head” [musoro] above
it [kumusoro] to mold and steer it, and that this relation-
ship is broadly analogous across a variety of registers.
Or, to put it differently, the analogy is between hierar-
chical relations per se, not just between the terms that
make up those relations.
As should be evident in Dondo’s telling, “headship” in
this sense is constitutively patriarchal: it situates old men,
qua fathers and elders, as natural “heads” over women
and other juniors, and it naturalizes other hierarchies in
similar terms (Rutherford 2019).16 Where women hold
similar positions of authority—and they do—those posi-
tions bring with them prerogatives that can be read as
masculine and have associations with eldership, at least
in the prevailing doxa.17 Not surprisingly, headship also
16. Jacobson-Widding (2000) asserts that the aesthetics of
verticality among rural Shona speakers is directly linked
to conceptions of male sexuality and potency. Where I
see a structure of doxa or common sense, though, she de-
tects a fully-fledged cultural complex. She argues that
Shona thought turns on a symbolic equivalence between
the head and the penis, and claims that men are thus
placed in a double bind with respect to the power their
mothers, sisters, and wives wield over them.
17. A paradigmatic case is the [va]tete (FZ, HFZ), or pater-
nal aunt, who is both “female father” to her brothers’
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554
underwrites domestic violence of both the gendered and
generational sort; indeed, any violence that is deployed
to govern others’ behavior has those connotations. Even
in its most violent guises, though, the logic of headship is
justified in terms of integration and care rather than bare
domination (which is conventionally scorned). The idea
is that “heads” and “bodies” have different functions and
responsibilities and that together, they contribute to the
proper functioning of the whole. It is the duty of those on
top (pamusoro), though, to maintain overall order and
control (cf. Weiss 1997: 338 passim). Thus, the father
as head of household should establish clear boundaries
between the domestic sphere and public life and regulate
the manner in which juniors—be they women or chil-
dren—move between them. And in the same fashion,
as Dondo would have it, the head of the national house-
hold should have established clear demarcations between
different social, political, and economic spheres, and po-
liced movement between them.
None of this is primordial “tradition,” even if people
frame it that way. On one level, the principles of headship
turn on a traditionalist reading of the present, rooted as
deeply in the colonial encounter, Christian theology,
and postcolonial political economy as it is in putatively
precolonial mores (Jeater 1993; Barnes 1999). In fact,
they share much in common with Foucault’s claim that
the (decidedly European) genesis of governmentality “in-
troduce[d] the meticulous attention of the father towards
his family into the management of the state” (1991: 92; cf.
Schatzberg 2001). Headship is ultimately grounded in
material practice, though. It cannot be reduced to dis-
course, rule-following, or cultural orthodoxy, whatever
their source. It structures a fine-tuned, bodily sense of
proper place, and is invested in everything from defer-
ence, posture, and registers of speech, to ideas of appro-
priateness and conceptions of time and space. These so-
cial orientations, in turn, grow from, reflect, and certify
what many people understand by material order: regula-
tions, institutions, processes and procedures, as well as
countless observable features of the built environment
(of which more in a moment).
For my purposes here, the most important aspect of
headship is that it includes disorder, or at least potential
disorder, as one of its own terms (cf. Shaw 2002). That
was actually the gist of Dondo’s account: the “children”
children and samukadzi [owner of the wife] to those
brothers’ wives. Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 99) discusses
related terminology in his essay on joking relations.
555
and the “wife”—his figures for “companies, private sec-
tors, [and] vendors”—were unruly forces that needed
to be wrangled in by the “father” (President Mugabe), lest
the whole national household lose its dignity, disinte-
grate, and die. But it is true in other registers of headship
as well: that which is below always lacks proper form, and
it is up to the “head” to provide it. This ability to absorb
disorder helps explain how the principles of headship
persist in the face of constant contradiction. To wit, “fa-
thers” have been continuously losing control of their
charges—and complaining about the fact—for more
than a century, and those charges, in turn, have continu-
ously challenged the authority of “fathers” (Jeater 1993).
