More lasting than bronze: Through the darkness as a competing and self-empowering narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhen confronted with a society and system of government that keeps changing the country’s political history, individuals like Judith Garfield Todd turn to memoir writing to challenge the new “patriotic history”, and to resist attempts to erase them from national history. In this paper, I argue that in her memoir, Judith Todd uses the authority of presence, epistemic privilege, erasure, palimpsest and converging voices to construct a new account of the discourse of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe. In doing so, Todd challenges the Zanu-PF hegemonic discourse of the struggle, which is constructed along racial lines and is a deliberate move by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF to create a complete ruin of the role played by the Todd family and the entire white community in the struggle for liberation in Zimbabwe.