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)
Re-gendering Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle: Fay Chung’s Revisionist Attitude in Re-Living the Second Chimurenga: Memories from Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle (2012)
Oliver Nyambi
Department of English; University of the Free State
&
Tsiidzai Matsika
Department of English; University of the Free State/
Department of English; University of Zimbabwe
Part of Zimbabwe’s socio-political and economic crisis of the past decade can be easily traced back to contestations about the place of Zimbabwe’s war of liberation (1966 - 1979) in constructions of political legitimacy. Since, for obvious reasons, the liberation war and its memory are inseparable from power and hegemonic control in the postcolony, the narrative of the war in Zimbabwe has long been a preserve of powerful and often male political leaders. This means that female narratives of the war are subordinated and with them, women’s roles in the war and post-independence power politics. This paper deploys Maria Pia Lara’s theory of women’s life writings as inherently ‘emancipatory’ and ‘disclosive’ to explore Fay Chung’s counter-hegemonic attitude in her autobiography Re-living the Second Chimurenga. Our analysis focuses on how Chung centres female experiences of the liberation war to revise prevailing phallocentric representations of the war which border on political misogyny.
Key words: Second Chimurenga; illocutionary force; affect; feminism; counter-discourse
In her study of gender dynamics in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, Parpart (2008: 181) notes that “[g]endered analyses of the conflict have focused almost entirely on women, initially uncritically accepting nationalist rhetoric about gender equality”. Parpart (2008: 181) further argues that insignificant studies have explored “the role of masculinity/ies and male power in the conflict (…) yet masculine discourse, authority and prerogatives have been at the heart of both the settler and the nationalist projects”. However, the continuing masculinisation of political power in Zimbabwe which is facilitated by statecircumscribed “patriotic narratives” (Ranger 2004) of the liberation war has put the war under renewed spotlight. While some scholars such as Muponde (2015: 137) rightly argue that “there is no one overarching and conclusive meaning of (President) Robert Mugabe the man and the phenomenon”, they perceive, in Mugabe’s recent methods of hegemonic control, his gravitation towards exclusivist and gendered notions of political legitimacy especially in the post-2000 period. A significant number of analyses of Mugabe’s rule (in power since independence in 1980) and that of his Zimbabwe African Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) party have now enquired into their political longevity through inter alia focusing on their masculinisation of the liberation struggle (1966 - 1979) to secure perpetual political legitimacy for its surviving (male) combatants. Such hegemonic revisions of the liberation war privilege male contributions through, among other ways, understating, undervaluing and even erasing female contributions (see Gaidzanwa 2015). In a postcolonial context in which politically “the past is the present and future” (Nyambi and Mangena, 2015: 139), political power in the post-independence period is as
masculine as its chief source and/or site of legitimacy - the liberation war.
Transgressing the Masculine Identity of Power and The War of Liberation
It is imperative that before exploring Chung’s revisionist approach to the epistemic political marginalisation of female experiences of the liberation war, we sketch a brief background to Chung’s focus - the gender factor in hegemonic discourses around the liberation war - and how it informs post-colonial Zimbabwean political identities and dynamics. Though dominated by ZANU PF and Mugabe, the liberation war is generally observed as one of the most significant national sites of collective history and the memory of struggles against colonial injustices. As hinted above, the state circumscribes a national identity that is fashioned by “patriotic history” (Ranger 2004) essentially a patchwork of events and processes in the liberation struggle which carry the signatures of the ruling party or its eminent heroes. Women’s experiences and heroics in this hegemonic narrative, are remembered and commemorated only in so far as they authenticate the grand narrative of the “man-nation” - to use Muponde’s (2015: 137) phrase.
It is in this context that the title of Chung’s autobiography becomes key to her text’s counter-discursive texture. A close analysis of Chung’s diction, lexis and even syntax of her title suggests an underlying intention to critically engage with the dominant (state-authored) narrative of the liberation struggle. This ‘official’ narrative of the liberation struggle is epitomised by Mugabe’s (2001) aptly titled book Inside the Third Chimurenga. Mugabe’s title and the discourse it engenders are important to our reading
of the counter-discursive methods and function of Chung’s title vis-à-vis the topical struggle for owning the liberation war, especially in a politically volatile post-2000 Zimbabwe context. Mugabe’s title aptly invokes the word “inside” to create a sense of ‘centeredness’ which comes with the impression that he (Mugabe) has authority over the Chimurenga narrative. This situation of Mugabe “inside” the Chimurenga narrative follows on his (re)construction in ruling party circles in the post-2000 period as the founder and curator of the liberation struggle who can qualify and disqualify its heroes (see Sithole, 2015; Nyambi 2016a, Nyambi 2013; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2009; Muchenwa, 2010).
