Paper short abstract:

It is forty years since the ‘Gukurahundi’ post-independence massacres in the western provinces of Zimbabwe. The state’s version of 'killing dissidents' is at odds with that of victims. Expert exhumations of the murdered dead vindicate that innocents died, and reburials have helped healed the dead.

Paper long abstract:

In Matabeleland and the Midlands of Zimbabwe, the post-independence era of the 1980s did not bring the peace and development experienced elsewhere, and instead brought years of oppression and killings, as the ruling party sought to establish a one-party state. While there were indisputably dissidents causing disruption in this region, they were few in number and reach, and the vast majority of terrible violations occurred at the hands of the notorious, North Korean trained Fifth Brigade. In recent years, differently-situated actors are increasingly shifting memories of this past out of the realms of silence and oppression and into the context of the political present. The dead themselves have been given an indisputable voice and are acting to challenge the official versions of this past, when exhumed by forensic specialists in the presence of a witnessing community. Beyond vindication of the memories of the tortured and bereaved, bringing bones out of the grave and into the light of day and reburying them where the family needs them to be, also brings some healing and allows for new, emboldened dialogue about the past. The exhumation of one grave of a young married couple not only brought new truths and reparation to a family, but reached throughout the broader community to offer clarity and relief to hundreds across the generations who had been forced to live for decades in the proximity of these restless dead.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the meaning and uses of legacy in connection to former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's rule and the futures of Zimbabwe through an examination of four nonfictional texts by Panashe Chigumadzi, Ray Ndlovu, Geoffrey Nyarota, and Douglas Rogers.

Paper long abstract:

Former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe was overthrown in a coup that was officially not called a coup in November 2017. In September 2019 he passed away, marking the definite end of an era and the almost four decades of his rule. The process to remove Mugabe from power was called Operation Restore Legacy and it has been well documented in a number of nonfictional texts emerging since 2017. This paper explores four such texts by writers and journalists connected to Zimbabwe in various ways: Panashe Chigumadzi, Ray Ndlovu, Geoffrey Nyarota, and Douglas Rogers. The meanings and uses of legacy are at the core of the paper. The act of bearing witness to the developments defines the writing in all four texts examined that also to some extent draw on the autobiographical. Not only was the operation to oust Mugabe built on the notion of restoring legacy, inevitably raising questions about whose legacy was being restored, but the legacy of the former president himself is increasingly being scrutinized since his passing. All four texts in focus ponder his legacy and the future of Zimbabwe, how history and the past continue to mould the nation’s present, and they ask how Mugabe will be remembered. The future eventually builds on the past, but which past and whose past that will be emerge as urgent concerns in the nonfictional texts.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores NoViolet Bulawayo’s mirthless satire and other literary strategies in Glory (2022) and proposes that her text shows that in Zimbabwe, her strained novel which excavates a tragic past, projects and predicts a decidedly bleak future; a reflection of the mis/fortunes of the nation.

Paper long abstract:

In Glory (2022), NoViolet Bulawayo marshals satirical strategies to suggest that Zimbabwe’s future will resemble the past by lamenting, mourning and wailing the country’s recent tragic history. In fictionally articulating events that are already so tragically fantastical as to be unmediatable by fictional reimagining, Bulawayo employs strategies that disarticulate fictionality by seemingly cutting and pasting statements from everyday news media and attributing these to animal characters. Bulawayo’s satire and other strategies that mimic social media styles, suggests the floundering of fictionality at the very moment it is needed the most leading to what one can call muteness. This is where muteness is heard as the discourse of death in the sense in which Walter Benjamin uses this word. Since when it comes to language use in recent Zimbabwean history there is already overnaming, if one may resort again to Benjamin’s terminology, Bulawayo’s text gropes for new names, to allude to the title of her debut novel, We Need New Names (2013). To achieve fictionality, Bulawayo follows on the footsteps of other African writers such as Ahamadou Kourouma in Waiting for the Wild Beast to Vote (2004) and Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days (2006) in using satire and animal characters to resemble and dissemble Zimbabwe’s history to project and predict a decidedly bleak future. This paper explores Bulawayo’s mirthless, expository and expansive satire and other literary strategies to proposes that her text shows that in Zimbabwe, her strained novelistic discourse reflects the mis/fortunes of the nation.

