Identity and the Genocide That Did Not Happen: An Analysis of Two Zimbabwean Plays 1983: Years Before and After and Speak Out! (original) (raw)
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(Re)membering the nation’s “forgotten” past: Portrayals of Gukurahundi in Zimbabwean literature
In the early 1980s Zimbabwe witnessed an ethnic cleansing which has been ignored in official state discourses and rendered unspeakable. This “moment of madness” (Ellis, 2006: 40), as Robert Mugabe called it, has come to be referred to as Gukurahundi. The minority Ndebele tribe was persecuted by government-backed forces. This article draws on the theoretical reflections of El Nossery and Hubbell who argue that even though some traumatic experiences may be unspeakable, they are not necessarily unrepresentable. Through an analysis of Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002), Christopher Mlalazi’s novel Running with Mother (2012), several poems by John Eppel as well as Owen Maseko’s paintings , this paper contends that these works of art broach a subject which has been rendered quasi-taboo. It is argued that these works of literature fictionalize, against the grain of the official national narrative, Zimbabwe’s traumatic postcolonial violence in which the national army turned against the country’s citizens under the guise of weeding out “dissidents” in the immediate post-independence period. Moreover, this article contends that fictional and artistic works function in such a way as to keep the memory of civilian victims alive, to heal the national trauma through memorializing it, and to call perpetrators to account by pointing out their culpability.
Gukurahundi in retrospect: Theatre performance as a cultural public sphere
2020
Resistance during Gukurahundi was virtually impossible especially in holding camps such as Bhalagwe and Matopo. Gukurahundi refers to the 1983-1987 period in Zimbabwean history characterised by an unconfirmed genocide of the Ndebele minority. Upon the deployment of the 5th Brigade in Matabeleland and some parts of Midlands, the government of the day closed off media access to these areas, banning access to journalists without formal permission. While some survivors of the holding camps and Gukurahundi brutality have over the years shared their experiences with family members, some have chosen to remain quiet. Out of the firsthand narratives from Gukurahundi emerging through various platforms, an 'alternative' narrative is beginning to infect public opinion and discourse. It is considered 'alternative' because it contests the official 'moment of madness' (GAIDZANWA, 2015) government meta-narrative. In this article, I examine Victory Siyanqoba's Talitha Koum-Someone Lied! (here in after referred to as Talita Koum) as one instance of a cultural public sphere's ability to give a voice to those who have lost theirs such as the survivors and their children in a manner that unsettles the past, bringing alternative narratives to the public and instigating debates and discourses around Gukurahundi.
2005
In this thesis I analyse representations of identity and nation in two plays. The plays are satires in the "community theatre genre" from Zimbabwe. The background for this work is the understanding of cultural expressions and popular culture as a form of mass media; as such they are utterances which take part in hegemonic battles. The context is the political situation in Zimbabwe in 1999, when the opposition was gaining a foothold and there was a certain silent optimism concerning future development of democracy and strengthening of human rights. The plays I analyse criticise the regime. "The Members" (Amakhosi) criticises corrupt MPs and "Ivhu versus the State" (Rooftop) recounts the intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am interested in how resistance in the plays is expressed and the differences in strategies between the plays which are from different geographical settings. My theoretical position and concepts derive from cultural studies, discourse theory and postcolonial studies. These theories and conceptual framework emphasise how the public sphere consists of conflicting discourses, and that political struggle is also a politics of discourse. A post-colonial reading strategy focuses on hybrid representations which avoid narratives told in polarisations and essential conceptions of identity. These theories are the background for my reading strategies. I analyse the plays in relation to how they recount/narrate actual conflicts in Zimbabwe-which lines of conflicts do they comment on? How is identity represented in the narratives of gender, class and race? How are the powerful/leaders recounted? How do they talk about inequality and the relationship between white and black? Do the plays offer multiple or stereotypical representations of identity? I analyse how they experience and narrate their nation-do they provide space for a multiplicity of national identities? How do they narrate strategies for political change? I demonstrate that both plays anticipate the political and socioeconomic crisis which been developing in Zimbabwe since 2000. I also show that the plays' strategies of resistance are the basis for the present opposition.
The Noisy Silence of Gukurahundi: Truth, Recognition and Belonging
Journal of Southern African Studies
A period of terrible state repression known as 'Gukurahundi' indelibly marked the foundational years of the Zimbabwean nation. The perpetrators of that period still hold power. It has never been subject to an official truth-telling process, nor have the responsible actors been held accountable. Instead, irreconcilable narratives about this past have interacted and, for those subjected to violence, proliferated, producing what I call a 'noisy silence' at the edges of the nation. This noise rumbles on because of a perpetual failure of public recognition of the violent past, but it does so in highly varied ways and to distinct purposes. I seek to trace the history of this noisy silence from its start in the irreconcilable narratives of the 1980s, themselves powerfully rooted in earlier liberation struggle ideas and relationships, through subsequent decades. Noisy silence sat in between an official, justificatory account of Gukurahundi on the one hand and the fearful, silenced memories of individuals on the other. It occupied a productive middle ground where collective, creative efforts delineated and demanded new political possibilities and terms of belonging through truth-telling, re-imagined and mourned nations and cross-generational attempts to heal and hold perpetrators to account.