The counter discourse of Chung’s title should be understood in this context of Mugabe’s and ZANU PF’s overt and covert paternalistic monopoly of liberation war heroism (Muchenwa 2010) and the sacrosanct status they have accorded liberation war heroism as the site of political legitimacy. Adjunct to this, Chung’s counter discourse is also better situated in the context of her politics and the political situation in post-2000 Zimbabwe. Markedly, Chung’s autobiography emerged at a critical juncture in ZANU PF politics when the party faced incessant internal schisms. During this time ZANU PF had already lost its majority in Parliament to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and Mugabe, considered to be the chief author of the Chimurenga narrative, had lost Presidential elections to the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and only managed to hang on to power through a negotiated Government of National Unity (GNU). 37{ }^{37} In state discourses, Mugabe’s and ZANU PF’s losses in the 2008 elections were almost entirely attributed to a group of party ‘rebels’ led by Simba Makoni and supported by, among others, Fay Chung. This tugging of Chung as a rebel 38{ }^{38} by ZANU PF which had self-styled itself as the overseer of the Chimurenga narrative is significant to an understanding of Chung’s nationalist status and political realities at the time of writing and coining of the title of her autobiography. Apparently, these political circumstances around Chung suggests that she conceived and titled her autobiography during a period when she had a ‘traitorous’ label hung on her by ZANU PF. The ‘rogue liberator’ tag imposed on Chung by ZANU PF was not only inimical to her political prospects with the newly formed Mavambo/Kusile/Dawn (MKD) party 39{ }^{39} but it also effectively ejected her from the ZANU PF-circumscribed circle of liberators and ‘legitimate’ rulers. This forced detachment from the Chimurenga entailed the ‘feminisation’ and subsequent ‘devaluation’ of her political contributions to the liberation; that is, in the sense
[1]of Mugabe’s masculine imagining of power and history manifest in his “amadoda sibili” (real men) rhetoric (see Muchenwa 2007: 14). In this light, Chung’s title can be viewed as a not-so-subtle counter response to her jettisoning from the nationalist imaginary and indeed tagging as the enemy of Zimbabwe’s liberation.
Tifling a book is much akin to branding it and this process is seldom ‘innocent’ - it is in fact often given careful thought. As Nyambi (2016b) has argued in his onomastic study of titles of Zimbabwean fiction pre-and postindependence, such titles are essentially polyphonic metanarratives - to use Bakhtin’s (1984: 73) word; they resist semantic fixation and often claim a narrative and discourse of their own. What we are arguing here is that although Chung’s title is not discursively removed from the autobiography’s counter discourse, it provides a complete counter narrative of its own which can (and sometimes may not necessarily) relate to the ‘inside’ story. If, as hinted above, giving a book title is tantamount to branding it, then we can read Chung’s titling of her autobiography as a significant act of branding her political self and her title as a complete narrative in itself. For Gagnier (1991), writing an autobiography (and indeed its title) is an act of curving a subjectivity and this involves the often cited process of reconstructing a preconceived particular self for public circulation. In light of the damage done to Chung’s liberation credentials and political identity hinted above, the title Re-living the second Chimurenga: memories from Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle can be construed as a conscious attempt to reconfigure her place in the liberation war narrative and indeed national politics. There are several talking points in Chung’s title that not only foreshadows her counter-discourse in the autobiography but constitute a counter discourse in their own right. Perhaps the most conspicuous pointers to Chung’s counter-discursive intentions in her title is her proclivity (just like Mugabe in his book title) for relocating herself (and women in general) at the centre of the liberation war narrative. This can be discerned from her choice of words in both the title “Re-living the Second Chimurenga” and the subtitle “Memories from the Liberation Struggle in Zimbabwe.” The full title is apparently semantically redundant in that the subtitle essentially repeats the message of the title. The words “re living” and “second Chimurenga” in the title have clear (near) equivalents in “memories” and “liberation struggle in Zimbabwe” in the sub-title respectively. But this redundancy is not without semantic yet political cause. The deliberate repetition in fact reveal Chung’s intentions to foreground her participation in the liberation war and in so
38{ }^{38} See the news article “Mugabe calls rival prostitute” available at: http://www.africafiles.org/printableversion.asp?id=17325\. 39{ }^{39} See the transcript of Chung’s interview available at: http://www.thezimbabwean.co/2009/03/dr-fay-chung-backs-dr-simba-makoni/.
- 37{ }^{37} The official results of the 2008 Presidential elections showed that Mugabe had indeed received fewer votes than Tsvangirai but the opposition leader came short of the fifty percent plus one vote required to take over the presidency. The violence and chaos that characterized the ensuing runoff election led Tsvangirai to pull out of the race. The GNU was instituted in February 2009. ↩︎
doing laying claim to the war narrative in a context when her liberation war credentials had been politically dented by ZANU PF.
Perhaps the most significant words in the full title (in relation to Chung’s aim to transgress the state’s exclusivist narrative of the liberation war) are “re-living” and “memories”. As hinted above, both words are fundamentally synonymous and the resultant redundancy synchronises with Chung’s aim to heighten her presence in the liberation war narrative. Generally, the terms “reliving” and “memories” imply a prior experience which has a significant bearing on the being of the subject who owns such memories, both in their past and present lives.
