Re-gendering Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle: Fay Chung’s revisionist attitude in Re-living the second Chimurenga: Memories from Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle (2012)

Abstract

Part of Zimbabwe’s socio-political and economic crisis of the past decade can be easily traced back to contestations about the place of Zimbabwe’s war of liberation (1966 – 1979) in constructions of political legitimacy. Since, for obvious reasons, the liberation war and its memory are inseparable from power and hegemonic control in the  postcolony, the narrative of the war in Zimbabwe has long been a preserve of powerful and often male political leaders. This means that female narratives of the war are  subordinated and with them, women’s roles in the war and post-independence power politics. This paper deploys Maria Pia Lara’s theory of women’s life writings as  inherently ‘emancipatory’ and ‘disclosive’ to explore Fay Chung’s counter-hegemonic attitude in her autobiography Re-living the Second Chimurenga. Our analysis focuses on how Chung centres female experiences of the liberation war to revise prevailing phallocentric representations of the war which border on political misogyny.

Key words: Second Chimurenga; illocutionary force; affect; feminism; counter-discourse