Oliver Nyambi
University of the Free State, English, Faculty Member
Violence has, in history, pervasively attended processes, events and ideas of making and unmaking modern nation-states, more so in previously colonised societies where colonialism manifested as brute and psychic violence, and... more
Violence has, in history, pervasively attended processes, events and ideas of making and unmaking modern nation-states, more so in previously colonised societies where colonialism manifested as brute and psychic violence, and revolutionary wars of liberation became rites and routes of passages to liberation. Theorizing the physical but mainly mental processes of traversing such routes in his chapter "Concerning Violence" in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), the Martinique-born liberation psychiatrist Franz Fanon famously noted that decolonization is inherently a physically and psychologically violent phenomenon. Born out of violent forces in violent conditions by violent paternalists, the post-colonial nation is inevitably entangled in precarious cycles of violence with complex roots in pre-colonial and colonial violence. The violence as well as its memory palimpsests evolutionary trajectories of becoming and being postcolonial. Creative literature has long functioned as a fascinatingly complex site from which to encounter the many dimensions and dynamics of violence in Zimbabwe. The literary archive of violence multiplies lenses into the violence and how it occurs as a performed and experienced rite of nation-ness. Using purposefully selected scenes of pre-colonial and colonial violence from several Zimbabwean literary texts, this chapter explores their representations of violence, focusing on what they tell us about its immanence in the historical evolution of group identities and relations. Borrowing from Fanon's insights on the psychology, materiality and race of violence, the chapter centres violence as a temporal motif and concept that is fundamentally rhizomic in the social and political ordering of societies, branching out into many different leads that unravel its 'necessity', causes, forms, and nature.
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This chapter uses onomastic lenses to read the metanarrative of selected literary titles in the Zimbabwean literary oeuvre.
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This chapter situates names and naming practices in Southern Africa in a postcolonial context, theorizing the ways that they can potentially reflect and reflect on the social, politics and economics of postcolonial southern African... more
This chapter situates names and naming practices in Southern Africa in a postcolonial context, theorizing the ways that they can potentially reflect and reflect on the social, politics and economics of postcolonial southern African societies.
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The post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis demonstrates the tendencies and potential in the past to influence the politics of the present. What is widely referred to as the Third Chimurenga (the third liberation struggle) in this crisis epoch is a... more
The post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis demonstrates the tendencies and potential in the past to influence the politics of the present. What is widely referred to as the Third Chimurenga (the third liberation struggle) in this crisis epoch is a complex (and at times problematic) cache of nationalist and quasi-nationalist ideologies, philosophies and practices, which are not only connected to the first two Chimurengas through their aspiration for a totally decolonised nation, but also the demand for its political guardianship by the heroes of the armed Second Chimurenga. Many writers have grappled with the hegemonic tendencies of what is now referred to as ‘patriotic history’ (a form of politicised, state-circumscribed history of the nation) without seriously engaging with the deeper crevices of its nature. This paper sets out to argue that in post-2000 Zimbabwean politics, the past and the present are also connected through names and naming patterns that straddle the three Chimurengas with ...
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Research Interests: History, Narrative, Praxis, Politics, Ideology, and 4 moreNationalism, Land reform, Child narrator, and Third Chimurenga
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with... more
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspectives on its origins and nature, the identity of the victimizers is not so clear and is in fact hotly contested and politicized. As typical and “known” victims, their victimization can furtively reveal and reflect on their victimizers and in the process subtly expose them for knowing. This form of “knowing” transcends a mere discernment of the victimizers’ physical identities; it goes to the heart of their motives, apparent and subterranean political objectives, and means of attaining them. Victim child characters are often used symbolically ...
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ABSTRACT This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbabwe’s national football teams (‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’) to point towards the possibilities they provide for theorising the political... more
ABSTRACT This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbabwe’s national football teams (‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’) to point towards the possibilities they provide for theorising the political (ab)use of the warrior identity in hegemonic (re)constructions of national identity. Unarguably the most popular sport in Zimbabwe, football has become a potential site for the political (re)inscription of national identities. The article explores how national team nicknames ‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’ have been invoked in ruling party discourses to (re)create a national warrior identity that serves the state’s hegemonic intentions inter alia by disqualifying its opponents from power.
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Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised... more
Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised and operationalized the Third Chimurenga—a cache of anti-colonial, anti-West, and anti-opposition narratives that essentially re-constructs political power as inextricably bound up with the liberation struggle, for long an exclusive site of the party’s claims to political legitimacy. The Third Chimurenga often manifested in the form of political rhetoric by political leaders and reinforced by an array of cultural performances such as song and other forms of spectacular dramaturgy such as national commemorations. The literary text is the latest participant in the Third Chimurenga politics and aesthetics. In this article, I read Mashingaidze Gomo’s novel A Fine Madness as a Third Chimurenga literary narrative, centering on how its representations of ...
