Zimbabwean Diaspora Research Articles

Raising children in the UK: the screams of Zimbabwean migrant parents

ABSTRACT Zimbabweans in the United Kingdom (UK) are currently a ‘silent subset’ of the broader migrant population, warranting further investigation into their experiences once settled in the UK. This study explored Zimbabwean migrant parents’ experiences of bearing and raising children in the UK and how they sustain their children’s health and wellbeing. The Silences Framework (TSF) offers a lens through which the Zimbabwean parents’ experiences are made visible in this study. Hermeneutic phenomenology was employed as a research methodology from van Manen's perspective and data was collected through in-depth interviews with 10 Zimbabwean parents settled in South Yorkshire, UK. Findings from this study show that parenting experiences in the UK are largely influenced by cultural background, religious beliefs and how the parents were raised. Parenting in a new culture requires parents to rely on an interdependent system of support. There is concern about the children's sense of belonging in the UK. Research findings help to increase knowledge on the Zimbabwean diaspora, add insight in the everyday life of migrant families and therefore influence policies, practices and future research. While some findings are specific to the Zimbabwean diaspora, others are concerns that migrant families have irrespective of place of origin.

Committing journalism?

This paper explores some issues of the contested Zimbabwean 2008 Presidential Election asit was represented in one-frame political cartoons published in a selection of Internet newssites in the Zimbabwean diaspora. It argues that the cartoons may constitute the contours ofalternative communicative spaces, in which the cartoonists present arguments about the ongoingZimbabwean crisis. The cartoons may be able to present, in a visual form, issues and processesthat are not so easily covered in verbal journalism. The cartoons thus constitute elements ofjournalistic practice in their own right.

Negotiating diasporic leisure among Zimbabwean migrants in Britain

This article examines, from a theoretical and empirical perspective, the types of diasporic leisure experienced by the Zimbabwean diaspora in Britain through extensive fieldwork, including interviews and participant observation. It extends an emerging body of scholarship concerning the relationship between diaspora and leisure by discussing different conceptualisations of diasporic leisure as homeland-oriented, boundary-crossing, and technologically mediated. Specifically, this is done to highlight the role leisure practices play in the formation of diasporic consciousness and in negotiating and contesting transnational identities. The article develops a dialectic of diasporic leisure as a framework for understanding how leisure practices and activities reconnect the Zimbabwean diaspora in Britain, enabling them to construct transnational identities in a country that construes them as “other.” The paper’s central argument is that diasporic consciousness and identities are activated, materialised and mobilised in and through leisure practices.

Facebook groups as transnational counter public sphere for diasporic communities

Mainstream media tend to frame media content from the perspectives of locals and seldom in the interest of diasporic communities. However, the emergence of social media has supported the existence of online diasporic communities. Deploying insights from the concepts of alternative media, digital counter public sphere and hidden transcript, this study explores the use of Facebook groups by Zimbabwean diaspora to form transnational online communities and connect with the homeland. This is a netnographic study of selected Facebook groups of Zimbabweans residing abroad. The study shows that since mainstream media in both home and host countries tend to exclude and marginalise interests of diasporic communities, Facebook has become an alternative counter public sphere for diasporic communities. Due to the affordances of social media, networking sites can be expedient platforms for creating diasporic networks, facilitating information circulation and enabling unrestricted and wide-ranging public debate; however, they can be volatile and susceptible to cybercrime and cyberbullying. The study demonstrates conundrums of online-based communities with regard to issues of trust, legitimacy, accountability and regulation. Research Article; Cultural Studies; 60 Arts & Humanities; 60.2.13 Media Communication; 60.3 Humanities; 60.3.6 Cultural Studies; 60.4 Language & Literature; 60.4.1 Language & Linguistics

Subversion or Identity Work? Tracing the Reception of Zimbabwean Counter-Narrative Memoirs

This article analyses the reception of memoirs that position themselves as counter-narratives to state-sanctioned Zimbabwean storytelling. It asks whether these texts play the subversive role that one might expect from their status as counter-narratives. To study the lives of counter-narratives, I propose that it is helpful to examine their narrative communities, distinguishing between implicit and imagined narrative communities. Under scrutiny are four very different memoirs: Nkomo: The Story of My Life by Joshua Nkomo (1984), The Great Betrayal/Bitter Harvest by Ian Smith (1997/2001), When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin (2006) and These Bones Will Rise Again by Panashe Chigumadzi (2018). The article examines the counter-narrative gestures of the memoirs and then places them in the context of their narrative communities, exploring how they are reviewed and debated, particularly online. Considering audiences in Zimbabwe, the ex-Rhodesian community, the west and the Zimbabwean diaspora, the article concludes that the target audience is rarely the Zimbabwean state itself. Instead, these texts are written and read in support of a number of identity projects, serving to confirm readers’ understanding of the world. Countering the Zimbabwean state narrative is not always the prime concern of readers who, like the texts, communicate mostly with like-minded people.

