Postcolonial shona fiction of zimbabwe

Abstract

Summary The aim of this article is to apply a version of postcolonial theory to understand the representations of struggles for land in the Shona novel of Zimbabwe. Since the year 2000 there has been an intensification of the use of language that describes land in Zimbabwe in terms that suggest that people have a common way of understanding and relating to this land. This language of oneness between Africans and the land attempts to forestall debate about different perceptions that Zimbabwe has on the emotive theme of the land issue in the country. While politicians insist on a unitary way of viewing the land, Shona authors are at the forefront of demonstrating that within the political centre of the discourse on land, Africans are struggling amongst themselves not only to have access to this land, but also to name it in different ways. A postcolonial reading of Shona novels that explicitly deal with the theme of land refuses to totally endorse the nationalist sentiment that projects Africans as having even levels of access to the land under the controversial land reform. Rereading the “classic” Shona nationalist novel Feso (1956) alongside Vavariro (1990) and Sekai: Minda Tave Nayo (2005) brings out moments of “slippery political significations” (Shohat 1996: 322) in which on the one hand Africans are agreed on the necessity to invest the land in their hands, while on the other hand manifesting intense struggles over the resource, with the consequence of further marginalisation of some Africans in the process.