The image of absence and the politics of naming in Shona war fiction

Willie L Chigidi,Davie E Mutasa

doi:10.4102/lit.v34i1.419

Abstract

During Zimbabwe’s liberation war thousands of young people crossed into neighbouring countries to take up arms to fight and end colonialism. There is sufficient evidence that many of these young people were women. Political rhetoric also maintains that women fought alongside their male counterparts. However, in the Shona literature that depicts Zimbabwe’s guerrilla war there is a glaring absence of female characters who play the roles of guerrilla fighters. This article is an attempt to discuss this absence and to explain why there are very few guerrilla girls in Shona war fiction. The article argues that female guerrillas are not given much space in Shona war novels because the writers of these novels continue the oral folktale tradition in which women are rarely made heroines. It is further argued that in the actual guerrilla war of the 1970s female guerrillas were rarely seen fighting at the war front, that the pioneer guerrillas were men and that the masculine discourse about the war excluded women. Moreover, only men have written Shona war novels.

Highlights

Zimbabwe’s guerrilla war of the 1970s attracted a lot of attention from writers of fiction in the Shona language
Shona war fiction derives its material from this guerrilla war, a historical event in which almost the entire population alive at the time was involved in one way or another and an event on which so much was, has been, and continues to be said
In ‘The men who turned into lions’, it is the younger brother who saves his elder sisters from being exploited by the lion men. (p. 5). It is this younger brother who becomes the hero and not the ‘foolish’ women. This stereotyping we find in Shona folktales is carried over to novels in the mainstream where we find that female characters like Marunjeya in Karikoga Gumuremiseve (Chakaipa 1958) and Munjai in Pfumo reropa (Chakaipa 1961) are subordinate to their male counterparts, Karikoga and Tanganeropa, who will eventually rescue them and become heroes in the process

Summary

Introduction

Zimbabwe’s guerrilla war of the 1970s attracted a lot of attention from writers of fiction in the Shona language. There came a time, especially in the middle phase of the war, that young people were abducted from schools without discrimination between sexes. The purpose of this article is to discuss the possible reasons that explain why female guerrillas are very rare in fiction about a guerrilla war in which women are said to have played a prominent role. This question has not been answered before. The debate on the portrayal of women in literature seems never to end and this article contributes http://www.literator.org.za doi:10.4102/lit.v34i1.419

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion