In a video circulating online, Judith Todd does not raise her voice. She does not need to.
What she says lands with the quiet force of someone who has watched a country repeat itself for decades: Zimbabwe, she suggests, has never really left a state of emergency.
It sounds, at first, like a metaphor. It is not.
To understand what Todd is pointing to, you have to go back, not just to independence in 1980, but further, to the architecture of power built before it. To a time when the language of emergency became the grammar of the State.
1965: When exception became rule
In November 1965, Ian Smith’s government declared a state of emergency ahead of Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).
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The move was not incidental; it was foundational. Emergency powers were not a response to a crisis. They were the mechanism through which the State would survive it.
From that moment, the law began to bend around the idea of a permanent threat.
Detention without trial became normal. Entire political movements could be outlawed, their members imprisoned not for what they had done, but for what they might do.
The Preventive Detention Act allowed the State to hold people indefinitely if they were deemed a risk to “public order”.
And the emergency did not expire. It was extended, renewed, rewritten.
When legal challenges emerged, the courts often deferred to necessity. In Madzimbamuto v Lardner-Burke, the Judiciary effectively accepted that the State could sustain emergency rule even when its legal foundations were shaky.
This is how a temporary measure becomes permanent: not through a single decree, but through repetition. Through normalisation.
The inheritance of power
Independence, in 1980, was supposed to mark a rupture. A clean break between colonial repression and democratic possibility. But systems, once built, are rarely dismantled. They are inherited.
Judith Todd, activist, exile, witness, understood this early. Her own life traces the fault line. Arrested by the Rhodesian State, later exiled, she returned to a country that had changed its flag but not always its instincts.
What replaced minority rule did not discard the legal machinery of control. It absorbed it.
Emergency-style governance, rule by decree, the centralisation of authority, the framing of dissent as a threat, remained available, ready to be redeployed.
Todd’s own writing, Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe, charts what she describes as the slow consolidation of power after independence: a tightening, almost imperceptible at first, then unmistakable.
A State that learns, very quickly, how to contain opposition and how to justify doing so.
Crisis as a governing strategy
The genius of emergency power is not simply that it grants authority. It reshapes how authority is explained.
If the State is always under threat, political, economic, existential, then extraordinary measures become ordinary. The suspension of norms becomes a defence of stability. The erosion of rights becomes a necessary cost.
Zimbabwe’s history offers a clear through-line. From the colonial period, where African nationalism was cast as insurgency, to the post-independence era, where political opposition could be framed as destabilisation, the language shifts. The logic does not. The emergency is no longer something declared. It is something implied.
The familiar present
This is what gives Todd’s intervention its urgency. She is not speaking only about the past. She is speaking into the present.
The debate around Constitutional Amendment No 3 Bill about Executive power, about how leaders are chosen, about how long they remain, are not occurring in a vacuum. They are unfolding within a political culture shaped by decades of emergency thinking.
The details of CAB3 matter. But the pattern matters more.
A State accustomed to governing through exception does not easily return to limitation. Power, once centralised, tends to justify its own expansion. Each legal change can be presented as technical, incremental, necessary. But taken together, they tell a story.
It is a story Zimbabweans have heard before.
Memory against amnesia
What Todd offers, ultimately, is not just critique. It is memory.
And memory, in a system like this, is a form of resistance. Because the most effective way to sustain a permanent state of emergency is to convince people that each moment is new. That each tightening of power is an isolated response to a unique crisis. That there is no pattern, only necessity.
Todd insists there is a pattern. What is happening now echoes what has happened before. That the playbook, once written, is rarely discarded, only revised. For new readers, this is the essential point: Zimbabwe’s present cannot be understood without its past. And its past is not past.
The emergency did not end. It evolved.