Female-headed households are just as old, and child-
headed ones have been common for decades now. When
invoked, headship standardizes such challenges as disor-
der, and that makes it strangely unfalsifiable; the things
that might prove it invalid can be rendered as evidence
for its validity. Moreover, insofar as the “head” is associ-
ated with elders, headship provides a powerful model for
history. Order and reason accrue to the past, and any-
thing new or foreign appears, almost by definition, under
the sign of disorder and disorientation. The paradigmatic
culprit in that regard is “Chirungu” (in this context,
“whiteness” or “western-ness”), which is said to have ush-
ered in a spirit of individualism, where everyone does
whatever they want [madiro or mazvakezvake] instead
of respecting tradition and the authority of elders. It fol-
lows that women, youth, and English-speaking urbanites
have long been portrayed as vectors of “white” colonial
infiltration (Jeater 1993; Solidarity Peace Trust 2003).
As is always the case, this kind of commonsense ap-
plied right up to the point where it didn’t. Exceptions
abounded, and in some instances an ethic of equality
was assumed instead. Still, headship provided a broad ho-
rizon for sense-making, and when called upon, it could
explain even the things that appeared to be contrary to
its principles. The irony, then, is that when Dondo in-
voked the figure of household order to express the ab-
sence of order in the country, he was actually doing some-
thing quite conventional: assimilating negation into the
realm of established doxa.
Inside, outside, upside down
That negation took other conventional forms too, and
here we return to the topos of queues and the black
market. Dondo’s commentary on both often appeared
in the rich guise of symbolic reversal, where head and
body changed places (Needham 1963; Babcock 1978).
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HEADLESS QUEUES
On September 6, 2007, in an entry he titled “What a
shame,” Dondo observed the following:
People around [Pamberi market] are always seen around
the shops in anticipation of getting one or two items
(sugar, bread or —) Now what I saw this day pained
me a lot. There came a lorry. [It was] covered but no
one [knew] what was inside. The people started running
to make a queue at [X] supermarket. In this rush two
people collided and [fell] down in the process. It was a
man and a woman. The two got injured so much that
they bled profusely from their mouths and nose[s]. A
good Samaritan took them to the clinic. [Eventually]
the lorry was said to be carrying cotton bales instead of
sugar as was thought.
Then, days later (September 10, 2007), he detailed an
early morning trip to a poultry supplier on the outskirts
of Harare, where he and his friend hoped to find eggs. By
5.00 a.m., he wrote, a large crowd was in the queue al-
ready, but “a hundred or more” soldiers and police offi-
cers were “causing confusion” by buying up all the sup-
ply for themselves. They only left when a truckload of
military police came and sent them “scurrying for cover.”
Finally, the following month (October 9, 2007), he de-
scribed another queue for sugar: after forty-five minutes
of peaceful buying, he reported, police officers arrived.
They “started some confusion,” he said, and many peo-
ple were “harassed and beaten.” Their goal was to ensure
that “their clients [could] buy sugar for resale [on the
black market].”
All three stories involve the undoing of queues, and
thus, again, a tangible, real unmaking of order. In the first
one, the problem seems to have been the rush for an un-
known good. In the second two, order was disrupted by
queue-jumping—the traditional foe of queuing norms,
scholars say (Mann 1969). In all three, the self-policing
order of the queue, an outgrowth of shared conventions
and techniques for the governance of the self, gave way
to disorder, and indeed, outright bloodshed and violence.
The particulars matter, though: his stories spoke to the
way disorder emerged and who exactly caused it.