As studies in the method and function of the autobiographical genre have shown, memory or the urge to re-live one’s past experiences is essentially political (Bluck 2003). Autobiographical memory is driven by the ‘need’ to utilise the past in settling questions in the present that have a historical trajectory linked to the autobiographer’s life. In this light, Chung’s preoccupation with “memories”, as revealed by its heightened presence in the repetitious full title, is indicative of her quest to use her liberation struggle past to re-construct her present nationalist identity in the backdrop of partisan, gendered and politicised memories of the liberation war.
As an autobiography, Re-living the Second Chimurenga is a product of memory which is described in another context by Assmann and Shortt (2012: 3) as “produced through mediated representations of the past that involve selecting, rearranging, re-describing and simplifying, as well as the deliberate, but also perhaps unintentional, inclusion and exclusion of information.” In their study of memory, Assmann and Shortt (2012: 4) connect the process of mediation to “belatedness” and its link to past realities that have “already undergone a process of interpretation (such that) what we encounter as reality is in fact the product of interpretation.” In this logic, Chung’s emphasis on memory in her autobiography can be connected to her intentions to (re)interpret the past - to problematize both the history of the liberation war as revised by the powerful and the gendered political identities produced by such prejudiced histories. Yet such “interpretations” in the autobiographical genre in general are seldom overt. They manifest subtly in the choices and descriptive renderings of inclusions and exclusions of events and circumstances as well as personal reflections of the same.
There are many instances of ‘careful’ inclusions in Chung’s autobiography that speak to Assmann and Shortt’s (2012: 4) notion of “belatedness” and its connection to (re)interpretation. However, we would like to pick a few of such examples to demonstrate Chung’s gendered memory (and indeed (re)interpretation) of the liberation war and how this memory of the war has clear and subtle implications for her place in the political/nationalist imaginary in the present. Chung strategically frames her life narrative around key moments in the political evolution
of the country and the liberation movements, especially ZANU. This strategy can be discerned in her telling chapter titles such as “Growing up in Colonial Rhodesia”, “In Exile in Britain”, “Joining the Liberation Struggle in Zambia”, and “The Lancaster House Agreement.” These chapter titles clearly evoke a sense of the inextricability of the story of the nation and that of Chung’s life. Chung’s tactical situation of herself in these politically defining moments, events and places that highlight the narrative of the liberation war makes her narrative experiential and authoritative. In Lara’s (1998: 3) theorisation of the “moral texture” of feminist autobiographies, experience and femininity are key requirements in female-authored autobiographies’ attainment of the “illocutionary force” which Lara finds to be inherently “emancipatory”. Linked to this politically ‘interested’ inscription of the self in the narrative and time-space of the national war of liberation, an interesting aspect of Chung’s remembered experiences are references to eminent figures whose names and persons are synonymous with the war. There are instances when descriptions of such experiences seem primarily intended to confirm Chung’s presence at the frontline and in so doing highlighting her role and influence in the struggle as the following excerpt reveals:
I found myself hiding in the same area as Rekayi Tangwena, the famous traditional chief who had so courageously defied the Smith regime’s various attempts to oust him from his ancestral lands. He had assisted Robert Mugabe and Edgar Tekere to flee across the mountains from Rhodesia to Mozambique. He then had joined the liberation struggle. Now we found ourselves hiding together in the Mozambican bush in the middle of the night, fleeing because of a machine gun attack by one ZANLA faction against another. This was too much for Chief Tangwena, who wept. He wept because he foresaw more bloodshed after independence. He told me of his fears: “What will happen after independence if we are ready to kill each other now?” (191- 192)
A closer analysis of the excerpt suggests a surreptitious and politically interested intention to morally censure the masculinisation of the war revealed here by the penchant for violence in settling internal disputes by male leaders of the revolution (see also Muponde 2015). But Chung’s witnessing account not only reflects on the downside of the masculinist tendencies to monopolise the liberation war experience. In fact, Chung’s remembrance of the particular moments she shared with Chief Tangwena while in hiding from the internal fights suggests an inclination to identify with both his esteemed presence and significance in the historical narrative of the Chimurenga and his judicious approach to power. The overall picture of Chung we get from the remembered detail about Chief Tangwena is that of a custodian of the memory and practitioner of his politics of inclusivity. Read in the context of Chung’s current struggle to retain her politically retracted liberation war credentials, Chief Tangwena’s fears about post-
independence power struggles become prophetic. His antipathy of the politics of the liberation leaders’ attempts to cartelise the liberation war effort seems especially recalled by Chung to synchronise it with her own contestation of the revolutionary party leaders’ exclusive claims to the war in the present.
