PhD defence Mandipa Ndlovu - Myth, Memory, and Political Settlements in the City: Compounded Disadvantage and a Path for Plausible Futures

On Wednesday 23 September 2026 from 1 to 2 pm, Mandipa Ndlovu will defend her dissertation Myth, Memory, and Political Settlements in the City: Compounded Disadvantage and a Path for Plausible Futures at Leiden University.

This dissertation interrogates the structural, symbolic, and futures-facing dimensions of urban disadvantage in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city. It argues that the city’s marginalisation is not simply the result of economic decline nor poor governance, but part of a wider “architecture of disadvantage”: a system built over time through colonial legacies, post-independence political settlements, centralised power, militarised governance, patron-client networks, spatial inequality, and entrenched myths about the city. Its central theoretical contribution lies in conceptualising Bulawayo’s disadvantage as both materially produced and socially narrated. By centring citizen narratives alongside critical analysis, the dissertation resists reducing the city’s decline to deindustrialisation, governance failure, or ethnic exclusion alone. Instead, it shows how residents navigate difficult conditions through informal economies, political silences, urban survival strategies, and everyday practices of resilience and accumulation. Ultimately, Bulawayo is presented not only as a site of disadvantage, but also as a city of compounded memory, myth, survival, agency, and possibility. The dissertation contributes to the study of legacies of urban politics in Africa by using the Bulawayo case to theorise how spatial and economic inequality, power, memory, and everyday agency interact to produce urban disadvantage while simultaneously breeding conditions for more inclusive urban futures.

You can follow the defence online.