Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: War in African Literature: Literary Harvests, Human Tragedies
- ARTICLES
- The Muted Index of War in African Literature & Society
- ‘Life in the Camp of the Enemy’: Alemseged Tesfai's Theatre of War
- Sacrifice & the Contestation of Identity in Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn
- Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria–Biafra War in Select Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria
- Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra
- Politics & Human Rights in Non-Fiction Prison Literature
- Problems of Representing the Zimbabwean War of Liberation in Mutasa's The Contact, Samupindi's Pawns & Vera's The Stone Virgins
- The Need to Go Further? Dedication & Distance in the War Narratives of Alexandra Fuller & Alexander Kanengoni
- History, Memoir & a Soldier's Conscience: Philip Efiong's Nigeria & Biafra: My Story
- Of the Versification of Pain: Nigerian Civil War Poetry
- REVIEWS
- Index
Problems of Representing the Zimbabwean War of Liberation in Mutasa's The Contact, Samupindi's Pawns & Vera's The Stone Virgins
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: War in African Literature: Literary Harvests, Human Tragedies
- ARTICLES
- The Muted Index of War in African Literature & Society
- ‘Life in the Camp of the Enemy’: Alemseged Tesfai's Theatre of War
- Sacrifice & the Contestation of Identity in Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn
- Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria–Biafra War in Select Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria
- Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra
- Politics & Human Rights in Non-Fiction Prison Literature
- Problems of Representing the Zimbabwean War of Liberation in Mutasa's The Contact, Samupindi's Pawns & Vera's The Stone Virgins
- The Need to Go Further? Dedication & Distance in the War Narratives of Alexandra Fuller & Alexander Kanengoni
- History, Memoir & a Soldier's Conscience: Philip Efiong's Nigeria & Biafra: My Story
- Of the Versification of Pain: Nigerian Civil War Poetry
- REVIEWS
- Index
Summary
In his foreword to The Struggle for Zimbabwe (1985), the then prime minister of Zimbabwe, Robert G. Mugabe commends the authors, David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, for writing a history textbook ‘through ZANU's History’ (Mugabe, 1981: v) but goes on to argue that the main limitation of the book is that it is written by ‘onlookers’, who according to him ‘have the limitation that they are not the actors themselves’ (p. vi). Here, Mugabe implies that those who did not wield the gun and were not necessarily linked to ZANU history cannot write a credible and an ‘authentic’ history of the liberation struggle. Dumiso Dabengwa (1995), writing from the ZAPU side contests the above view and suggests that the definitive history of the war cannot be written without taking into account the ZIPRA war narrative. Dabengwa however, reinforces Mugabe's view that the war can only truthfully be narrated by the ‘actors’, when he, Dabengwa calls for a new breed of ‘historian, political scientist, economist [and] sociologist’ (p. 24) to give Zimbabwe a truthful account of the contradictions of the war of liberation fought between 1972 and 1979. Neither Mugabe nor Dabengwa looks to Zimbabwean fiction for potentially truthful narrative accounts of the war.
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- Chapter
- Information
- War in African Literature Today , pp. 87 - 102Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008