Delayed Return: Consolidation of the Zimbabwean Diaspora and Transnationalism

Abstract. This article discusses consolidation of the Zimbabwean diaspora and its transnational activities. It presents formation of this particular diaspora as an unanticipated development that is contingent upon circumstances as they evolve in both sending and receiving countries. It draws from longitudinal research with Zimbabwean migrants in Germany and South Africa to illustrate this argument. It also borrows from Tsuda’s transnational outcome framework to provide a nuanced understanding of Zimbabwean migrants’ varied relationships with both Zimbabwe and the receiving countries. The article argues that migrants’ decision to settle for the long-term in the receiving country is not always made at the same time as the decision to migrate itself or in the initial stages of life in the receiving country. There are many cases among Zimbabwean migrants showing that migration was initially perceived as quest for reprieve from the country’s economic and political challenges while they “waited” for the situation to improve. However, the crisis in Zimbabwe has dragged on for more than two decades with no tangible solution in sight thus transforming waiting into settling. Economic and political factors in Zimbabwe as well as factors in the receiving countries influenced the formation and consolidation of the Zimbabwean diaspora and its transnational activities. Diaspora formation and consolidation in this case is an outcome of migrants’ adaptation of their initial plans to new realities obtaining in both the sending and receiving countries.

Clandestine crossings: Narrating Zimbabwe’s precarious diaspora in South Africa in Sue Nyathi’s The Gold-Diggers (2018)

ABSTRACT While there is a growing interest in Zimbabwean literature about diasporic experiences in the UK and the USA, scholarship on literary engagements with the Zimbabwean diaspora in South Africa remains sparse. This article analyses clandestine migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa and the formation of a precarious diaspora in the host country as represented in Sue Nyathi’s 2018 novel The Gold-Diggers. In contrast to strategies seen in South-North migration writing, those adopted by Nyathi’s migrants and diasporic subjects to negotiate everyday challenges – such as the need to pass as South African – reflect the close historical and cultural ties that structure African borderlands. Nyathi’s polyvocal text reconfigures diaspora discourse in relation to class and community, drawing attention to migrant vulnerability while illustrating strategies of resistance through identity erasure and homemaking. It carves out a space for precarious, yet not wholly disempowering, intra-African migratory and diasporic experiences often elided in diaspora studies.

What can the African diaspora contribute to innovation and knowledge creation? The case study of Zimbabwean innovators

The importance of diaspora and transnational knowledge production, innovation, and development is of growing interest, particularly in the developing world. The phenomenal increase in high human capital migration from poor to rich countries has historically led to what is commonly known as brain drain, which has negatively impacted the capacity of such countries to innovate. Yet more recently the emergence of the phenomenon of transnationalism has demonstrated the potential to transform brain drain into brain circulation, for the mutual benefit of both sending and receiving contexts. This article uses the case of Zimbabwe to explore the role of diasporan professionals, scholars, and entrepreneurs in contributing to knowledge production, innovation, and development initiatives in their countries of origin. Zimbabwe is an example of many African countries that have experienced substantial attrition of highly qualified knowledge workers for various reasons. A qualitative approach, involving interviews and documentary evidence, enabled the researchers to engage with the Zimbabwean diaspora to capture their narratives regarding the challenges and opportunities, which were then used to develop successful transnational knowledge production initiatives.

Diasporic reorientations: emotional geographies of the Zimbabwean diaspora in a post Mugabe era

ABSTRACT In recognition of multi-sited and dynamic diaspora formation, this article explores the relationship between significant (yet limited and differentially experienced) political change and emotional geographies for those outside of their country of birth. We do this with reference to the removal of President Robert Mugabe from power, as experienced by first-generation Zimbabwean migrants, asking if and how ‘change’ has been experienced and felt, but also what such responses do through what we call diasporic reorientations. This helps us to think through emotional alignments with/to Zimbabwe, as part of practical trajectories already under formation, but reinforced, exacerbated and in some cases reconfigured. We discuss how participants understood and navigated contested notions of ‘change’ with attention to the ambiguous co-existence of celebration, uncertainty, scepticism and tentative hopefulness. We then highlight the significance, complexity and unevenness of diasporic reorientations, through intentions, desires and experiences of return. In so doing we contribute to debates around the significance of emotional spatialities and temporalities in the re-construction of diasporic subjectivities, through and despite of such ‘change’.

