What can the everyday practices of people at the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border reveal about challenges to state power and state definitions of criminality? Dr Ushehwedu Kufakurinani is joined by Nicholas Nyachega to discuss Nyachega’s fascinating work on the Honde Valley and the Zimbabwe-Mozambique borderlands. Nyachega introduces us to the Honde Valley as an example of a contested space, in which local practices and customs challenge state definitions of legal border crossing as enforced by patrols and criminal convictions. Tune in for discussions of research methods, ethics and Nyachega’s call for new ways of interpreting and accessing the past in a postcolonial context.

More information about Nicholas Nyachega can be found here: https://icgc.umn.edu/nicholas-nyachega

Miniatures is the podcast of the ERC-funded ‘Dictatorship as Experience’ project at the University of St Andrews. We show how the big picture in history is best seen through the assemblage of individual and local stories, what the German historian Alf Lüdtke called ‘miniatures’. At Miniatures, we forego a studio model and instead adopt a ‘guerrilla’ approach to podcasting, grabbing interviews on handheld recorders with busy researchers whenever and wherever we can find them: in their offices, at conferences, or at a distance via video chat. Please do excuse any sound-based issues that may occur as a result of this method. 

To learn more about the wider project, visit: https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/everyday-dictatorship/

Miniatures Episode 16: History at the Border: Everyday Life in Honde Valley with Nicholas Nyachega

St Andrews is Scotland's first university and the third oldest in the English speaking world, founded in 1413.