Browsing by Author "Moyo, Thamsanqa"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Ethnicity, domination and tyranny: A case for the Ndebele people in Running with Mother (2012)
    (University of Namibia, 2015) Mdlongwa, Theresia; Moyo, Thamsanqa; Ncube, Bhekezakhe
    Hegemonic state grand narratives are often absolutist in ways in which they insist on particular ways of viewing the past, present and the trajectory to the future. They canalize society’s attention to certain ways of remembering, forgetting and viewing the socio-political, economic, cultural and ethnic relations in ways that legitimate the state as quintessential. Zimbabwean history, in its patriotic sense, is appropriated by the state in order to inscribe technologies of domination and tyranny in politics and ethnicity. In this research we argue that contesting narratives like Running with Mother use memory and re-memory to establish patterns of marginalisation, violence and hegemony used by the ZANU-PF government. Mlalazi’s narrative uses memory of the Gukurahundi violence in order to confront ethnic and political injustices in the past and present and, in this way, seek justice and healing in the public sphere. We argue that ZANU-PF politics since 1980 has been totalitarian and geared towards the elimination of ZAPU and the Ndebele through various exclusions and coercive acts whose consequences have left the Ndebele confronted with the question of: Who are we (the minority) and what are the opportunities in an increasingly ‘Shonaised’ (ZANUFIED?) Zimbabwe? We conclude by arguing that violence was used by the ruling party on the Ndebele not to create an inclusive society but to establish ethnic domination and tyranny which is still manifest to this day. The act of remembering the violence therefore, becomes a site for psycho-social therapy in a situation where the dehumanization is unacknowledged, diminished or perpetuated in other guises.
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    Handing down the poisoned chalice: Institutionalisation of partisanship, coercion and solipsism in Mlalazi's "They are Coming" (2014)
    (University of Namibia, 2017) Moyo, Thamsanqa
    The seizure and maintenance of power does not merely involve physical violence or force. In most in-stances, it is a combination of force through coercive state institutions that are used as props of self-legitimating and/or the creation of self-authenticating narratives that are often unquestioned and seemingly ‘logical.’ This paper argues that Zimbabwe, like Rhodesia, depended on the institutionalisation of partisanship and force, in order to sustain the elite’s tenacious hold on power. This involves the blurring of the distinction between party and state so that in the context of this paper, ZANU-PF became a party and the state, and vice-versa. In this way all state institutions and organs invariably became party organs. The paper uses Mlalazi’s short story “They Are Coming” to problematise the ways in which the ruling elite have sought to shut out the possibilities for change through the ballot and, instead, show how violence has muddied the Zimbabwean political culture such that the vistas for democracy and consen-sus-building have become remote. The paper concludes by arguing that the culture of militarising elections and youths, and the counter violence of the opposition, amounts to handing a poisoned chalice to successive generations.
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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.