First, take the obvious problem: the actions of the po-
lice. Like most of the vendors at Pamberi market, Dondo
considered the police to be partisan thugs. In one entry,
he described the “surprise” he felt at a police raid on
the market: “a Mr. X was slapped twice in the face,” he
said, “and a third slap left him nearly falling.” More
and worse violence ensued, as the police derided all
of them as “sell-outs” (August 19, 2007). In another, he
 Jeremy L. JONES
described laughing at the municipal police when they
came around demanding table-rents, which they had fig-
ured using the (illegal) black market rate for US dollars
(March 10, 2008). In another, provocatively titled “Mira-
cle” (August 20, 2007), he described a police officer who
barely escaped mob justice after seizing an old woman’s
black-market sugar (she was “like an injured lion” Dondo
said approvingly, and “she stripped herself naked” to em-
barrass the officer). Police raids were a daily affair at that
point, and it was common cause that they sold the goods
they seized and demanded bribes and sexual favors from
female vendors. None of this was how things ought to
have been, though: elsewhere, Dondo made it clear that
he wanted to associate the police with the symbolism of
headship, as he had once done. The problem was that
“these days,” their arrival always heralded confusion and
senselessness instead of reason and discipline.
Second, reversal was also directly implicated in the ge-
ography of queuing. The fact that everyone was waiting
around for deliveries of sugar, or that Dondo had to travel
long distances for mere eggs, showed that “normal” pat-
terns of production and social reproduction had col-
lapsed. Searching out and waiting around for goods was
now “work” (cf. Jones 2010a), and everyone seemed to
be engaged in it, regardless of gender, generation, occupa-
tion, or class. At the same time, the place of work had
shifted into the “street,” which was both a physical space
and a common metonym for the black market.
It is difficult to overestimate the challenge this pres-
ented for local common sense about order and hierarchy.
Chitungwiza residents often refer to their neighborhoods,
and to their city as a whole, as “maraini,” i.e. “the lines.”
The name dates to the Rhodesian era invention of native
“locations,” i.e. dormitory areas for African labor. All
were designed and built according to a strictly geometri-
cal template, emphasizing functionality and legibility.
Along one axis, this grid delineated the time and place
of work (central Harare) from the time and place of res-
idence (the location), which was at the same time a dif-
ference between “white” industry and “black” labor,
production and reproduction. Eventually, it came to
be seen as a gendered divide, too, between (black) male
breadwinning and (black) female domesticity, though
this divide was far more imagined than real. A second
axis reproduced the same basic forms, only internally,
dividing homes from “shops” like Pamberi market. This
allowed for central access to resources, as well as to the
orderly provision of services and utilities. It also pro-
duced a particular rhythm of home and market, criss-
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556
crossed by relations of gender and generation, and an
ethic of work and leisure.
Although this moral geography had already begun to
collapse in the early years of the so-called Zimbabwe cri-
sis, it was still what Dondo had in mind when he spoke
about fathers controlling movements in their households.
Indeed, in practice, hierarchical control meant governing
where bodies were and when they were there. The “head”
governed movements, ensured spatiotemporal propriety,
and maintained the material boundaries that kept things
separate. The “street,” on the other hand, was the arche-
typal location of disorder, a place where hierarchical con-
trol of that sort was most keenly threatened. It was con-
sidered a dangerous, liminal space of undomesticated
movements, inhabited by dangerous, undisciplined pop-
ulations: the homeless, touts, young men, sex workers.
Throughout the twentieth century, nationalists and pop-
ular culture alike had deemed women’s presence in the
street to be a grave social problem (Barnes 1999; Scar-
necchia 1999). All of this in spite of—or perhaps because
of—the possibilities streets afforded: mobility, freedom,
public display.
In mid-2008—the period of the worst political vio-
lence—Dondo dedicated several entries to this theme.
He started on June 9 with one entitled “SERVICE STA-
TIONS IN THE STREET”: “If you just stand and look
at motorists,” he wrote, “you [wonder] where actually
these people [are] getting diesel and petrol . . .” The an-
swer, of course, was illegal street trade. Two days later
he wrote about “BANKS IN THE STREETS,” i.e. black-
market foreign currency dealers, who really were the
only operating bank anywhere nearby (cf. Mawowa
and Matongo 2010). Finally, on June 14, he described
“SUPERMARKETS IN THE STREET”:
Just imagine that you can only buy basic commodities
in the streets. Yes we say [the] black market is not good
but if you go into [formal sector grocery stores] you re-
ally get totally nothing. So it means one has to buy his/
her grocer[ies] from the streets. You get every com-
modity in the streets. Where on earth can we say a
country can sustain its people that way[?]
