Abstract
This thesis examines the emergence, consolidation, fragmentation, and reproduction of a black telecommunications entrepreneurial class in Zimbabwe within the shifting political and economic settlements between 1990 and 2017. Zimbabwe’s crisis has often been interpreted through polarised governance-versus-geopolitics narratives; little attention focuses on the historically structured processes through which indigenous capitalist classes are formed within specific strategic sectors. This obscures critical insights into Zimbabwe’s state-market dynamics and economic development trajectories. This qualitative historical case study approach, buttressed by theories of primitive accumulation, Polanyi’s double movements, Poulantzian state and class ideas, and global commodity chains traces these processes within the telecommunications sector, explaining the nuances of their political construction and reconfiguration over time. Centring, telecommunications brings the political construction, contestation, partial stabilisation, and repeated reconfiguration of how markets - i.e. capitalism - emerge within a post-colonial state embedded in global circuits of capital. The central finding is paradoxical: the state simultaneously functions as a catalyst, gatekeeper, and destabiliser of black telecommunications entrepreneurship thereby challenging conventional views of state-led development and market emergence. The project of a nationally embedded and developmentally transformative African bourgeoisie remains unfinished, constrained by global dependency and internal class contradictions.