Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo's The Story of My Life

Abstract

Summary The aim of this article is to critically analyse the problems of the ideologies of narrativity raised in Joshua Nkomo's autobiography The Story of My Life. When this Zimbabwean version of the book was published in 2001, there were speculations and “gossip” that its contents had been tampered with by the Zimbabwean editor. However, a close comparison with the contents of the first edition published by Methuen of London, revealed that there were no editorial changes that could have prejudiced the depiction of his public image published in Zimbabwe. The Story of My Life documents the details of Nkomo's life from the point of his birth to his life as an immigrant in South Africa, and then a nationalist guerrilla, up to the period of independence from 1980 when he was politically persecuted by Robert Mugabe. This article demonstrates that in attempting to tell the story of his life, Nkomo found himself forced to suppress some facts about the contradictions that he lived in his personal and political life. The article argues that although Nkomo details the pain he suffered in the hands of Robert Mugabe, he could not totally ward off the lure of the dominant ideology that inclined him to explain his political misfortunes in tribal terms. The article suggests that the “fictions” contained in autobiographical works such as Nkomo's story is that they lay claim to the authority of incontestable truth emanating from a single subject position. This perception that Nkomo's book promotes should be questioned because any account of the self is predicated on the suppression of some facts of “other selves”. This irony at the heart of autobiographical writings suggests that the storyteller unconsciously suppresses certain memories which may not “sit” comfortably with the version of personal/national history that a story of selfinscription is forced to authorise.