As he had bluntly stated back in 2007: “What I saw out-
side the market is what I expected to see inside but it
was opposite.”
“I expected one thing, but I saw the opposite”: this
would be an appropriate title for Dondo’s journals as
a whole. In his telling, the situation in Zimbabwe was
557
not just different or new, but a world turned upside-
down, mundus inversas (Babcock 1978: 16). At several
other points he observed how youth—and poor youth
at that—had usurped elders through their control of
the black market and as agents of political violence.
Other times, he noted that vendors like him, with com-
paratively little education, made vastly more money
than well-educated civil servants. Other times still, he
described women challenging the authority of their
husbands by supporting a different political party.
And of course, there was the hyperinflating Zimdollar:
the larger the denominations and the taller the stacks of
bills, the less it was all worth.
Reversal was at the core of his refrains about confu-
sion, too. Zimbabweans use “confusion” to refer to events
[“paita confusion”] at least as often as they do to refer to a
mental state (cf. Taussig 1992). That is to say, confusion
maps social phenomena and bodily ones. It is thus a kind
of hall-of-mirrors reflection of headship—headship up-
side down. As I have said, things that were confusing or
senseless were things that had no “head” [hazvina mu-
soro]. And though Dondo did not employ them often
in his journal entries, people regularly adduced a number
of equally “headless” bodily states to explain the situation.
One commonly heard that things were “drunk” [zvakad-
hakwa] or that the country itself was “drunk” [nyika
yakadhakwa]. Drunkenness suggested a loss of mental
control, and with it, the capacity for normal propriocep-
tion. Similarly, recall the journalist I started with, who de-
clared standing in queues to be a form of “lunacy.” In fact,
nearly everyone thought things were “crazy” [kupenga]:
President Mugabe used that language, ZANU PF and
MDC officials used that language, state and private media
used that language, old rural grannies and young urban
men used that language. And craziness in local idioms
meant, precisely, losing one’s head, failing to act reason-
ably or properly [kushaya musoro], and being driven by
bodily (or extra-bodily, i.e. spiritual) forces. With apolo-
gies to Lakoff and Johnson (2008), then, we might call
these “metaphors of disorientation.” They assumed a
proper, vertical hierarchy of head and body, then flipped
that image to capture social matters considered to be out
of order. To say the country was fatherless and to say it
was “drunk” or “crazy” was in many ways to say the same
thing.
Keep in mind that these vernacular judgments did not
involve explicit crisis talk or periodization; instead, they
brought perceptions of disorder under the control of a se-
ries of workaday signs, grounded in the body itself (cf.
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HEADLESS QUEUES
Siegel 2006: 70 passim). For Dondo, it was largely a mat-
ter of enunciation: naming confusion and madness as
such, and finding in that some explanation for, say,
bloody and violent queues. But the same signs could be
deployed to different ends. The figure of the “sell-out”
[mutengesi] for instance, so key to ZANU PF’s rhetoric
and violence, was “headless” in the very same sense: sell-
outs were all at once “unscrupulous” (read: motivated by
base, undisciplined desires) and “puppets” of outside
forces. Those, like the police, who meted out violence
on sell-outs, portrayed their acts as disciplinary in both
character and effect. Official discourse on the subject of-
ten shaded into a related figure, too: the witch, a prototyp-
ical symbol of reversal (Jones 2010b).
Herein lies the paradox of rendering events in the
country in terms of reversal: despite appearing symmet-
rical in form, the pole associated with confusion and dis-
order (the body, the household, followers, etc.) was by its
very nature excessive. It therefore threatened to overflow
not just order and sense, but its own categorization per se.
Where apparent disorder reigned, that is, it became diffi-
cult to discern the difference between order and disorder.