Josiah Tongogara, the commander of ZANLA, is another key figure in the war who is tactically remembered by Chung to not only re-centre women’s contributions to the struggle for independence but also to debunk and confute some of the celebrated phallocentric narratives and narrators of the exclusive liberation struggle grand narrative. Markedly, Chung’s account of Tongogara is not only extensive (it covers an entire chapter) and intimate (Chung recalls his physical appearance, mannerisms, and gaiety), but it is, perhaps more importantly, punctuated by accounts of sexual abuse of women fighters. The feminist effect of this revisionist approach can be felt in the following quotation from the interestingly titled chapter Josiah Tongogara: Commander of ZANLA:
Despite his deep love for his family, he, like many of his senior commanders, demanded the sexual services of some of the young women guerrillas who had joined the liberation struggle in their thousands… Sometimes, women did not enter into these casual unions willingly, but were forced into them. I remember two incidents when I was in Pungwe III, a military camp on the banks of the Pungwe River deep in the heart of Mozambique. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of commotion…The next morning I was told by a young commander that Tongogara and his retinue had arrived in the middle of the night and had demanded women to entertain them. Such women were euphemistically called “warm blankets”. These women knew what this meant and refused. The commotion was caused by the fight between the camp commander and the young women, whose fierce opposition to being carried off to grace the beds of the commanders was termed “rebellion”. Despite their shouts and screams, they ended up in the beds of the top ZANLA commanders that night. (2006: 126)
The usual criticisms on the standing of the autobiography as a historical genre is that it is inherently a product of “selective memory” (Sankara 2011). Chung attempts to skirt the often cited ‘unreliability’ of selective memory in her remembrance of Tongogara’s abusive contact by remembering women fighters of power who also “([ook] their pick of the thousands of young men who had joined the struggle” (2006: 127). However, Chung’s underlying feminist perspective - her deconstructive approach to
[1]Tongogara’s patriarchal attitude and the political elisions of the ‘sins’ of male liberators in official narratives of the liberation struggle can be inferred from the detail she chooses to remember about the women’s encounters with male sexual predators epitomised by Tongogara. In the quotation above, these ‘chosen’ details betray Chung’s suspicious attitude to and interpretative appraisal of both the sexual abuse and its significance to the moral standing of prominent male liberation war leaders as authentic narrators of the liberation war.
Perhaps the most significant and telling of the remembered details above is the derogatory reference to the abused female guerrillas as “warm blankets” (2006: 126) and the tagging of the women fighter’s opposition to the men’s advances as “rebellion” (2006: 126). These two labels suggest Chung’s attempts to re-excavate the hidden and derisive dimensions of male experiences of the war. The labels are fundamentally demeaning to the female fighters and indicate the superiority complex of the male fighters and their consequent intentions to subordinate women in the power hierarchy of the liberation struggle. The label “warm blankets” (2006: 126) essentially ‘thingifies’ the women, reconstructing them as accessorial objects at the disposal of male fighters. The fact that this despicable treatment of and attitude to female fighters are perpetrated by a prominent male liberator (Tongogara) flags and historicise the condescending attitude to female liberation war heroism by male leaders. Chung’s strategic memory therefore allows her to put the political immorality of her current subordination and exclusion from the Chimurenga narrative into historical perspective. This stirs in us (in the present) the same antipathetic feelings we have for Tongogara’s political misogyny during the liberation war. In this autobiographical memory, Chung, it seems, is resuscitating the foiled women’s “rebellion” (2006: 126) against the patriarchal experience and archiving of the Chimurenga.
Although narratives of female sexual abuse by prominent male liberators are not completely elided from the official liberation war narrative, they are often silenced and only strategically remembered whenever they are usable in disqualifying opponents from the Chimurenga narrative and the political legitimacy it ascribes to heroes involved in its prosecution.
Chung’s construction of the prevailing hegemonic masculinisation of both the liberation war and political power as an evolutionary product of the liberation war echoes contemporary attempts by the ZANU PF regime to embroil Mugabe’s perceived opponents in scandals involving the sexual abuse of women fighters during the liberation war. Recently, President Mugabe expelled his deputy Joice Mujaru from both the ZANU PF party and government accusing her of plotting his ouster. 40{ }^{40}
http://www.dailynews.co.zw/articles/2014/12/04/mujuru-used-juju-on-me-mugabe
- 40{ }^{40} See the story “Mujuru used juju on me” available at the Daily News website: ↩︎