Global Zimbabweans: Diaspora Engagement and Disengagement

Since 2000, migration from crisis-ridden Zimbabwe has led to almost one million people leaving the country. The majority migrate to neighbouring South Africa and Botswana, and most of the research on the Zimbabwean diaspora to date has focused on South Africa and the UK. However, the Zimbabwean diaspora is now truly global in its distribution. This paper argues that more attention should therefore be paid to Zimbabweans in other jurisdictions in the Global South and North. Zimbabweans began migrating to Canada in increasing numbers after 2000, most as refugees but also as immigrants and students. Based on a survey of the Zimbabwean diaspora in Canada, this paper focuses on their migration history, demographic characteristics and backward linkages with Zimbabwe. Given the interest in diaspora engagement in the global migration and development literature, it is important to understand the nature of these linkages in order to assess the potential for diaspora involvement in Zimbabwean development. The paper argues that under current economic and political conditions in Zimbabwe, this potential remains weak.

Language and the geopolitics of (dis)location: A study of Zimbabwean Shona and Ndebele speakers in Johannesburg

AbstractThe Zimbabwean diaspora is a well-documented phenomenon. While much research has been done on Zimbabwean migration to South Africa, the role that language plays in this process has not been well researched. This article draws on South African census data and qualitative fieldwork data to explore the manner in which Zimbabwean migrants use languages to appropriate spaces for themselves in the City of Johannesburg. The census data shows that African migrants tend to concentrate in the Johannesburg CBD, and fieldwork in this area reveals that Zimbabwean migrants are particularly well established in two suburbs—Yeoville and Hillbrow. The article explores migrant language repertoires, which include English, Shona, Ndebele, and a variant of Zulu. While many contributions to the migration literature tend to assume a strong association between language and ethnicity, the article shows how this relationship is mediated by geographic location and social positioning within the city. (Language, migration, Johannesburg, South Africa, Zimbabwe)*

VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS: ZIMBABWEAN DIASPORA LITERATURE AN EMERGING CATEGORY

This article draws attention to the existence and emergence of a body of fictional works produced on Zimbabwe’s Diaspora between the years from 2000 to 2014. It is the contention of the article that these literary works represent an emerging category within the general canon of Zimbabwean literature called Zimbabwean Diaspora literature. Through the application of existing conceptual and theoretical frameworks based on key characteristics of diasporic writings, the article concludes that Zimbabwean Diaspora literature is in its embryonic stage of development since it typically exhibits not only the common features attributed to diasporic writings, but it also possess the characteristic features often ascribed to a young diaspora. The article does not attempt to offer a rule of thumb definition of Zimbabwean Diaspora literature, for the simple reasons that Zimbabwean Diaspora literature is still very much in its infancy; it is a canon of literary works still growing steadily; still establishing its form, message, primary ideologies and identities. Thus, to offer a prescriptive or restrictive label to define the discourse is subjective and premature. It would be a travesty against the artistic enterprise as it only serves to stifle the creative imagination of the artist and to curtail the objective insights of the literary critic. In essence, therefore, the article seeks to draw attention to, rather than limit understanding of, this literary discourse called Zimbabwean Diaspora literature. However, there are features and characteristics exhibited by said literary discourse which have guided and informed the understanding of the article as to what constitutes Zimbabwean Diaspora literature.

The trauma of home and (non)belonging in Zimbabwe and its diaspora: ‘Conversion disorder’ in <i>Shadows</i> by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

The renewed outbreak of xenophobic attacks in March and April 2015 in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, the killings, looting, and burning of homes and shops, and the flight of thousands of foreign Africans to refugee camps, have brought to the fore not only the question of the African diaspora in South Africa, but also into focus the notions of home and homeland in a diasporic context. In Shadows, for which she was awarded the Herman Charles Bosman Prize in 2014, Zimbabwean writer Novuyo Rosa Tshuma presents the dislocations of life in present-day Zimbabwe and the relocation and double displacement of the Zimbabwean diasporic community in South Africa. The text, comprising a novella, ‘Shadows’, and five other stories, is best approached as a story cycle, the individual narratives being linked not only by the theme of diaspora but also by a number of recurring diasporic situations, figures, and tropes. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary diaspora theory, including the African and intra-African diaspora, as well as current research on Zimbabwe and its diaspora, this article examines the ambiguous diasporic concepts of home and belonging, and inclusion and exclusion, with reference to Tshuma’s fictional depiction of daily township life in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe with its food queues, depleted resources, and crashed economy, as well as in the marginal world of the presentday Zimbabwean diaspora in Johannesburg with its police corruption and brutal exploitation of illegal immigrants. The article considers the psychogenic condition known as ‘conversion disorder’, which Tshuma foregrounds in one of the stories, as a metaphor for understanding the paradoxical diasporic identification with, and alienation from, home, community, and home country in Zimbabwe as well as in the unaccommodating host country, South Africa.