Paper short abstract:

In recent years, Zimbabwe's Matabeleland region has seen a wave of second-generation public activism aimed at ‘breaking the silence’ around the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres. This paper explores the agendas of key public actors, whilst rooting their activism in a broader generational experience.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a wave of historical counter consciousness that is currently taking place in Zimbabwe’s majority Ndebele-speaking regions and centred in Matabeleland’s capital city, Bulawayo. As a project of making Matabeleland’s history more visible, one of its core concerns is to ‘break the silence’ around the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres which saw between 10,000 to 20,000 people killed by government forces. The paper draws on multiple fieldwork visits between 2018 and 2022 that focused on second-generation Gukurahundi memory and activism. In particular, the paper zooms in on the work of some of the key public actors engaged in Gukurahundi activism. Drawing on in-depth interviews as well as observations of their public engagement, the paper explores their different agendas and, at the same time, roots their politics in a broader generational experience of growing up in the ‘noisy silence’ surrounding Gukurahundi (Alexander, 2021) and in the hey-days of ‘patriotic history’ (Ranger, 2004; Tendi, 2010). Their activism, I argue, can be read as an act of political resistance against the state’s History which has excluded their region’s experience for too long. Concurrently, it may be understood as a partial adoption of the historicised mode by which politics in Zimbabwe operates.

Paper short abstract:

Zimbabwe’s postage stamps issued since 1980 are used to explore the ZANU(PF) state’s difficult relationship with history and commemoration via a multi-country comparative study, individual stamp images, analysis and discussions with Zimbabwean artists and stamp designers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses Zimbabwe’s postage stamps issued since 1980 to explore the ZANU(PF) state’s difficult relationship with history and commemoration. The paper will include data and insights from a large-N comparative study using content analysis, but the main focus is on individual stamp images, analysis and discussions with Zimbabwean artists and stamp designers.

The analysis raises questions about the Zimbabwean state’s self-depiction to both domestic and international audiences. It reveals intriguing differences between Zimbabwe and its neighbouring states, as well as change over time.

In the first decades of independence, nationalism and history seem to have been excised from the Zimbabwean state-building project – Zimbabwe doesn’t mark its own independence, nor its heroes. The commemoration of historical events is almost entirely absent, and few, if any named historical individuals are memorialised. Rather, the themes that predominate are idealised images of a ‘modern’ developmental state, and what Mwangi (2002) describes as ‘ambiguous art’ depicting norms and desired futures, detached from history and individuals.

Unusually, most Zimbabwean stamps have been locally designed and printed, creating a distinctive archive of images which were domestically produced, and which have been carefully documented by local collectors. Although Rhodesia’s stamps have been used as data sources by scholars including Josiah Brownell (2019), only one short and somewhat obscure – but perceptive – academic article by R.S. Roberts (2006) considers the post-colonial production. This is an under-utilised data set with much potential for thinking about how the past is invoked and utilised for political purposes.

Paper short abstract:

Migrants deploy the past to claim a place in the world through a male centric narrative of the nation that critiques the racialised global structural inequality and yet still precludes shifts in gendered power dynamics and creates rigid boundaries between ethnic groups.

Paper long abstract:

The past is an always available resource for navigating the present and envisioning the future but its meaning is reframed by those who hold more power. While national narratives may employ the past to locate migrant bodies as the sites for the contestation delineating who belongs and who is other within the nation. How do migrants in turn respond to these political contestations and with what gains or losses? Through an intersectional analysis of Zimbabwean migrant narratives about belonging and home in Johannesburg. The paper presents music by migrant victims of Gukurahundi in Johannesburg which simultaneously narrates Gukurahundi atrocities perpetrated against the migrants in Zimbabwe, experiences of xenophobia in South Africa and the history of slavery and colonialism. The music harkens to imagined pre-colonial origins to substantiate ethnic differences amongst Zimbabweans, while simultaneously claiming affinity to the Zulu in South Africa and thus space in Johannesburg; At the same time it narrates racial differences to center their victimhood to slavery and colonialism to racially locate themselves within the imagined human global community. The past is used to claim space in Johannesburg and justify the imaginings of a future home ‘Mthwakazi’ which does not yet exist. Concomitantly this hampers shifts in ethnic tensions or gender power dynamics. In this way the past is deployed to claim space for the migrants through a male centric narrative of the nation that critiques the racialised global structural inequality and yet still precludes shifts in gendered power dynamics and creates rigid boundaries between ethnic groups.

Paper short abstract:

While ZANU PF attempts to arrest the movement of time, artists push back by narrating a present and future outside this arrested imaginary. They depict postcolonial ruination and anticipate its end. Using ruination, this paper reads Bulawayo's Glory, for a possible future free of ruination.

Paper long abstract:

While the ruling ZANU PF has always attempted, through its propaganda machinery to arrest the movement and narrativization of time to what I call the “Chimurenga chronotope”, artists have pushed back on this narrative by depicting a present and future that are unlike and outside this arrested imaginary. Such artists have done two things – pointed out the ruination created by the Chimurenga chronotope and anticipated a better life free of ruin(ation). One such artist to do so recently is NoViolet Bulawayo through her novel, Glory (2022). Using Stoler’s (2008) idea of ruination, this paper reads closely, images that surface feelings of being ruined as a person – to have a psychologically crippling past (unresolved effects of Gukurahundi and other forms of political violence), a present in ruins and continuing to decay, and a future in need of saving from bleakness and ruins. Thus, the paper argues that the novel suggests how to move beyond colonial and postcolonial ruination of people and things.