A similar possibility may help explain why ritual uses of
inversion typically seek to hem it in, both spatially and
temporally: carnival is only a week, the destabilizing vio-
lence of cockfights is confined to the ring, etc. Still, this is
where Dondo’s efforts to domesticate disorder ran up
against their limit, or rather, against a lack of limits.
Madisnyongoro18
On September 25, 2007, Dondo wrote the following
under the heading “Queue After Queue”:
Going around this township of Chitungwiza or even
within Harare you will always meet people in queues.
This is because people are after some missing commod-
ities which are in short supply. In this process, a Mr. X
saw people running around and he saw them making a
straight line. The man joined the line but to his surprise
he found the queue was [made up] of women only. The
18. “Nonsense,” said especially of someone’s speech; a port-
manteau that combines the English prefix “dis” with a
further Shona prefix marking plurals, then tags both
to an ideophone for a ruckus or din. The word is asso-
ciated with the chorus of a song from the liberation war,
but it is commonly deployed as a satirical term of abuse.
 Jeremy L. JONES
line was moving fast. When there were only three people
left in front of Mr. X a lady behind the man asked whether
he was a (ngochani) (man who serves as a woman).
Then the man was told that the queue was for women
only, who were waiting (kuzosvirwa) to sleep with men.
So the man ran away in surprise.
For the most part, this reads like the other entries, but he
clearly intended it as a joke, and the two Shona terms he
included stood out for their comedic coarseness. Ngo-
chani has been a vulgar slur for homosexuals through-
out southern Africa for over century (Epprecht 2004),
and kuzosvirwa, in addition to being obscener than
Dondo’s translation allows, is grammatically marked as
a passive, feminized act. To put it bluntly, then, (but still
euphemistically), men screw, and to get screwed is to be a
woman—or, as Dondo suggestively put it, a man who
serves as a woman. The suggestion was clear: Mr. X was
waiting to be un-manned.
From the outside, the premise of the joke is puzzling:
why exactly would the women stand in a line for sex?
Many of his compatriots would have laughed if they
had heard it, though, especially the men. On the one
hand, although it was standard, gender-mixing in queues
had longstanding sexual connotations. There is even a
kind of juju, mubobobo, which supposedly allows men
to have sex with women in queues without their know-
ing.19 On the other hand, jokes about sex, besides being
commonplace, constituted a kind of “play on form,” at-
tacking “sense and hierarchy” alike (Douglas 2002: 96,
104). In saying what should not be said, they offered a
metacommentary on propriety. Joking about homosexu-
ality could up the ante considerably, but a joke that com-
bined homosexuality and queues? Told properly, that
could be a comedic coup, pitting an erstwhile icon of or-
der and propriety against a virtual archetype of disorder
and disorientation, as conceived in the logic of headship I
discussed above.
Zimbabweans are largely unified in their disdain for
homosexuality, both the practice and the identity, and
President Mugabe’s insistent, headline-making attacks
on homosexuals were always well received at Pamberi
market, even by nominal MDC supporters like Dondo.
19. It does not only apply to queues: mubobobo can be of-
fered as an explanation any time a woman dreams
about sex. It therefore has wide application in matters
of occult influence, and speaks to deeply rooted beliefs
about female sexuality.
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558
Sometimes people spell out the reasons for their disap-
proval. For instance, Christians and traditionalists alike
treat homosexual acts to be a sign of pollution and spir-
itual affliction, whether by ancestors, witchcraft, or de-
mons (Shoko 2010; Chitando and Manyonganise 2016).
Many consider homosexuality to be symptomatic of the
madness introduced by white people, too [Chirungu],
and by extension, a sign of both foreignness and imperi-
alism (Epprecht 2004). As often as not, though, people’s
reasoning extends no further than the language of com-
mon sense. Only someone who has lost his mind (i.e.
“head”) would engage in such behavior, the thinking
goes; the incompatibility of male “parts” is explanation
enough. As Mugabe liked to say, “even pigs and dogs”
know better (Shoko 2010). That kind of obviousness
makes the matter ripe for political instrumentalization.