Previously, Joice Mujuru was celebrated in ZANU PF circles as a “father of the nation” (Christiansen, 2007: 88) before she was unceremoniously haunted out of the party and national deputy presidency in 2014 on allegations that she had ambitions to unseat Mugabe. Part of the ZANU PFrevised narrative that vilified Mujuru in the process of (and after) her ouster tactically retracted much of the liberation credentials and war heroics previously attributed to her. Among other deletions of and modifications to Mujuru’s hitherto recognised masculine war heroics, the story of the helicopter shooting is conspicuous. This is not least because it demonstrates how ZANU PF’s revocation of Mujuru’s “father of the nation” (Christiansen, 2007: 88) identity is uncunningly associated with the cancellation of her war-time heroics and ‘emerging’ revelations that she facilitated the sexual abuse of women fighters in the liberation struggle. A story headlined “Mujuru facilitated abuse of girls, women” in the state mouthpiece The Sunday Mail newspaper claimed that “Mujuru was at the forefront of coercing young women to sleep with male combatants.” 41{ }^{41} The following narrative, published in the The Sunday Mail, reveals overt attempts at not only justifying Mujuru’s expulsion from ZANU PF and government but also her denial of a stake in the kind of masculine violence that legitimate the phallocentric status quo:
Joice Runaida Mugari was a teenage chimbwido (a term used to describe civilian girls who ran errands in aid of combatants) in the Chahwanda area of Mashonaland Central. In 1973, a group of guerrillas under the command of Cde Joseph Chipembere and including the likes of Cdes Mbukayesango, Cephas Tichatonga and Dick Joboringo, among others, were in that area. The chimbwidos prepared food for Cde Chipembere and his comrades. Cde Chipembere became interested in Runaida and they became intimate when he finished eating … During the intercourse, a battle broke out (with Rhodesian forces) and Cde Chipembere fought the better part of that battle whilst he was naked. This nonsense that (Dr Mujuru) brought down a helicopter - I don’t know where people got that from. It was Cde Chipembere who did that, and unfortunately he was a casualty of that battle. "But yes, she was there as a chimbwido with other girls. (The Sunday Mail Online, 2016, August 21). 42{ }^{42}
This narrative epitomises the post-2014 character ‘assassination’ targeted at Mujuru before, during and after her fall-out with Mugabe in 2014. Conspicuous in this narrative is not only the male political patriarch’s predisposition to rescind Mujuru’s defining moment of
“masculine” violence during the struggle, but a preoccupation with sexually scandalising her. In reidentifying Mujuru as a war-time chimbwido (literally a helper) - the male narrator of the story not only dwarfs Mujuru’s contribution to the struggle but perhaps more importantly, invokes Mujuru’s femininity to marginalise and subordinate her war experiences to those of her perceived male war-time lover. In a patriarchal society in which sex has clear phallocentric power configurations and associations and a war-time setting in which male combatants “had (rules and warnings) against sleeping with girls or women” (Sunday Mail Online, 2016, August 21), Mujuru’s alleged sexual encounter with the male fighter who is now accredited with the shooting of the Rhodesian helicopter reconstruct her (just like the female guerrillas in Chung’s passage above), at least, as a sexual chimbwido (accessory) to her male lover, and at worst an obstruction to the liberation struggle. In this statepromoted revised narrative of the (in)famous ‘helicopter mystery’, the death of Cde Chipembere, whose value to the liberation and nationalist legacy is established through the ascription of the heroic helicopter shooting to him, is strategically bound up with Mujuru’s femininity. In fact, the hitherto ‘forgotten’ and now carefully remembered sex encounter and its tragic consequences not only undervalue Mujuru’s (and by implication female contribution to the war) but it scandalises and criminalises it.
A ‘Disclosive’ Autobiography
As hinted above, Chung’s Re-living the Second Chimurenga may not be the first historically situated narrative to attempt a narrative deconstruction of the truth claims of a gendered “patriotic history” (Ranger, 2004: 215) and the gendered “social space” and power hierarchies it creates. Chung’s autobiographical methods can be usefully compared to and contrasted with many burgeoning narratives of the liberation struggle which focalise female experiences of the war. Besides many feminist literary interventions such as Yvonne Vera’s novel Nehanda which re-visits the symbolic significance and iconography of perhaps the best known heroine of the first anti-colonial uprisings, the spirit medium Nehanda, a stylistically significant and more recent contribution is the symbolically titled book Mothers of the Revolution: the war experiences of Thirty Zimbabwean Women (1990) which was edited by Irene Staunton. The importance of Staunton’s book, among other things, is its reclamation of a ‘social space’ that gives female ex-combatants the voice and agency to “re-live the second Chimurenga” - to use Chung’s title. In a context marked by overt and covert hegemonic elisions of female experiences of the war, the title and method of Mothers of the Revolution shares much in common with Chung’s autobiography. Just like Chung’s title Re-living the Second Chimurenga which foregrounds Chung’s situatedness in the time-space of the liberation
- 41{ }^{41} The full story is available online at: http://www.sundaymail.co.zw/mujuru-facilitated-abuse-of-girls-women/ ↩︎
struggle, the title “Mothers of the Revolution” evokes a sense of belonging to and owning the struggle. “Mothers of the Revolution” are therefore at once literally the mothers at the frontline and also the metaphorical female combatants who metaphorically ‘birrhed’ the struggle.