Zimbabwe: Gukurahundi Victims’ Monologues, State Silences and Perpetrator Denials, 1987-2017
Conflict Studies Quarterly, 2020
The Zimbabwean government instigated Gukurahundi massacres resulted in the death of around 20 000 people. The majority of the victims belonged to the Ndebele ethnic group while the Fifth Brigade, a Shona dominated military outϐit, were the main perpetrators of the mass killings. The atrocities ended with the signing of the Unity Accord of December 1987 between the ruling ZANU (PF) party, which had masterminded the atrocities, and the opposition (PF) ZAPU, whose supporters had borne the brunt of state highhandedness. After the cessation of hostilities the Zimbabwean government frustrated open conversations and public commemorations of the massacres. What conversations on Gukurahundi that took place were largely victims’ monologues. To interrogate this state instigated silencing of exposure and remembrance the article suggests an exigency for counter-narrating erasures of memories of harm and impunity. In the aftermath of massacres, I argue, harmed communities embolden themselves and ...
Matatu, 2013
ABSTRACT The perception of the Gukurahundi period (the Matabeleland disturbances in the years 1981–87) depends largely on the way the social and ideological forces were aligned during this period. This essay therefore argues that the fictional representations of this particular period are vexed and varied because of the concatenation of the political, ideological, ethnic, and social realities of various writers. It also posits that some of the perceptions that informed the ideological inclinations of the period arguably had some residual effect on the contemporary political scene in Zimbabwe. The contention is that the events of the 1980s seemingly continue to have a lasting impact on the socio-political and economic spheres of the nation. Recent developments during elections since 2000 prove that the hegemonic imperatives in ZANU PF were prepondent in the execution of the 1981–87 Gukurahundi, thus tending to retard national development, healing, and cohesion.
This article analyses the construction of imagined identities of Zimbabwean nationhood in two televised documentaries, Nyadzonia Massacre and Colonial Era Atrocities, aired on Zimbabwe national television. Using qualitative semiotic analysis and borrowing from post nationalism, this article analyses how the two documentaries interweave memory and violence with the politics of nationhood and belonging during the Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe. The paper also analyses how the films were packaged in order to undermine the semiotic resistance and autonomy of the viewer to create oppositional readership of the films.
Gukurahundi Victims Monologues State Silences and Perpetrator Denials 1987 2017
The Zimbabwean government instigated Gukurahundi massacres resulted in the death of around 20 000 people. The majority of the victims belonged to the Ndebele ethnic group while the Fifth Brigade, a Shona dominated military out it, were the main perpetrators of the mass killings. The atrocities ended with the signing of the Unity Accord of December 1987 between the ruling ZANU (PF) party, which had masterminded the atrocities, and the opposition (PF) ZAPU, whose supporters had borne the brunt of state highhandedness. After the cessation of hostilities the Zimbabwean government frustrated open conversations and public commemorations of the massacres. What conversations on Gukurahundi that took place were largely victims' monologues. To interrogate this state instigated silencing of exposure and remembrance the article suggests an exigency for counter-narrating erasures of memories of harm and impunity. In the aftermath of massacres, I argue, harmed communities embolden themselves and coalesce their fractured senses of self by openly memorialising their collective suffering through open conversations about their shared victimhood, commemorations, and the assembling of monuments. The Robert Mugabe led government's foreclosure of such avenues for public acknowledgements of mass injuries that are supposed to serve as visceral registers of what societies should remember to avoid in the future reveals its disregard for the wounded humanity of the constitutive political other. Thus, Gukurahundi as an historical episode reveals the pathology of mass harm silenced and rendered insignificant by the state.
How do you put genocide and mass violence on stage? How can you possibly imagine what it was like to walk in the shoes of the real-life victims of violence? Is it a transgression to give perpetrators a voice on stage when they have denied voice to so many others? What does a play performed in a professional context have to contribute to social change? This paper focuses on playwriting that takes up the topics of genocide and mass violence with a focus on the creative strategies of the writers – how do they carry out this difficult work? What is common to each of the plays is that fact that the writers are outsiders to their various subjects. I am interested in how they stage the perspective of outsiders and how they explore the responsibilities of distant bystanders and belated witnesses – those who come after or who watch from a distance. Each of the writers is interested in blurring the distinctions of then and now, here and there, you and I, often through the use of metatheatre. Foremost I want to think about how we might read such blurring from an ethical perspective: who may speak for whom? To whom does the experience of suffering belong?
Political theatre, national identity and political control: the case of Zimbabwe
African Identities, 2010
This article intends to situate Zimbabwean political theatre within the discourse of national identity. National identity is deployed here as denoting any given set of myths, stories and beliefs propagated to justify a dominant group in maintaining power and in the case of Zimbabwe such generated myths and images are sectarian. Institutions such as theatre must be established to protect, nourish, articulate and perpetuate such identities. What is emerging now in Zimbabwe is that even if the government has supported such institutions often posturing as independent of sectarian political expedience, the resultant public imagery is the official version of history which incriminates those who have different views as sell-outs. Political theatre in Zimbabwe is one of the mediums which generates public imagery that challenges or maintains the ZANU-PF version of national memory. I argue that the totality of the state is expressed in its monopoly of images of meaning that float in the public mind through the medium of theatre. Where such theatre is consistent with what Ranger calls ‘patriotic history’ it is protected as memory should be guarded against dissolution. However, national identity can be an umbrella for determining what speech and passion is permissible and what is not. Thus in Zimbabwe, national identity has become a camouflage for a series of political controls that occupy the creative space and deny the opportunity for a pluralism of views and freedom of expression.