Thus, in the “superphallicist” symbolic order of state
rhetoric (Muchemwa 2007: 14), ZANU PF leaders took
themselves to be real men [amadoda sibili], and por-
trayed MDC figures as “men serving as women,” to bor-
row Dondo’s formulation.
We could read Dondo’s joke as a simple reassertion of
the patriarchal logics informing headship, then, but that
would miss its real bite. After all, given the circumstances,
it was perfectly rational for Mr. X to join a queue without
knowing what it was for. Dondo’s entry about cotton mis-
taken for sugar turned on exactly that possibility. In fact,
Dondo was Mr. X—or Mr. X was someone like him. As
such, it was not just a joke at the expense of homosexuals
(although it certainly was that). Dondo was laughing at
himself, and at the weakness of regular, salt-of-the-earth
Zimbabwean men like him (cf. Willems 2011). The situ-
ation in the country, as symbolized by queues, threatened
to level all patterns of hierarchy, rendering conventional
authority (notably the gendered, Fatherly sort) impotent,
exposed, and vulnerable.
Part of what makes jokes work, of course, is their fram-
ing as jokes; this one blurred that boundary (Stewart
1979: 21 passim). It spoke to a process of change so pro-
found that it corroded the very terms that would make it
intelligible. Doing the wrong thing seemed quite reason-
able, and it made good sense to act nonsensically. That
conclusion was not the product of faulty (“headless”) rea-
soning, either. People spoke of it as a blunt material im-
perative, and it was written all over the landscape. The
black market not only reversed inside and outside, it
joined them in a kind of illicit congress. Everywhere was
the market. Even queues were markets. And as Dondo
repeatedly acknowledged, if you wanted to eat, that was
the terrain you had to traverse. Conventional boundaries
559
between one thing and another seemed to have faded into
a haze of immediacy, and there was no apparent path
to reintegration.
Conclusion: This queue is not unto death
In late 2007, I heard another queue joke and hastily scrib-
bled it in my fieldnotes, unattributed. It went like this:
A man was walking through Harare one day when he
encountered a long queue. He couldn’t see where it
ended, and nobody could tell him what it was for,
but he decided to join it anyway. Anything he didn’t
want, he told himself, he could sell on the black mar-
ket. The queue snaked around the block, entered a
back alley, and stopped at an unmarked door. As he
approached it, his excitement mounted, but when he
finally stepped inside, all he saw was an open casket.
He stood for a moment, gaping at the corpse, then
turned to the attendant. “Didn’t you know, sir?” she
explained, “This is a line for a body viewing . . .”
This man’s fate was perhaps less threatening than the one
Mr. X. faced, but it was unsettling all the same. The real
danger of joining queues was not generally blood or vio-
lence, it was that all of your standing might eventually
lead to . . . nothing. And in this case, it was the definitive
sort of nothing, i.e. death. As an old Shona idiom for fruit-
less endeavors had it, the man had traveled a long way just
to see a dead donkey [kufambira dhongi rakafa].
Around the same time I heard this joke, one of
Zimbabwe’s most esteemed veteran journalists, Bill Saidi,
wrote a column narrating his own experience in a bank
queue. He had been in it so long, he began, that “the
queue had lost meaning, like the country itself.” Expand-
ing, he added:
A queue is the ultimate humiliation. It strips you of
whatever you believe you are, into a cipher, a zero, a
number. That’s what we’ve been reduced to, as mean-
ingless as the zeros in our currency (Saidi 2007).
One doubts he was quoting Sartre, but he might as well
have been. The order of Zimbabwean queues was in-
deed incidental, an instance of “pre-fabricated seriality.”
And in that sense, they too stood for nothing. They
seemed to be an empty sign vehicle. And for men espe-
cially, it seems, that kind of ramifying nothingness was
quite humiliating.
