Children's Literature, Child Engineering And The Search For An Ennobling Gender Paradigm

A ZJER article on children' s literature and child engineering.The article is an exegesis of selected works of Zimbabwean children’s literature in English. It discusses these works with a view to unravel perspectives on gender and child engineering. The conceptual and epistemological thrust in these works underlines the fact that they largely derive inspiration from and are coterminous with children’s oral narratives and games in which neither maleness nor femaleness is a handicap. This makes them an ideal sociological discourse and pedagogical resource in advancing knowledge on gender. Consequently, the article marshalls the contention that, though a neglected genre in Zimbabwean critical scholarship, written children’s literature is a befitting discursive instrument for the advancement of an ennobling gender consciousness and paradigm. It deconstructs the socially constructed identities of women as those who are permanently vulnerable and neurotically lacking the impetus to struggle and triumph. It conspicuously achieves this by depicting and locating girl children and mothers at the center of the struggle to transform weakness and vulnerability into strength. Thus, this kind of a curriculum on gender makes children’s literature critical in the investment of gender in nation building processes

An analysis of the social vision of post-independence Zimbabwean writers with special reference to Shona and Ndebele poetry

Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation analyses creative trends in Shona and Ndebele poetry published after the attainment of political independence in 1980. The research tries to establish the close link between poems in the two national languages and post-independence Zimbabwean history in order to examine the link between creative writing and nationalism, which is the context in which creativity takes place, an attempt is made to outline major trends in nationalist history vis-a-vis colonialism. Having set the background for analysis, the research focuses on texts that are published in the context of the apparent cultural renaissance that is ushered by the apparent victory of African nationalism over colonialism. The texts are analysed in the context of the dialectic of nationalism and colonialism

Contesting ‘Patriotic History’: Zimbabwe’s liberation war history and the democratization agenda

The article is an exegesis of the interface of liberation war history and democracy in the Zimbabwean polity. It draws corroborative evidence from an exclusively women authored historical narrative, Women of resilience: The voices of women ex-combatants (2000) published by Zimbabwe Women Writers (henceforth ZWW). Remarkably, the article observes that the exclusively women authored anthology on liberation war history offers an inventory of a gender based trajectory of memory, thus making gender one of the vital political resources in the nation’s democratization agenda as well as in contesting historical authoritarianism and reconfiguring historical and political discourse. The women’s voices use the gender card to discursively destabilize and delegitimate official memory reconstructions, particularly at a time when liberation war history in Zimbabwe is being brazenly and aggressively deployed as a political resource. Seen in this light, the article further lays it down that renditions of Zimbabwe’s liberation war history and the meanings/interpretations of and contestations for democracy in Zimbabwe’s violent politics of contested hegemony are inalienable, inextricable and even fungible. The various contesting categories in the nation use and interpret history for different purposes. The state, represented by the nationalist party (ZANU [PF]) largely operationalizes history as legitimating discourse. On the other hand, the sidelined demographic categories contest narrow ‘patriotic history’ by engineering counter discursive historical accounts.S.Afr.J.Afr.Lang., 30(2) 201