The image of absence and the politics of naming in Shona war fiction
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 counterpar...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
AOSIS
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/11408/817 |
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| Summary: | 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. |
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