There are a number of points in Dondo’s journals
where he stared into the same interpretive abyss, albeit
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HEADLESS QUEUES
not always in direct reference to queues. “Wherever in
the world have [you] ever heard of this nonsense” he
concluded in one, “This is a dead country” (April 21,
2008). In another, he exclaimed: “I can definit[ely] tell
you that Zimbabwe is now ungovernable. One person
even everyone in the country is using the word[s] ‘I
DON’T CARE’.” (February 20, 2008). In local terms,
that phrase, “I don’t care,” spoke directly to the trans-
gression of ordered hierarchy. In fact, in the following
paragraph, he returned to the (literally) familiar theme
of a headless household. To “care” was to recognize and
respect the difference between right and wrong, one
person and another, up and down, inside and outside.
The situation in the country, on the other hand, defied
directionality, and seemed to dissolve those basic regis-
ters of social differentiation. People were regularly re-
duced to loitering and going in circles. Discerning up
from down could be quite difficult. To Dondo, that
was a sign that someone in charge, a “head,” needed
to straighten things out.
As appropriate as it would be to frame his experi-
ence as “motion in motion,” though—the nub of what
Vigh (2009) deems “chronicity” as opposed to “cri-
sis”—queuing shows that we can push the theme of
nothingness and uncertainty too far. After all, no mat-
ter how bewildering they might seem, as an actual bod-
ily experience, queues are insistently not nothing, and
their structure provided a degree of certainty that many
Zimbabweans actively sought out. Better a queue than
a stampede (Wiseman 1979). Standing in queues, one
is keenly aware of the body, of social norms, and of
the passing of time. One need not take this as proof that
they are an unvarnished social good or a bulwark
against chaos, as some might claim, only that they can-
not be grasped except by reference to pattern and reg-
ularity. And this is true of much (even most) everyday
activity in times of social upheaval. Daily rounds can be
profoundly upset, but they remain, perforce, rounds. In
Zimbabwe, diets (and beer-drinking habits!) were cer-
tainly called into question amid hyperinflation, but
people continued to eat and drink, and their efforts
to eat at least some of the usual things generally paid
off. Women and juniors continued to cook and clean
for men and elders. All kinds of habits and conventions
persisted.
What then to say of disorder? There is an ample lit-
erature on everyday life amid difficult social circum-
stances and much of it speaks to Dondo’s predicament.
One thinks of Taussig’s (1992) discussion of a “nervous
system” of “ordered disorder” (17), for instance, where
 Jeremy L. JONES
“immense tension lies in strange repose” (10). Likewise,
in her introduction to Ethnography in unstable places,
Greenhouse notes that the essays in that volume speak
precisely to “ordinary people”—like Dondo, we might
say— “who . . . recognize their own situations as signs
of the times” (Greenhouse 2002: 3). My analysis here is
intended to echo that tradition of analysis, but also to
point to the fruitful potential of another, which deals
with culture and disorder more broadly, and goes all
the way back to classic analyses of transgression (Doug-
las 1966), symbolic reversals (Needham 1963), “anti-
structure” (Turner 1977), and the like. I suggested at
the start that disorder might be productively viewed as
a “blind spot,” securing a lived world for observation
and framing certain largely tacit perceptions of history.
The “classificatory body of a culture,” as Stallybrass and
White argue, “is always double, always structured in re-
lation to its negation, its inverse” (1986: 20). And be-
cause classification is specific to times, places, and peo-
ples, so too are the terms of negation. Crisis might be
taken as a specific manifestation of this logic. Indeed,
contingency, senselessness, and even globally circulating
terms like “crisis,” “emergency,” and “disaster,” always
appear to us garbed in local idioms and symbolic cate-
gories (cf. Lear 2006).
The question I have pursued in the Zimbabwean case
is what happened when material shifts made experiences
of negation the daily rule. In the first instance, I argue,
Dondo tried to “domesticate” disorder by assimilating
it into a venerable series of doxic categories, based on hi-
erarchical relations and the “low,” disordering forces that
threatened them. In short, in Zimbabwe there is a rela-
tively stable tradition of conceptualizing flux, especially
through the lens of reversal. That tradition allowed
Dondo to integrate the daily shocks of hyperinflationary
life into the realm of meaning, if only as a negation. As
Clifford Geertz suggests, when “ordinary expectations fail
to hold,” people have recourse to time-honored, if under-
specified, categories of negation, like witchcraft, which
“seal up the common-sense view of the world,” and fore-
close the conclusion there might be a “kink in reality” as
they understand it (Geertz 1983: 79).
