What Has Culture Got to Do With It?: Girl-Women Marginalisation and Human Rights Violations – The Case of Zimbabwean Women as Depicted in Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region (2003)

Abstract

SummaryThe article takes an African-centred approach in its examination of women’s plight and strategies propagated by African women in pre- and post-independence Zimbabwe to create safe space and empower women with a view to building more stable families and sustainable social transformation for society’s greater good. Bringing indigenous Zimbabwean African ideals and values to the centre of analyses, against the backdrop of lived socio-historical experiences, the article interrogates selected short stories contributed by some Zimbabwean authors in Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region (2003). It focuses on pertinent issues raised concerning problematic existential conditions particularly affecting women, including their ripple effects on the socio-cultural, economic and material conditions of the respective female protagonists’ lives, families and communities. Because the contributors are themselves women, the assumption is that they know best where it pinches worst, including how best they envision strategies that can usher in sustainable transformation in their respective environments. The article argues that it is important that these issues be examined holistically within the women’s respective socio-cultural and material contexts in order to validate pragmatic approaches that would enable women to wade with ingenuity in their respective community waters. Placed within their familiar cultural environments, women can ingeniously wrestle for meaningful and sustainable transformative change where it is necessary. Yet, women alone cannot usher in sustainable social transformation outside their existential and material conditions, begs the article.