Theorising Zimbabwe post-2017: a literary and imaginative perspective

ABSTRACT

International and Zimbabwean scholars have correctly interrogated the negative consequences of the 16 November 2017 military coup in Zimbabwe by Emmerson Mnangagwa. Debating Zimbabwean politics post-2017 has also meant emphasising the continuation of Robert Mugabe’s politics imagined as unproblematically overflowing into the Mnangagwa post-2017 era. Critics from the social sciences continue to underplay the uniqueness of Mnangagwa’s coup in its precedent-setting politics currently dragging Zimbabwean citizens into uncharted political territory. How do scholars imagine Zimbabwe moving beyond the cycle of violence born of a coup and enforced on its citizens by an intolerant ‘new’ dispensation? This study uses the creative agency of the anxious and unstable narratives of imaginative literature to unpack the symbolically unsaid implications of the military coup and its aftermath. A textual and close reading of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory (2022) suggests that interpreting imaginative literary metaphors contributes to generating subjective and incendiary narratives that imagine the possibility to think beyond new forms of authoritarianism post-2017. The argument in this article is that the cultural uniqueness of the literary narratives in Glory lies in how they generate literary contexts that revise narratives on post-2017 Zimbabwe in current social science-based scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Mnangagwa;
• imaginative literature;
• authoritarianism;
• post-2017;
• Zimbabwe

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Maurice Taonezvi Vambe

Maurice Taonezvi Vambe is a world-leading African literary scholar and cultural theorist. He is Professor of English Studies at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He serves and has served on the editorial boards of international peer-reviewed scholarly journals, including African Diaspora. He has contributed as editor, co-editor and/or guest editor to international peer-reviewed scholarly journals, including Imbizo: International Journal of African Literary and Comparative Studies and the Journal of Literary Studies. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed scholarly articles, including in African Identities. He is the author of more than five books, the latest of which is Genocide in African Literature (forthcoming, early 2024). He has contributed book chapters to works such as The Encyclopedia of African Literature and The Oxford Companion to African Literature. Among other committees, Prof. Vambe served on the UNISA Senate Committee on Africanisation. He was the African Union (AU) Co-ordinator and Consultant for the Mwalimu Nyerere AU Scholarship. His community outreach involved students exploring their awareness of HIV and AIDS at the University of Zimbabwe. The research output was an anthology of poetry, short stories, and dramas. Prof. Vambe can be reached on [email protected].