In many cases, then, navigating “the situation” in Zim-
babwe meant setting novel developments against a back-
drop of old assumptions and conventions. Sometimes,
though, efforts to domesticate disorder ran up against a
material limit. Again, it made perfect sense to forgo pro-
priety, and to do the very things associated with unruly
“bodies” (Jones 2010a). People stood in queues, but they
happily jumped them to take advantage of backroom
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560
deals whenever they could. It was as if people were sud-
denly allowed to dabble in witchcraft, provided they did
not become fully fledged witches. Dondo lamented this
turn of events, writing that it was a “miracle” that things
still basically held together while “the *FATHER* [was]
just quiet and looking” (August 29, 2007), but he too
played along.
This kind of shift is not well grasped as a descent into
the unthinkable. As Geertz concludes, people “plug the
dikes of their most needed beliefs with whatever mud
they can find” (1983: 79). In this case, as in many before
(e.g. Greenhouse 2002: 10), that “mud” was the near ritual
reassertion of the continued relevance of social order,
only in its absence, as if it were waiting in the wings to
be restored. The key, then, was a kind of metacommuni-
cative framing (Stewart 1979: 30), where anything that
happened “these days” in Zimbabwe was deemed, pro-
phylactically as it were, to be nonsensical. The designa-
tion was a kind of blanket instruction for reading events,
which allowed people to get on with life amid the “mad-
ness.” As Dondo put it:
“At the present moment there is nothing wrong about
doing anything in this country. In fact, there is no sinning
in Zimbabwe because all wrongs are on the Zimbabwean
government.” These words were said by an ex-teacher
who left teaching because [teachers were not being paid].
Surely as he was saying I foresaw exactly the exact situa-
tion in Zimbabwe. If you[’re] gonna steal, rob, or any
means of corruption for you to survive its better to do
[so]. I definitely ask God to forgive people and give all
the sins to the leader of the country because people want
to survive (sic). (March 2, 2008)
Stealing, robbing, corruption: the sins of the nation were
all on the FATHER. Anything could happen. But I like to
imagine that Dondo and the ex-teacher had this conver-
sation while standing in a queue for beer. And then
Dondo went back to cutting keys.
Acknowledgments
This essay has been “in the queue” for a long time. Research was
carried out under the auspices of a Fulbright Hays DDRA grant,
the first draft was written for a workshop at University of Zim-
babwe, generously supported by the Suntory Foundation, and a
subsequent draft was presented at the Harvard African Studies
Colloquium. I am thankful to all of the participants for their
commentary and questions. I owe special thanks, though, to
Mayu Hayakawa, Eric Worby, Lowell Brower, Jean Comaroff
561
and John Comaroff, Robert Blunt, Zebulon Dingley, Joshua
Walker, Brad Weiss, Sasha Newell, Alvaro Jarrin, Greg Beckett,
James Smith, and three anonymous reviewers at HAU. Of
course, my biggest debt is to “Dondo,” a friend and guide to ev-
eryday life in Zimbabwe. I hope I have done justice to his expe-
rience. All mistakes remain my own.
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 Jeremy L. JONES 564

Jeremy L. JONES is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at College
of the Holy Cross. Starting in the mid-2000s, he has carried out research on young men working in the Zimbabwean
informal economy. He has published articles in Journal of Southern African Studies and Social Dynamics, and has
several chapters in edited volumes. His research interests include money, hyperinflation, informality, youth, tempo-
rality, gender, kinship, intoxicating substances, basic needs, and everyday life.
Jeremy L. Jones
College of the Holy Cross
1 College St.
Beaven 119A
Worcester, MA 01610
USA
jjones@holycross.edu

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