Changing nationalist politics in African fiction

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the transformations taking place in the images of African nationalist politics as depicted in African fiction from Zimbabwe and to examine the new roles that these creative artists have assumed in postcolonial Africa. It is argued that guerrillas in the second Zimbabwe liberation struggle (1963–79) described themselves as ‘comrades’, ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘war veterans’ and that even after the war of 1980–2008 they continue to do so. These romanticized images of the nationalist leaders and players have come under consistent interrogation in the fictions by Zimbabwean authors such as Samupindi, Vera, Marechera and Hove. The authors depict the contradictory roles that nationalists have played and continue to play in Zimbabwe, challenging the official narrative of national triumphalism. These changing portrayals of nationalist politics can be taken as paradigmatic of the desire by Africans to ‘change’ the representation of African nationalism, to introduce new patterns of meaning in the postcolonial period. It is argued here that this is an indicator of the disappointment of ordinary people with the African leadership's style of ruling ‘their’ subjects, which shows a tendency to undermine the very essence of the nationalist struggles that these leaders led while fighting colonialism in the name of people's emancipation.