Summary

Women, as part of communities, societies, and nations, have, on one hand, participated in national mythmaking, however “nation” has been defined. On the other hand, women, have also been some of the fiercest opponents of the idea of the nation, as its self-definition often subjected them—and all those deemed deviant—to hetero-patriarchal violence, physically and otherwise. Women in Zimbabwe since the late 1800s, when that country became the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, have been integral to that country’s history, despite periodic historiographical invisibility. Thus, in the long and short arcs of Zimbabwe’s history, women’s historical and contemporary lives have been interpreted teleologically and ontologically. The teleological is in the literature that writes women as destined to be subservient to men across time. The ontological is in the literature that writes not only of women’s agency but their connectedness to their communities, societies, and the larger world. The triumph of contemporary women in Zimbabwe, against fierce patriarchal odds, is the reclamation of voice and space in visible and invisible ways in that country. The tragedy, of course, is the long shadow cast by virulent patriarchal nationalisms of both colonial and postindependent Zimbabwe that has dispersed millions of people into the diaspora around the world. For women, and the people of Zimbabwe writ large, hope is not a noun but a verb. Refusing to give up is an act of defiance and a claim to life.