Tsitsi Dangarembga is Zimbabwe’s first Black female novelist and is now one of the most well-known writers in the canons of Zimbabwean, anglophone African, and postcolonial women’s literature. Her 1988 Nervous Conditions has become one of the most widely read and widely taught novels in the African literary canon. Dangarembga’s published literary works include one play (She No Longer Weeps, 1987), three novels (Nervous Conditions, 1988; The Book of Not, 2006; and This Mournable Body, 2018), two short stories (“The Letter,” 1985; and “Jana Dives,” 2022), and one essay collection (Black and Female: Essays, 2022). Nervous Conditions won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region); This Mournable Body was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2020, and since then Dangarembga has won the 2021 German Publishers and Booksellers Association’s Peace Prize, the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize, and the 2022 Windham Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. Dangarembga is also one of Zimbabwe’s most prominent filmmakers. The owner of her own production company, Nyerai Films, she has written, directed, or produced over twenty films, including Everyone’s Child (1996), On the Border (2000), Hard Earth: Land Rights in Zimbabwe (2001), Kare Kare Zvako: Mother’s Day (2004), High Hopes (2010), and I Want a Wedding Dress (2010).
While all of Dangarembga’s published work casts a critical eye on postindependence Zimbabwean nationalism and government policy, she gained international visibility as a political activist in July 2020, when she was arrested for participating in a demonstration against the government’s persecution and arrest of journalist Hopewell Chin’ono. Dangarembga was convicted of inciting public violence in 2022; in 2023, that conviction was overturned. In 2021, she received the PEN International award for Freedom of Expression. In 2022–2023, she served as a Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Tsitsi Dangarembga
Anne Gulick
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Joshua Nkomo
Eliakim Sibanda
Joshua Nkomo was a dominant force in the anticolonial independence movement in colonial Rhodesia between 1949 and 1980, and then a major political figure in independent Zimbabwe from 1980 until his death on July 1, 1999. Four historical themes emerge, however, themes that form the context of Nkomo’s life and work and that have intersected in the larger story of Zimbabwe’s independence. First is the politics of the state, which revolves around the question of state power and who controls it, and which has ethnicity as its subtext. Second is the struggle over property ownership, pitting the haves against the have-nots, which has informed class formation. Third is the politics of land, which has likewise informed the nature of class formation and political cleavages. Fourth is the theme of ethnicity and race, especially pitting one ethnicity or race against another. Nkomo rose from a railway welfare officer to lead a militant union, and then three political parties between 1957 and 1987. He made significant contributions to the downfall of a white supremacist colonial regime in Zimbabwe. After independence, the anticolonial revolutionary became a statesman who championed both reconciliation and social justice until his death in 1999. After independence, Nkomo, would become a Member of Parliament, Minister of Home Affairs, and rose eventually to be Vice-President of Zimbabwe.
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Land Resettlement and Restitution in Zimbabwe
Joseph Mujere
Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Program has attracted a lot of scholarly attention. While some scholars have argued that the process through which landless peasants reclaimed land was chaotic and violent, others have praised it for having been one of the most radical redistributive land reform programs in Africa. While these debates have dominated scholarship on land reform program in Zimbabwe since 2000, what has been lacking has been a historical analysis of the entanglement between land resettlement and struggles over restitution. Land restitution has been at the center of the land redistribution in Zimbabwe. In spite of the successes that the government has made in redistributing land, land restitution is the last frontier in the struggle over land. Ruins, ancestral graves, and sacred sites are important landscape features whose emotive presence and materiality enable communities to make land claims and counterclaims.
Land restitution processes have been initiated in a variety of regional and country contexts. In former settler societies such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Canada, and Australia, indigenous populations have laid claims over land dispossessed under colonial rule. In post-conflict societies internally displaced people have also attempted to lay claims over land that they had to leave behind fleeing from violence. Further, where large-scale land deals have been unsuccessful or revoked through resistance land reclamation has also been instigated. Land restitution is concerned with restoring landed property to former owners. As compared to land redistribution, restitution is not concerned with ironing out of inequitable distribution of land to create a just future but with reestablishment of former rights based on principles of justice rather than equality. Restitution is therefore based on returning land to former owners who can prove claims. Land restitution is an elastic concept covering a range of processes designed to appease what are perceived as historical injustices around loss of land rights.