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In Zimbabwe, as in most traditionally conservative, patriarchal and Christian dominated countries, female sex work is abhorred on moral grounds as an unbecoming means of livelihood which takes away the practising woman’s social... more
In Zimbabwe, as in most traditionally conservative, patriarchal and Christian dominated countries, female sex work is abhorred on moral grounds as an unbecoming means of livelihood which takes away the practising woman’s social respectability. In such societies, then, the moral threat and stigma associated with female sex work affect women’s decisions on whether or not to take up sex work as a permanent means of livelihood. One can, however, ask how sustainable and stable these patriarchally constructed notions of morality and female identity are, especially in the face of crises? This article uses Virginia Phiri’s novel Highway queen, which is set in one of Zimbabwe’s economically tumultuous eras, to demonstrate how cultural texts grapple with the discourse of female sex work in contemporary Zimbabwe. The gist of my argument is that dominant prostitute identity constructs shaped by Zimbabwe’s patriarchal social and economic system are unstable. I find that the novel Highway queen m...
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In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in discourses on constructions and reconstructions of national identity. The history of the Gukurahundi (the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland... more
In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in discourses on constructions and reconstructions of national identity. The history of the Gukurahundi (the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe in the early to late 1980s) continues to dominate debates on the politics of ethnic exclusion in contemporary Zimbabwe. This article explores the place of creative fiction in this political discourse. The article contends that Yvonne Vera’s novel The Stone Virgins (which is set in the Gukurahundi era) is a historically situated narrative of murder, rape, and trauma that powerfully challenges and renegotiates state power premised on hegemonic inscriptions and re-inscriptions of national history. The article focuses on the subtlety with which the psychic impact of rape and violence, especially as manifested in the suppression of the female victim’s voice and memory, can be read in turn (and paradoxically so) as the novel...
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Writing the postcolonial Nation: A study of three Zimbabwean literary texts explores the interplay of history, postcolonial theories and contemporary Zimbabwean literature with particular reference to three literary works published in the... more
Writing the postcolonial Nation: A study of three Zimbabwean literary texts explores the interplay of history, postcolonial theories and contemporary Zimbabwean literature with particular reference to three literary works published in the post year 2000 period - Olley Maruma''s Coming Home, Shimmer Chinodya''s Chairman of Fools and Chenjerai Hove''s poems in Blind Moon. The Zimbabwean cultural, economic and political spheres have been contentious and prone to polarized and politicized representations. In a tumultuous political context, the struggle for the control of minds takes center- stage as the diametrically opposed major political parties trade blame for the dystopian contemporary time-space. This book invokes multifarious voices on the obtaining "Zimbabwean crisis" in its critique of the social and political function of the contemporary Zimbabwean literary narrative. The book studies the various ways in which literary works complexly further ...
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ii OPSOMMING iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: ALTERNATIVE METAPHORS OF A HISTORICAL MOMENT 40 CHAPTER 3: THE CONTROVERSY OF NATIONAL INTEREST‘ 68 CHAPTER 4: ―A STRUGGLE WITHIN A STRUGGLE‖: CENTERING FEMALE... more
ii OPSOMMING iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: ALTERNATIVE METAPHORS OF A HISTORICAL MOMENT 40 CHAPTER 3: THE CONTROVERSY OF NATIONAL INTEREST‘ 68 CHAPTER 4: ―A STRUGGLE WITHIN A STRUGGLE‖: CENTERING FEMALE PERSPECTIVES ON THE ZIMBABWEAN CRISIS. 110 CHAPTER 5: HOLDING THE STATE TO ACCOUNT IN POST-2000 ZIMBABWEAN FICTION 163 CONCLUSION: CONTESTED NARRATIVES OF THE ZIMBABWEAN CRISIS ......... 211 WORKS CITED 231 Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za
Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus... more
Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of “lady nature,” nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Imvunge Yemvelo to explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond rejecting imperial distortions of indigenous environmentalism, Ntuli’s poems re-center local knowledge of nature in understanding its relationship with humans. That knowledge subverts epistemic structures of colonial conservation, revising and re-visioning racially geo-politicized knowledge hierarchies.
