Reflections on the Limitations Imposed by the Zimbabwean State's Essentialist Interpretation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Identity on Yvonne Vera's Representation of Human Rights in The Stone Virgins

Abstract

AbstractYvonne Vera's novel The Stone Virgins (2002) stands out as a courageous text that questions the Zimbabwean state's use of violence and an ethnically exclusivist nationalist ideology in its pursuit of a one‐party state objective between 1982 and 1987. This article argues that subtle intimidation through the articulation of a violent postcolonial nationalist discourse and the state's deployment of a military unit and other instruments of coercion might have forced Vera into self‐censorship in her representation of the ‘Gukurahundi’ atrocities in the provinces dominated by the ethnic Ndebele minority. Furthermore, the discursive limitations imposed by the dominant ideology of paternalist Shona nationalism, the need to avoid persecution by the state, and to narrativize the national memory of a painful and emotive history, compromised her objectivity in the representation of culpability for the genocide.