Zimbabwean Foodways, Feminisms, and Transforming Nationalisms in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Food studies are a productive lens through which to view the impact of social, cultural, historical and political shifts on conceptions of female identity. Nervous Conditions (1988) and We Need New Names (2013) are two novels which link the coming of age of two young women with the development of nationalism, in the first case, and the forced transnationalism of Zimbabwean refugees and exiles in the second. The story of these female and national identity transformations is conveyed, in part, through food—its production, sale, preparation, consumption, and cultural significance. The replacement of sadza and mbodza by the British cuisine of the 1960s in the novel of colonialism and national independence is paralleled in the replacement of food scarcity (symbolized by NGO beans, maize, and sugar) with the fast food of American consumer culture, and its impact on the Zimbabwean diaspora in the later novel of transnationalism. The centrality of the cultivation of mealies, which paradoxically both burdens and “liberates” in Nervous Conditions, occurs only as a pastoral backdrop to caricatured indigeneity in We Need New Names. In the later novel, the nutritional and cultural significance of maize is reduced to the mealie meal handed out by NGO workers. Maize’s centrality is replaced in We Need New Names by constipation-inducing guavas. But in this novel also, maize finally holds out the symbolic possibility of new senses of belonging and home.

CHIMURENGA RENAISSANCE: DOUBLE DOUBLENESS IN THE DIASPORIC MUSIC OF TENDAI MARAIRE

Over the past decade, emerging Seattle-based artist Tendai Maraire, the American-born son of Zimbabwean teacher, performer, and ethnomusicologist, Dumisani Maraire, has crafted a unique musical position by marshaling multiple diasporic strands in his music. These include both the centuries-old African-American diaspora that took shape through the “Black Atlantic,” as well as an emerging diaspora that is specifically Zimbabwean in nature. In this article, it is argued that the layering of these distinct diasporic histories has fostered a type of “doubled doubleness” in Tendai Maraire’s music, extending DuBois’ original conception of “double consciousness” to encompass multiple sites of identity location: the American superculture, the Shona culture of his parents, the old African diaspora, and the new Zimbabwean diaspora. It is further argued that Maraire has articulated this “doubled doubleness” musically through his relationships to musical styles associated with both old and new African diasporas, most notably North American hip-hop and Zimbabwean chimurenga, a genre that has historically functioned as a form of resistance to colonial rule.

Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada ed. by Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton (review)

Reviewed by: Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada ed. by Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton Frances W. Kaye Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada. Edited by Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2013. 329 pp. Notes, index. $34.95 paper. Place and Replace is a collection of papers presented at a joint meeting of the St. John’s College Prairies Conference and Western Canadian Studies in Winnipeg in 2010. All of them focus on the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, but they come from many different disciplines, including Indigenous studies, history, literature, political science, community planning, and geography. None of the authors formally specifies “region,” but all deal implicitly, usually explicitly, with place. Race, ethnicity, and gender are also central issues in eleven of the sixteen articles. Sarah Carter’s essay on “Homestead Rights of First Nations Farmers” begins the volume on a useful, if depressing, note, describing the tortured thinking necessary to prevent Native farmers and families from taking up homesteads. The contrast between the white yeoman farmers and families turning wasteland into the breadbasket for the world and the savage Indigenous hunters and gatherers was only maintained by merciless government prevention of Native agriculture. In looking again at the Murdoch v. Murdoch case and its denial of any right to land by a wife who had invested both her own capital and her own labor directly into building up a family farm, Pernille Jakobsen undercuts the myth of the Prairies as the home of Canadian women’s rights. Although this is a Canadian collection, American Great Plains readers will also be aware of the strength and dubious authenticity of these myths in the United States. Joyce M. Chadya’s look at the Zimbabwean diaspora in the Prairies and its response to funerals is a wonderful insight into 21st-century immigration. Far from the “emigrant cars” of the 19th and early 20th century, immigration from the Global South to Canada depends on planes, cell phones, and electronic money transfers. Cather’s Shimerda family certainly had no such ease of connection—and hence no such sense of obligation to the old country. Alison Calder points out that much Canadian prairie literary study has not followed historians into the intellectual frameworks of decolonization, and although George Melnyk’s work with Alberta literature provides counterexamples, her questions and her directions toward a study beyond old myths are useful. Lindy Ledohowski also writes back to the critics, emphasizing the power and noncompliance of the “Baba” figures who have generally been oversimplified as rustic grandmamas. Two of the more innovative articles are Sterling Evans’s history of Dinosaur Provincial Park and Beverly A. Sandalack’s study of prairie towns as they morph from their early mainstreet-and-railroad forms, dominated by grain elevators and their false-fronted echoes, to their current decentralized and deregionalized highway strip malls and residential cul-de-sacs. Not an anthology with a few coherent themes, this is a more angular collection that is full of useful information both for scholars of the Great Plains in any discipline and for general readers. Frances W. Kaye English and Ethnic Studies University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Forging Ties: Social Capital Utilization by Zimbabwean Social Workers in Britain