Lara’s (1998) theorisation of autobiographies by women as “morally textured” can be usefully invoked to read Chung’s text as an important contribution to prevailing political and cultural challenges to the ‘immorality’ of what Adichie (2009) in another context, famously calls “the danger of a single story.” Lara (1998: 4) perceives a “connection between public narratives and their ‘disclosive’ potentialities for emancipatory transformations”, noting in particular, the capacity in women’s life narratives to reflect on personal experience of injustice in ways that can influence public responses to such instances of social injustice. Thus for Lara: “the aesthetic effect of ‘disclosure’ can provide a new way of understanding justice. Once a story is retold, it is possible to grasp the narrowness of previous conceptions of justice, debts to the past that takes the form of moral responsibilities in the present are thereby incurred” (1998: 5-6). In Re-living the Second Chimurenga, Chung grounds her personal life experience on a reflective plane, interpreting the interstices between her personal life and Zimbabwe’s political trajectory over the last years. Remembered events in Chung’s narrative show a proclivity for redefining the liberation struggle from a feminist point of view. An important aspect of Chung’s ‘disclosure’ is her childhood. Chung remembers and re-visions her childhood in ways that ‘disclose’ the typicality of her initial urge to become a liberation war fighter. Her childhood experiences are carefully selected and structured in a way that debunks patriarchal notions of the making of a freedom fighter. Chung’s childhood re-genders the founding principles of Zimbabwean nationalism by showing what she finds to be the inevitable connection between colonial experience and a socio-politico-economic consciousness of the injustice and immorality of colonialism. This thinking of materiality and the cause-and-effect dynamic of the colonial encounter fundamentally follows on the Marxist leanings of the liberation struggle (see Chung 2006: 162). The first chapter, aptly titled “Growing up in Colonial Rhodesia” best reveals the strategic primacy accorded to one’s material realities in the creation of urgency to re-gain agency to live as independent subjects. Conspicuous in this chapter title and indeed in the chapter and the entire book is not only the absence of gender in considerations of the ways in which the colonial experience conscientised colonial subjects to the need for arms in the process of decolonisation. This deliberate gender-blindness in thinking about colonialism and means and methods of contesting it unsettles the gendered dominant ideology that views colonialism as inherently masculine and which can best be overcome by masculine counter-resistance.
There are at least two interconnected issues attendant on Chung’s definition and identification of herself as a product of the colonial time-space. The first issue can be
connected to Chekhov’s (cited in Grant 2008: 93) dictum that “love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.” This theorisation of colonial causality informs Chung’s deliberate elision of the gender factor and her foregrounding, instead, of inclusive circumstances underlying the origins and evolution of an anti-colonial disposition. For Chung, then, all that non-whites ‘needed’ was to “grow up in colonial Rhodesia” (and especially not to be male) to develop an anti-colonial temperament. A brief quotation from Chung’s book can be opportune in demonstrating how ‘disclosure’ enhances the narrative’s problematisation of the masculine dynamic in dominant narratives of the liberation struggle. Chung begins her book thus:
It was impossible to grow up in colonial Rhodesia without becoming aware from one’s earliest age of the deep hostility between the races …These laws (segregation and land apportionment laws) forbade the sale of the best land to anyone but the whites. The worst land was reserved for blacks. Those who were neither black nor white were not catered by the land laws" (27).
Read in the context of the narrative’s situation in a patriarchal socio-economic and political context which thrives on limiting and surveiling female agency, the memory of material inequalities caused by the colonial racial caste system acquires a more affective appeal. This is because inter alia, Chung is writing from a point of (lack of) power and subjectivity which is impacted upon by various intersecting forces unique to her as a citizen of Chinese origins, non-white and (especially) female. For Lara (1998) occupying and narrating the story of one’s life from such points of unjust disadvantage lends female narratives the “illocutionary force” (Lara 1998: 5) which magnifies instances of injustice in ways that affects us (as readers) to sympathise with Chung and to think of redress (through the liberation struggle) as a moralising act.
Wispé’s (1991: 8) notion of the “psychology of sympathy” suggests that “the orientation of sympathetic behaviour is not the welfare of the person who is sympathetically motivated, but that of the person who is the object of that sympathy.” It is from this perspective that Wispé considers sympathy an altruistic emotion. In light of this discussion’s focus, perhaps the most urgent question to be asked concerns what Wispé (1991: 8) calls “the paradox of sympathy” which emanates from the seemingly vexing question: “how can one person be motivated by a desire for the well-being of another person whose thoughts and feelings she or he has not immediate or direct awareness?” (Wispé 1991: 8). This question requires us to consider the nature of the autobiography especially its organisation and structuring of thought. The essence of autobiography is that it is a product of a selective memory. Memory is fundamentally cognitive (Black 2003). While in her study of “autobiographical memory” Black (2003: 1) suggests that “memory represents our inner and outer world”, we
would like to contend that Chung’s autobiographical memory involves thinking the “inner world” as a product of past spatio-temporal forces impacting on her “outer world”. As the title of Chung’s text Re-living the Second Chimurenga indicates, the autobiography is a personal reflection on the past. The act of ‘reflecting on’ entails a commentary or an interpretive approach. Interpretation is here conceptualised as entailing much more than a mere direct expression of thought on possible causes of certain effects. In Chung’s autobiography, interpretation involves a careful narrative motivation of readers to enter her “circle of concern” (Nussbaum, 2001: 319) from which they can begin to experience what Wispé (1991: 8) (in another context) calls “a desire for the well-being of another person”, in this instance, Chung the female freedom fighter.