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Dambudzo Marechera
Julie Cairnie
Charles William (Dambudzo) Marechera (1952–1987) was born in poverty in Rusape, Zimbabwe and died in poverty in Harare, Zimbabwe. He was and continues to be celebrated as an iconoclast, the “enfant terrible” of African literature, and a cult figure with many acolytes across the globe. He was born in and formed by White-ruled Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe when independence was achieved in 1980) but was also deeply influenced by eight years in the United Kingdom and an immersion in European literature. The House of Hunger (1978) is Marechera’s most famous and impactful work. It is a stream-of-consciousness novella, published with nine other satellite stories, that is a semiautobiographical engagement with Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. The novella is simultaneously beautiful and brutal. The House of Hunger won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979, and Marechera disrupted the awards dinner by dressing in an eclectic costume and throwing plates at the chandeliers. The book and Marechera were so celebrated that there was a Channel Four production that combined a biographical study of Marechera, documenting his time in the United Kingdom and his return to an independent Zimbabwe in 1982, and a film rendering of The House of Hunger. Unfortunately, there was an acrimonious break with the White South African filmmaker, Chris Austin. After his abrupt departure from the film project, Marechera stayed in Zimbabwe until his death five years later.
In England and Zimbabwe, he wrote in a range of genres: prose, poetry, plays, essays, and even children’s literature. After the initial success of The House of Hunger, Marechera found it frustratingly difficult to publish his intellectual and esoteric work. Three books were published while he was alive (The House of Hunger, Black Sunlight, and Mindblast); three were published posthumously by his literary executor, Flora Veit-Wild (The Black Insider, Cemetery of Mind, and Scrapiron Blues). All six of these books were published between 1978 and 1994, but Marechera’s work continues to exert influence and make deep impressions on readers, whether formally trained or not, whether African or not. In addition to The House of Hunger, in Marechera’s essay “The African Writer’s Experience of European Literature” (1987), he embraces the influence of European literature on his own writing—a fidelity that is evident in his work and criticized by readers who prefer African writing that contributes to nation-building rather than privileges introspection. His essay demonstrates the breadth of his reading and the multifarious texts—from across the globe—that influenced all of Marechera’s work and captures his resistance to narrow labels that define writing and writers. Marechera continues to generate creative, critical, and theoretical responses from a variety of artists and thinkers from a range of locations—geographical, social, and racial, such as Yvonne Vera, NoViolet Bulawayo, China Miéville, Comrade Fatso, Helon Habila, and many more.
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Women in Zimbabwe
Ruramisai Charumbira
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.
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The Archaeology of Nyanga, Eastern Zimbabwe
Plan Shenjere-Nyabezi
The Nyanga district of eastern Zimbabwe shows a cultural history that is similar to the rest of Zimbabwe and the southern African region. Although largely undated, the Stone Age—from the Early Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, through to the Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers—is represented at a number of open sites and rock shelters. Later Stone Age rock art, some of which exhibits rather unique artistic attributes and characteristics such as the stripped images, has been recorded in this area. The advent of settled iron-using farming communities is also evident, as elsewhere in southern Africa dating from the 2nd to the 3rd century ce. The well-known Early Farming Communities Ziwa ceramic tradition of southern Africa is in fact named after the type site in this district. The Nyanga district is however particularly famous for its stone constructions that come in a variety of forms, consisting of stone terraced hillsides, which extend for almost sixty-five miles from north to south and cover some twenty-three hundred square miles, as well as stone-lined pit structures, hilltop forts, stone-walled enclosures, and trackways. Dating from the 14th to the early 19th century, the culture is one of the Later Farming Community cultures of Zimbabwe. The stone architecture and several other cultural aspects differ from those of the more famous Zimbabwe Culture, such that, although the two entities partly overlapped chronologically, Nyanga represents a separate cultural development in Zimbabwe’s history. The purpose of the stone structures has been a subject of archaeological debate for some time. The majority of scholars generally agree that the terracing and pit structures were constructed for agricultural and animal herding practices. However, since the early 2010s, some scholars have somewhat unconvincingly argued that gold-mining and processing were the primary motivation for the Nyanga architectural remains. The traditional view of the communities associated with the Nyanga stone architecture has largely seen them as representing basic peasant agricultural people lacking complex sociopolitical organization. However, examination of the scale and extent of the architecture, including consideration of the size of the enclosures and their spatial distribution, strongly suggests that the Nyanga people were organized as fairly complex sociopolitical formations that are archaeologically consistent with the chiefdom level, at the very least.
