Browsing by Author "Gonye, Jairos"

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    Remembering or re-membering? Life-writing and the politics of narration in Morgan Tsvangirai’s autobiography At the deep end (2011)
    (University of Namibia, 2013) Kangira, Jairos; Moyo, Thamsanqa; Gonye, Jairos; Hlongwana, James
    Morgan Tsvangirai’s autobiography is a construction of both personal and national identities from the 1960s up to 2011. In doing that the autobiography At the Deep End reshapes events from the colonial up to the period of Zimbabwe’s crisis with a view to staking a specifi c, deliberate identity that privileges the self as more sinned against than sinning. This paper interrogates Tsvangirai’s autobiography so as to unpack the conspicuous presences and absences and the motive of such narration. The paper argues that the politics of narration in the book is motivated by the reality of his being a leader of the opposition party in Zimbabwe where he has faced a lot of accusations about his history and leadership qualities. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was often branded as a ‘terrorist’ organisation by the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). We argue that Tsvangirai’s analysis of events is compromised by his view of the self as a possible leader in Zimbabwe. Out of the possible selves generated by his shifty experiences, he privileges the political identity in order to create an aura of relevance in the rugged political terrain of Zimbabwe. Thus the autobiography is constructed in a way that shows remembrance and re-membering of historical accounts.
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    A revolutionary character, a dispensable rebel? Edgar Tekere's political point-scoring autobiography of a Zimbabwean nationalist movement
    (University of Namibia, 2017) Gonye, Jairos; Moyo, Thamsanqa; Hlongwana, James
    In Zimbabwe, autobiographies, particularly political ones, are sites of contestations, compositions, decompositions and recompositions of national narratives. In their obsession with the self, they always centre the narrating subjectivity whilst at the same time decentering and recentering others. This means that in this literary gamesmanship, certain political personalities are displaced, peripherised, and debunked in this historical re-imagination. Tekere in his autobiography, A Life time of Struggle (2007), seeks to impose his political credentials and legitimacy in the national script in the face of what he sees and stigmatises as opportunism by many politicians, and how these politicians were catapulted into positions of power by default. To dramatise this, his autobiography employs binary tropes that mark him out as iconic and a quintessence of virtue as opposed to the insipid, dour, corrupt and wishy-washy others. In this paper we argue that Tekere’s autobiographical act, coming as it does after he has been pushed outside the ruling circles, is meant to portray him as the personification of revolutionary incorruptibility which both the colonial and postcolonial regimes felt threatened by. This autobiography is, therefore, a conscious and deliberate act of inscribing the self into the Zimbabwean historico-literary landscape. It presents an alternative frame to the hegemonic master-discourses of the fetishised, Mugabe-centred patriotic history on and about Zimbabwe.