Violence and Gendered Heroism
As Lara (1998) asserts in general and as hinted in relation to Chung’s text above, women’s autobiographies thrive on affect. One would therefore expect a female-authored autobiography which sets out to “re-live the Second Chimurenga” (the title of Chung’s book) to reflect and reflect on the various forms of violence experienced by women during the war and their implications for thinking gender and liberation war heroism in the present. Apart from the more subtle and structured colonial violence manifesting in (among other things) segregated spaces and institutions, the violence of the liberation war as depicted in Chung’s text is connected to the experience of prosecuting the war. The war is depicted in Chung’s autobiography as physically demanding and more so to female combatants who hitherto were traditionally confined to ‘safe’ domestic spaces by patriarchy. The violence of the war in Chung’s autobiography is connected to death and the female combatants’ sacrifices to risk their lives. A quotation describing one of Chung’s remembered heroines illuminate Chung’s notion of heroism as bound up with sacrifice:
One such woman was Sheila Tavarwisa, a primary school teacher who joined the liberation struggle and became one of the first women commanders in ZANLA. Her responsibility in the beginning was to carry arms from Zambia and Mozambique to the frontline in Rhodesia… When the peasants saw that the fight was being led by women like Sheila, a highly respected person within her community, it became much easier to gain moral and logistical support for the war effort. It was said that if women were brave enough to fight the war, then it was incumbent on every person to join too…She later died of a kidney disease, a major killer of former guerrillas and probably the result of hepatitis from polluted water. (81)
There are several talking points in this quotation vis-à-vis Chung’s specific remembrance of Tavarwisa’s heroism and her re-gendering of revolutionary consciousness and
commitment. In light of this discussion’s present focus on Chung’s strategies of re-centering female experiences of the liberation war, perhaps one of the most critical markers of heroism in the quotation is the heightened altruism of the female heroine. Tavarwisa’s heroism can best be understood in the context of wider and often masculine notions of heroism in state narratives of the war. Rankin and Eagly’s (2008) theorisation of the masculine tendencies of heroism in their aptly titled study “Is his heroism hailed and hers hidden? Women, men, and the social construction of heroism”, can help us to understand some of the ways in which Tavarwisa becomes iconic and rememberable:
The construal of heroism as involving both risk to the hero and benefit to others is provocative in relation to cultural stereotypes of men and women. As Becker and Eagly (2004) demonstrated, risk taking is stereotypically and actually associated with men, whereas empathic concern for others’ welfare is stereotypically and actually associated with women. Given this definition of heroism as combining masculine and feminine elements, heroism would seem to be culturally androgynous, and women as well as men might be well represented as heroes. However, one important caveat is that risk taking that imposes demands of physical strength advantages men because of their greater physical prowess. (Rankin and Eagly, 2008: 414)
In light of this view, perhaps the most central of Tavarwisa’s heroic traits that Chung felt compelled to archive and deploy to re-invigorate interest in female heroism is her commitment to take a risk. The risk that Tavarwisa takes is depicted as extraordinary in the given socio-political circumstances. This extraordinariness heightens Tavarwisa’s heroic appeal. From an anthroponymic perspective, one of the most fascinating aspects of the heroine’s person is her name, Tavarwisa, and how it seamlessly fits into her heroic acts and identity.
Writing in particular about the liberation war nom de guerre, Płukwa and Barnes (2010: 211) note that “these names developed in an environment of conflict and are a chronicle of popular resistance.” While it is not clear if Tavarwisa is the heroine’s original name or a given or selfascribed nom de guerre, its semantic associations in the time-space of the war reflect on its bearer’s significance to the war. Tavarwisa is a Shona name which can be literally translated as “we have fought them”. Markedly, the plural form “tava-” (we have) signifies a collective effort which is inscribed on the name and identity of the female combatant. The name Tavarwisa and the female bearer of the name thus become symbolic yet aesthetic sites for encountering the war experience in general. In particular, the structure of the name reflects the act of prosecuting the war as an inclusive act and this perspective stands in stark contrast to dominant narratives of the liberation war which
(as hinted above) hegemonically devalue and even excludes women’s experiences.
Tavarwisa’s heroism is not only inscribed on her name only, it also manifest in her selflessness. Chung’s careful selection of memory, inclusions and exclusions about the combat life of Tavarwisa suggests a preoccupation with celebrating her altruistic intentions in fighting in the war. The “risk to the hero(ine) and benefit to others” (Rankin and Eagly, 2008: 414) in Chung’s narrative of the fate of Tavarwisa is intensely touching and draws our attention to her sacrifice. In highlighting Tavarwisa’s commitment, Chung makes reference to the life that she sacrificed for a gruelling time with an uncertain future in the frontline. This life is marked by her teaching job which (at the time) signified material comfort. Tavarwisa’s decision to leave it while fully aware of the discomforts of the war reveals a firm consciousness of the general good intentions of the war for the majority of the people. Ultimately, for Tavarwisa, fighting in the war is a commitment to moralise an immoral socio-economic and political situation created by colonialism. Thus her presence at the war front is evoked as exemplary and motivational to others who had not yet joined the war.