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It is more than two decades now since the earliest state-endorsed appropriations of mostly white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe. The Third Chimurenga – or Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, as the land takeovers were later on... more
It is more than two decades now since the earliest state-endorsed appropriations of mostly white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe. The Third Chimurenga – or Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, as the land takeovers were later on officially tagged – triggered an unprecedented economic cataclysm from which the country is struggling to emerge. Over the years, there has been a rush to document, in multiple archives, experiences of the Third Chimurenga. Naturally, white Zimbabwean farm life-writings thrived during this period as victims of land loss sought to inscribe themselves into its narration. In available studies, their writings are usually read against the backdrop of the state’s Third Chimurenga narrative as complex alternative archives of the event. Such studies have mainly explored existential complications of landed whiteness, focusing primarily on how it informs particular notions of land (in)justice. In open letters written by Cathy Buckle during and following her farm’s invasion, land justice is discursively entangled with concerns about ecological/environmental justice. This article examines the semantic and aesthetic implications of this ‘entanglement’. Focus is placed on the ways in which environmental damage is discursively deployed as a moral site for contesting the state’s narrative of land. Beyond this, however, the article argues that, in her preoccupation with establishing moral deficits in violent farm appropriations, Buckle’s construction of white victimhood in terms of environmental harm manifests stereotypic sub/un/conscious innuendos that ambiguate and problematise the moral claim of her concept of land (in)justice. This, I further contend, complicates the status and function of the Zimbabwean ‘farm narrative’ as an unproblematic archive pluralising the Third Chimurenga narrative of land upheavals.
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ABSTRACT The making and continuous shifts of African identities outside Africa have attracted interest from across critical disciplines. Imaginative literature has achieved a considerable status as a site and optic for critical engagement... more
ABSTRACT The making and continuous shifts of African identities outside Africa have attracted interest from across critical disciplines. Imaginative literature has achieved a considerable status as a site and optic for critical engagement with evolving dynamics of the diasporization of African identities. This article sets out to extend what is known about this ‘function’ of literature by looking at how representations of female experiences of forced trans-oceanic African mobilities can potentially disrupt male-centred narratives and epistemologies, to become a critical site to read shifting trans-Atlantic African identities. Using Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing (2016), the paper explores how the metaphor of female descendancy dominating the narrative emplotment of female experiences of being and becoming African and African American in America, can be read as potentially illuminating and problematizing notions of African diasporic identities and in the process, charting new frames for re-imagining the present and future of African identities in the context of their pasts.
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ABSTRACT Beyond its ubiquitous functions in human physiology, food is one of the most distinctively experienced cultured phenomena. Its significance varies in time and across categories of space, race, religion, traditions, economic... more
ABSTRACT Beyond its ubiquitous functions in human physiology, food is one of the most distinctively experienced cultured phenomena. Its significance varies in time and across categories of space, race, religion, traditions, economic status and gender. Over the years, analyses of intersections and inter-connections of time, food cultures and gendered power have revealed a long history of evolutionary human identities based on temporal and sometimes timeless arbitrary ascriptions of gender to various aspects of food and food traditions. This makes food a convenient site to understand time and gender, firstly, as distinct concepts constructed by humans to structure life for the ease of its negotiation, and secondly as interconnected phenomena reflecting the evolutionary trajectory of social identities. This paper uses the novels Highway Queen and The Uncertainty of Hope to examine how evoked gendered food cultures reflect (on) gender identities in a flux, particularly some of the defining aspects of the Zimbabwean crisis time-space. Borrowing from Warren’s work on the unsteadiness of the male breadwinner as a masculine identity, our textual analysis shows that as a symbolic cultural leitmotif that is synonymous with gender, food demonstrates gendered ways in which the Zimbabwean crisis is experienced, perceived and known.
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Over the years, the notion of home has permeated disciplinary, inter- and cross-disciplinary enquiries into the human condition. In recent years, ideas, constructions and perceptions of ‘homes’ have been further complicated by constant... more
Over the years, the notion of home has permeated disciplinary, inter- and cross-disciplinary enquiries into the human condition. In recent years, ideas, constructions and perceptions of ‘homes’ have been further complicated by constant shifts in conceptions and practices of transnational mobilities that have informed and disrupted ways of seeing, making and re-making homes at home and away from ‘home’. In this article, we draw from Sara Ahmed’s idea of home as ‘a space within us’ to read the novel We Need New Names (2013) by the transnational Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo as a text that interrogates the intertwined and complicated relationship between home, transnational identity and belonging. Focusing on the protagonist’s experiences in both Zimbabwe and America, this article examines the idea of home as it refracts uniquely twenty-first-century experiences, perceptions and notions of transnational spaces, and shapes certain notions of identity, transnationality and belongin...
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ABSTRACT This study concerns itself with nicknames of Zimbabwean soccer players with a view to understanding not only the process or act of their creation and ascription and the various power dynamics attendant on the processes, but also... more
ABSTRACT This study concerns itself with nicknames of Zimbabwean soccer players with a view to understanding not only the process or act of their creation and ascription and the various power dynamics attendant on the processes, but also the nicknames’ semantic and aesthetic structures. The paper argues that the fans’ primary drive to nickname players suggests their intention to participate in a group action that can influence player performance, create, sustain and/or change player and team identities. Using purposefully sampled player nicknames, this study explores the semantic yet cultural function of nicknaming as performative and identification acts, laying especial emphasis on what nicknames can potentially tell us about the spectacle and culture of Zimbabwean soccer and soccer fandom.