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Documents on South-Central and Southeast Africa to 1890
Matthew Hannaford
Much research on the history of south-central and southeast African societies prior to colonial rule has made use of historical documents to a greater or lesser degree. Here, the contents and coverage of available written sources are examined over a near-millennial period from the end of the 1st millennium ce to 1890. While the argument that follows is that documents over this period provide valuable historical material beyond the activities of colonial societies, it is inescapable that they are generally “external” narratives written for external purposes, foremost among which was the exploitation of the land and people. This imbues documentation with a multitude of biases but does not preclude careful and critical use of documentary records for the study of African societies and environments. This is especially true when documents are used alongside other source types from other disciplines such as archaeology, oral history, linguistics, paleoecology, and paleoclimatology. Many pre-19th-century documents are housed in European archives, which poses challenges around accessibility. However, endeavors to produce source databases and develop digital archives are beginning to change this picture, providing scope for renewed scholarship on aspects of the history of Africa from the early 16th century through to the end of the 19th century.
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The Central African Federation
Andrew Cohen
The late 1940s and early 1950s saw British government policy align, albeit briefly, with European settler desire in Southern and Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia) for a closer association of their territories. Widespread African opposition was overlooked, and on September 1, 1953, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (more commonly known as the Central African Federation) came into existence. Nyasaland was included at the insistence of the British government. The federation was a bold experiment in political power during the late stage of British colonialism and constituted one of the most intricate episodes in its retreat from empire.
Explanations for the creation of the federation center on attempts to stymie the regional influence of apartheid South Africa and the perceived economic advantages of a closer association of Britain’s Central African colonies. African opposition to the formation of the federation was widespread. Although this protest dissipated in the early years of the federation, the early promises in racial “partnership” soon proved to be insincere, and this reinvigorated African protest as the 1960 federal constitutional review drew close. The end of the Central African Federation is best explained by several intertwined pressures, including African nationalist protest, economic weakness, and hardening settler intransigence. By the end of 1962, there was large-scale African opposition to federation in both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and the Rhodesian Front had come to power on a platform of independence free from the federation. The final death knell for the federation rang with the British government’s decision that no territory should be kept in the federation against its will.
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Ndau Identity in Zimbabwe
Emmanuel Sithole
Ndau people (popularly identified as VaNdau) possess a rich but largely under-recorded history. Notwithstanding that the etymology of “Ndau” as a collective ethnic term is the subject for much debate, some documental archives suggest that the ancestors of Ndau people arrived in a series of migrations and settled in the areas between the Pungwe and Save rivers during the early centuries. The existing archaeological and historical evidence attests that there were interethnic and interracial contact between “Mandowa” (local Indigenous people) and Swahili and Muslim merchants at Sofala Bay during the 8th century. They had trade networks that were developed several centuries before Portuguese traders’ arrival, settlement, and control of the trading of gold, ivory, and, much later, slaves in that part of the East African region. Early Portuguese explorers and writers, some of whom had intermarried with Mandowa women, realized that VaNdau had developed political, linguistic, social, and cultural identities in the 16th century. As reported in early Portuguese literature, VaNdau shared kinship ties, similar social and cultural beliefs, and spoke the same language (albeit with several regional varieties) that helped in the negotiation and assertion of a collective sense of Ndauness across centuries. Ndau identity became even more asserted and concretized during the 19th century when VaNdau were exposed to extreme persecution at the hands of their Gaza Nguni conquerors. Forced conscription of VaNdau into Gaza Nguni social and military ranks, however, resulted in a renegotiation of the nature and meaning of an Ndau identity. Interethnic marriage with Gaza Nguni warriors culminated in the emergence of a dual Ndau and Gaza identity represented by a permanent accommodation of Gaza Nguni clan names, among other cultural and linguistic elements among VaNdau in the late 19th century. Meanwhile, White colonial and missionary (mainly American Board Mission) activity exerted significant influence on the cultural, social, religious, and political aspects of Ndau society in the 20th century. Colonial and postindependent policies in education, media, and the greater society encouraged the assimilation of Ndau people into a newly created linguistic Shona identity in Zimbabwe. From 1931, young Ndau speakers began to gradually accept Shona as their primary identity. However, Ndau’s constitutional recognition as a separate official language in 2013 contributed toward the reclamation of the ChiNdau identity in Zimbabwe, especially across virtual platforms such as Facebook and other social networking sites. Thousands of Ndau-speaking people converge on virtual platforms such as Rekete Chindau—Leave a Legacy to reassert and reshape their identity through speaking and writing about it in Zimbabwe.