This article examines the characteristics of social ties that shape the migration experiences of Zimbabwean social workers in Britain. While contributing to the elaboration of the social capital concept, the article seeks to answer the following question: To what extent do Zimbabwean social workers generate, destroy or re-constitute social capital in trying to adapt to and progress with life in a foreign country? Conceptualizing social capital as a process rather than a state helps in understanding the extent to which Zimbabwean social workers have utilized three types of social capital namely bonding, bridging and linking social capital and how these have influenced their migration trajectories. The article contributes to the growing literature on the Zimbabwean diaspora while paying attention to the ‘invisible’ immigrant professionals. Research findings reveal how the Zimbabwean social workers have relied on more distant ties, linking social capital, to migrate instead of the commonly used bonding social capital. The agency of the social workers also shows in the way they abandon social capital that has become less beneficial in pursuit of more beneficial forms.

Negotiating and Contesting Gendered and Sexual Identities in the Zimbabwean Diaspora

The transnational and global flows of people, ideas and capital across borders inescapably shape and develop people's gendered and sexual meanings, processes and identities. Drawing on our extended fieldwork, including interviews and participant observation in different social spaces, we seek to examine the negotiation and contestation of gendered and sexual identities among Zimbabwean migrants in Britain. Within transnational diaspora communities, women's bodies and their sexualities are not only symbols of homeland traditions, and cultural markers that distinguish migrants from the indigenous population, they are also sites of ideological and material struggles between different social actors. As Zimbabwean patriarchal traditions compete with liberal and egalitarian values in Britain, the diaspora becomes a site of cultural conflict. Empirical evidence suggests that, within the diaspora, sexuality has been decoupled from traditional marriage and is often expressed in non-normative sexual relationships. We illustrate how the boundaries of gendered practices and sexual behaviours deemed ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ also seem to be shifting.

Performing patriotic citizenship: Zimbabwean diaspora and their online newspaper reading practices

Abstract Zimbabweans in the diaspora engage in various forms of material and psycho-social remitting in order to maintain links with the homeland. Although geographically disconnected from their motherland, collective and idealized memories of the homeland linger long after leaving the country. This article focuses on the psycho-social dimension of the diaspora through an examination of the online news consumption practices of the Zimbabwean diaspora. The objective is to contribute on theoretical debates about the way in which the diaspora imagine their citizenship in the digital age. Data were elicited through an open-ended questionnaire e-mailed to Zimbabweans in the diaspora selected using the snowball sampling method. In addition, in-depth interviews with five of the respondents based in South Africa were also held to complement the survey data. The article argues that Zimbabwean diaspora use online newspapers to assert their membership to the Zimbabwean political community. This active information-seeking disposition of the diaspora is an affirmation of their loyalty to the homeland regardless of the social, economic and political reality in the homeland. The symbolic assertion of transnational loyalty by the Zimbabwean diaspora to the homeland could be viewed as a performance of patriotic citizenship through seeking of collective identification around the nation state.

Listening in the Wilderness: The Audience Reception of Oliver Mtukudzi’s Music in the Zimbabwean Diaspora

Abstract Documenting the diasporic audience reception of Zimbabwean popular musician Oliver Mtukudzi, I argue that transnational identities and subjectivities are not only shaped through live performance, but are also negotiated, articulated, and produced through musical listening. Foregrounding intersections between diaspora, kinship, and moral obligation, I suggest that Mtukudzi’s songs enable audiences to symbolically reposition themselves within the social relations of a remembered home. In the process, audiences routinely interpret Mtukudzi’s songs about migration and diaspora, ostensibly directed beyond Zimbabwe’s borders, as reflecting back within the nation, conveying a powerful yet subtle critique of postcolonial domestic politics.