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ABSTRACT In Zimbabwe, ethnicity has long informed the ways people make sense of their membership to the nation. Sport has since the turn of the century emerged as one of the major sites for the performance of ‘patriotic’ and subversive... more
ABSTRACT In Zimbabwe, ethnicity has long informed the ways people make sense of their membership to the nation. Sport has since the turn of the century emerged as one of the major sites for the performance of ‘patriotic’ and subversive notions of ‘unity in diversity’. This article explores the significance of nicknaming and name-calling by Highlanders Football Club fans on virtual spaces, in illuminating the ethnic threat to dominant conceptions of nation in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The study argues that as psycho-social and cultural constructs, football team nicknames reveal deeper states of ethnic attitudes which indicate the politics of complex ethnic sentiments that destabilise popular notions of belonging to a nation.
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Some contemporary Zimbabwean literature demonstrates a discernible resistance thread. These literary works create fictional life-worlds in which the ambivalence of colonial land and economic injustices are exposed as potentially mutating... more
Some contemporary Zimbabwean literature demonstrates a discernible resistance thread. These literary works create fictional life-worlds in which the ambivalence of colonial land and economic injustices are exposed as potentially mutating and threatening the independent nation. In this way, such works validate ‘nationalist’ corrective measures through inserting a narrative that implicitly refers back to past colonial imbalances. In the choreographed discourses of national sovereignty that characterise the Third Chimurenga – epitomised by Mugabe’s book Inside the Third Chimurenga – there are perceived dangers from infiltrating forces which pose a threat to the nation’s sovereignty. Britain’s refusal to fund land reform in Zimbabwe is viewed as an implicit declaration of that country’s intention to derail the Zimbabwean people’s movement towards total independence and the ‘fast track land reform’ of the Third Chimurenga. The anti-Britain campaign is inextricably linked to the land ques...
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ABSTRACT Migration, be it national or transnational, is often a disruptive and traumatising experience that brings with it loneliness and homesickness. This article investigates how migrants from QwaQwa in the Eastern Free State Province... more
ABSTRACT Migration, be it national or transnational, is often a disruptive and traumatising experience that brings with it loneliness and homesickness. This article investigates how migrants from QwaQwa in the Eastern Free State Province in South Africa (re)imagine and (re)visualize the homeland away from home through social networking. QwaQwa is a remote mountanous area located in the Eastern Free State Province of South Africa. Like most remote areas around the world, QwaQwa does not have many economic opportunities and its inhabitants migrate to bigger cities in search of greener pastures. In an attempt to deal with the homesickness and loneliness associated with migration, some migrants have taken to online platforms to imagine and reconstruct home away from home. This article is particualrly interested in examining the way migrants from QwaQwa (re)imagine and (re)present home through images and texts that they share on a social networking site named QwaQwa Thaba di Mahlwa. The findings show that members of the webpage imagine home in four ways: as a place of natural beauty untainted by forces of modernization, a place of reunion and fellowship with family and friends, a place of ritual and cultural practices and, lastly, a place of social harmony and fun.
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Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with... more
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspectives on its origins and nature, the identity of the victimizers is not so clear and is in fact hotly contested and politicized. As typical and " known " victims, their victimization can furtively reveal and reflect on their victimizers and in the process subtly expose them for knowing. This form of " knowing " transcends a mere discernment of the victimizers' physical identities; it goes to the heart of their motives, apparent and subterranean political objectives, and means of attaining them. Victim child characters are often used symbolically to represent the weak and vulnerable members of society who are exploited as political fodder by the powerful. The symbolic children are seen to be caught in between the political goals and strategies of the powerful, and their victimization reveals overt and covert markings of their political abuse. This makes child-narrated or child-centred narratives possible sites to encounter the nexus between children's victimization and the underhand methods of creating and sustaining political hegemony. This article explores this connection, particularly focusing on the aesthetic subtlety with which child-centred or child-focused narratives proffer a counter-discursive discourse which unsettles the dominant narratives presently given of victims and victimizers in a post-2000 Zimbabwean context.
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Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised... more
Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised and operationalized the Third Chimurenga—a cache of anti-colonial, anti-West, and anti-opposition narratives that essentially reconstructs political power as inextricably bound up with the liberation struggle, for long an exclusive site of the party's claims to political legitimacy. The Third Chimurenga often manifested in the form of political rhetoric by political leaders and reinforced by an array of cultural performances such as song and other forms of spectacular dramaturgy such as national commemorations. The literary text is the latest participant in the Third Chimurenga politics and aesthetics. In this article, I read Mashingaidze Gomo's novel A Fine Madness as a Third Chimurenga literary narrative, centering on how its representations of the post-2000 political and economic crisis relates to the underlying counter-discourse of the empirical Third Chimurenga. This article dialogues with the