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Nehanda
Diana Jeater and Ruvimbo Rusike
In the foundational stories of the Zezuru and Korekore Shona peoples of Zimbabwe, Grandmother (Ambuya/Mbuya) Nehanda was one of the original forebears. She is described both as a semi-mythical autochthonous ancestor, a sister of the Zezuru founding ancestor Chaminuka; and as the daughter of Mutota, the historical founder of the 16th- and 17th-century trading empire, Mwenemutapa (Monomotapa). By 1980, however, she had also become an icon of resistance to White rule in Zimbabwe and a model of gender empowerment. A number of things contributed to the creation of this iconic image, including a complex intertwining of resistance to White settler invasion in the 1890s; literary and musical compositions throughout the 20th century; the nationalist liberation war of the 1970s; and Terence Ranger’s 1967 academic monograph, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia. The image celebrates both the ancestral spirit and her late 19th-century spirit medium, Charwe Nyakasikana. Charwe, who was recognized as a medium for Nehanda’s mhondoro (founding ancestor) spirit, was hanged in 1898 by White settlers, who had invaded and occupied the territory eight years earlier. They said that she had ordered the killing of a White official and, with a fellow medium, Sekuru Kaguvi, had helped to coordinate an armed resistance to the occupation. Following the establishment of independent African rule in Zimbabwe in 1980, Ambuya Nehanda—as the spirit working through Charwe—was revered as the “Mother of the Nation.” The final words attributed to Charwe before her execution, “My bones will rise again,” were celebrated as a prophecy of the future successful overthrow of White rule. Charwe’s story and image have subsequently been used in many ways to represent ongoing struggles around gender, nationalism, and neocolonialism.
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South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe
Alois Mlambo
This article traces the relations between South Africa and Southern Rhodesia/Rhodesia/Zimbabwe from the end of the 19th century until the present with respect to politics; economic, military, ideological, and cultural activities; as well as foreign policy. The conflicted relationship between the two countries went through varying periods of close cooperation and also of tension, especially given the difference in power between the much larger and more economically prosperous South Africa and the smaller society and economy of Southern Rhodesia. Other important factors include the dominant influence of the Afrikaners in South Africa, from the creation of the Union in 1910 onward, and the apprehension felt by a predominantly English-speaking white population of Rhodesia, which arose from a fear of being swallowed up by Afrikaner-dominated South Africa. During the Zimbabwean liberation struggle from the early 1960s onward, South Africa gave military support to Rhodesia, at least in the early part of the conflict; it changed its policy in the mid-1970s and began to advocate for negotiations between Rhodesia’s warring parties. Between Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 and the democratic transition in South Africa in 1994, relations between the two countries were fraught with tensions because the Zimbabwean government persistently condemned the apartheid regime and hosted representatives of South African anti-apartheid movements, although Zimbabwe was careful not to allow these movements to launch military attacks on South Africa from its soil, for fear of reprisals. On its part, the South African government conducted a sabotage campaign against its northern neighbor and exerted economic pressure on it. Despite all these tensions, however, South Africa remained Zimbabwe’s major trading partner throughout this period. The tension between the countries lessened when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994, but new tensions arose because of Mandela and Robert Mugabe’s rivalry over the leadership of Southern Africa. On coming to power in 1999, Thabo Mbeki tried to diffuse tensions by adopting a different style of foreign policy that, in Zimbabwe’s case, was known as “quiet diplomacy”—a policy that came under much criticism from Western countries and some sectors in Southern Africa. Mbeki’s successors continued this diplomatic policy toward Zimbabwe, even following a militarily assisted political transition in November 2017, which saw the overthrow of Mugabe and his replacement by Emerson Munangangwa.