The narrative also thrives on the traditional and rather stereotypic constructions of female identity and (lack of) agency in its bid to reinforce Tavarwisa’s heroism. The processes and circumstances which inform Tavarwisa’s iconography are steeped in her femininity and part of her heroism is shaped by her courage and drive to explode constraining notions of female agency constructed by patriarchy. Conspicuous in descriptions of Tavarwisa’s short ‘history’ is her intentions to transgress boundaries of gender and political roles and stereotypes which could easily inhibit women’s self-esteem vis-à-vis the gruelling frontline. In Chung’s memory of Tavarwisa, what Rankin and Eagly (2008: 414) call “empathetic concern for others” - the hallmark of stereotyped female identity - is not even her most heroic virtue. Instead, Tavarwisa’s ‘feminine’ “empathetic concern for others” (Rankin and Eagly 2008: 414) is in fact her motivation for her facing up to the ‘masculine’ “risk taking that imposes demands of physical strength” (Rankin and Eagly 2008: 414). Tavarwisa therefore epitomises the desirable mix and harmony of gendered characteristics - a stable co-existence of both ‘feminine’ empathy which allows her to identify with the broader intentions of the war and ‘masculine’ strength which allows her to sacrifice her life to prosecute liberating violence.
While the short historiography of Tavarwisa’s iconic female experience of the war suggests the desirability of an equal mix of the rather stereotypic feminine and masculine qualities, there are many instances in the autobiography when Chung reconstructs femininity as more suited to certain tasks than masculinity. Such instances portray women fighters as indispensable to the war not least because their inherent qualities allowed them to perform certain core functions suited to, inter alia, their bodies and
traditional gender roles and their stereotypic public image. A quotation of one of such parts in the autobiography where women’s unique traits are celebrated as situating them at the centre of the struggle can demonstrate Chung’s preoccupation with contesting the dominant masculine imagining of the liberation war.
Women were also better suited for the long walk from the Mozambican and Zambian borders into Rhodesia carrying loads of weapons on their heads, not only because they were already accustomed to carrying heavy loads of water and firewood, but also because the Rhodesian security forces were less suspicious of women, whereas they suspected every man of being a guerrilla. It was part of a Rhodesian macho mores that war was the responsibility of men, so they were completely unprepared to fight against women… thus 1972 saw not only an intensification of the war effort, but also the entry of women as major players in the liberation struggle. (2012: 81; emphasis added)
This passage typifies some of the ways in which Chung seeks to remember and re-proclaim previously subordinated yet critical functions performed by women during the war. By remembering and highlighting such roles, Chung debunks the fetishism of masculine hero narratives which mostly glorifies the men who fired guns. The physical combat is thus re-created in Chung’s narrative as only a part of a broader assault process which included roles that were more suited to women than men. Chung problematise the eminence accorded to the gunfiring male combatant by making it dependant on a ‘women-only-role’; that is, carrying guns. Thus, it is women who are the source of guns - the assault weapons associated with masculine violence. Women therefore enter the war process as “major players” (to use Chung’s own description) who could use their unique biological and gender attributes to their and the war’s advantage. In the quotation above, besides illuminating and underlining the symbolically close relationship between women and guns, Chung also unsettles the macho guerrilla men construct by ‘remembering’ equally tough roles and tasks performed by women which prepared them for some of the most demanding tasks in the war. Thus the women are markedly described by Chung as “accustomed to carrying heavy loads of water and firewood” (Chung, 2012: 81).
These specific roles are in fact the seals of female identity in a society where patriarchy delegates all domestic tasks associated with the provision of food to female members of the family. The symbolism that this gender role plays out is key to Chung’s re-visioning of women’s contributions to the struggle. Thus just as the family depends on the women for the provision of food, the male guerrillas depended on women to provide them with weapons. In both instances the men are clearly dependent on women and this dependency reflect the extent to which they could have been severely curtailed in their operations
without the contributions of women. The women are thus integral to the liberation war effort just as they are indispensable to the well-being of the family. There is a subtle visioning of what Heuer (2007: 40) (in another context) calls the “image of the nation as a family.” Chung is not so much concerned with the well-known gendered curtailments to female subjectivity in patriarchal societies but she is more interested in the capacity in women to transcend their cultured limitations to use their talents acquired through their familial roles for the nationalist cause.
Conclusion
Re-living the Second Chimurenga appeared at a time in Zimbabwean history when the state’s grand narrative of the nation’s past and its implications for political legitimacy and power dynamics in the present was fiercely contested. The autobiography’s counter-discursive strategies share a lot with similar autobiographies of eminent liberators such as Joshua Nkomo’s (2001) The Story of My Life, Edgar Tekere’s A Lifetime of Struggle (2007) and Cephas Msipa’s
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