Re-gendering Zimbabwe's Liberation Struggle: Fay Chung's Revisionist Attitude in Re-Living the Second Chimurenga: Memories from Zimbabwe's Liberation Struggle (2012 (original) (raw)
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Journal of Literary Studies, 2013
Because masculinities and femininities are socially and culturally constructed, they often play significant roles in constructing identities and distinguishing one another. Femininities and masculinities therefore play a key role in nation-building and in the sustenance of national identities. This paper explores, through the autobiographies of two luminaries of Zimbabwe"s liberation war, how individual politicians configure their own gender identities and consequently how they configure the masculine and feminine identities of others. The paper posits that the autobiographical mode allows for intimate gendering of the liberation discourse. It further argues that Tekere celebrates the heroic masculine self; preferring military femininities to domestic ones. He privileges his own masculinity while "feminising" Robert Mugabe. The paper also contends that Chung debunks the perceived manliness of political struggle and its representations by hailing the participation of women in the struggle for liberation. Her narration of their femininity is in relation to the nation and is structured around the struggle for national liberation, female emancipation and nation-building. Typical of female life-writing, Chung exhibits a relational sense of identity in which the autonomous self is subordinate to or subsumed in the collective. Hers becomes a projection and celebration of heroic femininities. The paper concludes that masculine and feminine identities in Zimbabwe"s political discourse remain bound up with the historical processes of colonial and nationalist liberation struggles.
women and the liberation war in zimbabwe
In revolutionary war situations there is often no defined front line and both women and children can come directly under attack: thus the stereotyped image of men going off to war, and women staying at home away from the conflict, has to be radically revised. 1 In such revolutionary conflicts, women are not merely victims but also actively work sideby-side with men in support of the war effort. The position of women in liberation struggles shows that wars have to be judged not just from the position of men, but also from the position of women who incessantly struggle to sustain the force of the revolution. This paper argues, therefore, that the story of a liberation struggle cannot be complete without an analysis of the role women play in guerrilla warfare revolutions.
Gender Comes in Two Sexes: a critique of recent historiography on Zimbabwean women.
even those historical accounts which deal with women in Zimbabwe's history often fail to engage fully with the issue of gender. A focus on political economy and on the interests of the white state and the African male elite leaves out important features of gender relations. The broad typification of African women as 'immoral', as inscribed in offical discourse by the NAPO, tends to be accepted by researchers, whether as normatively good or as normatively bad, without detailed examination of how and why this typification came about. This paper has attempted to outline the importance of gender struggle - by which is meant the range of struggles around gendered relationships, including the triangular struggle between insubordinate women, non-compensation paying men and family heads - to the first significant success won by African lobbyists and the first significant defeat inflicted by white settlers on the Southern Rhodesian state. It is important to understand these struggles not simply to understand the NAPO, but also to understand the gender relationships which followed after it. An account of NAPO which looks only at a putative alliance between the state and the African male elite must simply assume the insubordination of women as a given, and take subsequent stigmatisations of women as 'immoral' as arising out of some timeless essence of male prejudice and oppression. If we posit these stereotypes of women as timeless and eternal aspects of African society, rather than rooted in specific early twentieth-century history, we will not only produce bad history; we will also produce bad politics.
Zimbabwe women writers from 1950 to the present : re-creating gender images
2016
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2016.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My thesis focuses on Zimbabwean women as writers and thus on women as producers, contesters and negotiators of gendered images, and the ways in which they write gender identities in and of the nation. I have selected Zimbabwean women-authored texts written in English, from 1950 to 2015. The fictional texts are set in five historical periods – pre-colonial and colonial incursions and the first chimurenga (war) from 1890-1897, colonial rule from 1898-1966, the second chimurenga 1966-1978, independence and the first two decades of self-rule from 1980-1999, and the third chimurenga? and the Zimbabwe crisis from 2000 to the present – each of which is marked by important gender (re)configurations. My delineation of the five historical periods refers to the setting, not production, of the primary texts. The periodization approach makes evident the significant shifts in gender relations and roles in the home and the nation, and t...
Female Identity In Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction
Zimbabwean literature in English represents a hybrid fictional development encompassing literary modes from both precolonial oral narratives and written Western tradition. This study discusses a selection of post-independence novels by Zimbabwean writers Yvonne Vera, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Vivienne Ndlovu and Chenjerai Hove, whose fiction addresses the growing up of girls in societies shaped by two patriarchal heritages; problematizes violence against women and children; celebrates female sexuality; and introduces metahistorical perspectives on political and social developments before, during and after the Second Chimurenga. All of these themes are being localized in the identity formation of the texts' female protagonists. Following the argumentation of postcolonial theorists Trinh T. Minh-ha and Homi Bhabha, the study shows female identities – as represented in these novels – to consist of both contextually determined identity layers and individually appropriated subject positions. By deconstructing such compositions, the analysis identifies not only the postcolonial ‘writing back’ attitude in these novels; it also highlights that the texts struggle to overcome the conventional Self / Other dichotomy by relying on sensual and aesthetic value to produce a more coherent vision of what Bhabha termed as the ‘Knowing Subject’.
Guns and Guerrilla Girls Women in the Zimbabwean National Liberation Struggle
Guns and guerrilla girls, and women in the Zimbabwean national liberation struggle fighting side by side with their men." These words, rhetoric from a liberation war evoke an image of the heroic woman warrior wielding an AK47 assault rifle with a baby strapped to her back, fighting for political independence. Investigating the roles and experiences of "women warriors" in Zimbabwe's anti-colonial national liberation war, reveals certain glorifications which have served to obscure and silence the voices of thousands of young girls and women involved in the struggle.
Identity and Exclusion in the Post–War Era: Zimbabwe's Women Former Freedom Fighters
Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 2004
This study examines how demobilisation and reintegration processes affected the roles and status of women ex-combatants after the liberation war in Zimbabwe. The success of post-war demobilisation and reintegration depends on the formulation and implementation of programmes that recognise the contributions of women and treat them as a differentiated mass with specific aspirations. In disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) processes after most wars, the roles of women in the conflicts and their post-war needs are ignored or not adequately addressed. Their critical roles and contributions in the conflict and its resolution are rarely recognised. The vital contribution that women fighters made in Zimbabwe's liberation struggle between 1962 and 1979 has gone largely unsung. Through extensive interviews with female ex-combatants, this article argues that the absence of a gender-sensitive demobilisation and reintegration policy resulted in the marginalisation and exclusio...
Understanding the Nature and Roots of Women Marginalisation and Subordination in Zimbabwe Today
Efforts by the Zimbabwean government to pursue gender equality have witnessed the excoriation of patriarchy, Shona men and culture as the purported causes of the marginalisation and oppression Shona women in particular and Zimbabwean women in general. Through the use of the Africana Womanist literary theory, augmented by interviews with a purposefully sampled population, this article discusses the place and perception of women in Zimbabwean history and culture as a way of interrogating and informing contemporary debates and efforts on gender equality. It observes that patriarchy, Shona men and culture are usually wrongly blamed and fought against as the causes of the marginalisation of women when in fact they too are victims of broader colonial policies. The article concludes that blaming patriarchy and African culture for women's contemporary problems is a case of misdirected anger and recommends that a re-look at Zimbabwean women's plight, the likely causes and the possible solutions be done in their proper socio-historical context. It also recommends that intensive and extensive research on gender relations in pre-colonial African culture be pursued to enable contemporary scholars, citizens and legislators to see, appreciate and draw lessons from on positive and healthy male-female relations.