Precarity of the (Employed and Unemployed) Educated in Zimbabwe in Valerie Tagwira’s Trapped (2020)

Abstract

Zimbabwean writer Valerie Tagwira’s novel Trapped (2020, Harare: Weaver Press) is set in Harare between the latter part of 2016 and November 2017, the period leading to the ousting of Robert Mugabe, the late former president of Zimbabwe, from power. The novel provides a glimpse into the lives of three protagonists, all of whom are university graduates, (un)employed, and forced to hustle for survival. Through these characters, Tagwira dramatises the condition of the educated and (un)employed in a dysfunctional economy and in the grips of a persistent crisis, which transforms them into “vagrants, vendors and criminals.” The overarching argument in this article is that the experiences of Tagwira’s characters are prisms through which to determine the effects—on the lives of the educated, both employed and unemployed—of Zimbabwe’s unprecedented and prolonged political and economic stagnation. Drawing on Guy Standing’s concept of the precariat and Michel de Certeau’s idea of the practice of everyday life, this article contends that Tagwira’s representation of the experiences of the educated, unemployed, and employed highlights the economic injustices that are rampant in postcolonial Zimbabwe.