The late Welshman Hadane Mabhena, was a leading Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) activist, the political party led by Joshua Nkomo. He was among the pioneers of the liberation struggle in Nkayi and Matabeleland North. He faced incarceration in various prisons in Rhodesia. He was detained in Gonakudzingwa near the border with Mozambique. A loud and fearless voice for the voiceless, uMawelishi, as he was affectionately known among his colleagues and admirers, was declared a national hero when he passed on. While the focus of the book is on an individual, Welshman Mabhena, it also illuminates the times, both good and bad, that were an integral part of Welshman Mabhena’s life.
The Idea of Matabeleland in Digital Spaces: Genealogies, Discourses, and Epistemic Struggles establishes a debate and dialogue between critical and post-/de-colonial approaches in the study of subalternity in online media representations. Editors Khanyile Mlotshwa and Mphathisi Ndlovu curate chapters that deal specifically with the intersectional subalternity of Matabeleland, a political and geographical region in the Southwest part of Zimbabwe comprising of three provinces: Matabeleland South, Matabeleland North, and Bulawayo metropolitan province. The subalternity of this region emerges in politics and popular culture, including media, as intersectional in terms of ethnicity, region, gender, class, and beyond. This book argues that in online spaces the liberatory politics of Matabeleland emerges as trapped in coloniality.
A Cradle of the Revolution is a compelling book of stories by former Inyathi School students in the period before Zimbabwean independence. The stories render moving accounts of evictions in the colonial period, conditions at Inyathi school, and in particular the leadership qualities of Kenneth Maltus Smith, who was the school head. After leaving Inyathi school, many of the student participated in the struggle for independence. The book is an expose of the colonial conditions and efforts to dislodge colonialists and usher in independence and dignity for the black majority.
This book examines the triumphs and tribulations of the Zimbabwean national project, providing a radical and critical analysis of the fossilisation of Zimbabwean nationalism against the wider context of African nationalism in general. The book departs radically from the common 'praise-texts' in seriously engaging with the darker aspects of nationalism, including its failure to create the nation-as-people, and to install democracy and a culture of human rights. The author examines how the various people inhabiting the lands between the Limpopo and Zambezi Rivers entered history and how violence became a central aspect of the national project of organising Zimbabweans into a collectivity in pursuit of a political end.
Innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics.In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe''s postcolonial milieu. From ancestral "bones" rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled wardead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. In this book Joost Fontein examines the complexities of human remains in Zimbabwe''s ''politics of the dead''. Challenging and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressing and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressing and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressing and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressing and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressg Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Press
K.M.R Smythe grew up in Rhodesia Her family lived in the grounds of Ingutsheni Mental Hospital in Bulawayo from 1953-1971 where her father worked as a psychiatrist. As a child she grappled with many frightening situations and found strength and self-belief by becoming a successful tennis player. The Secret World of Shlomo Fine is an exploration of concealment and prejudice on many different levels. It is a story about an isolated and isolating experience inside one of the largest lunatic asylums built during British colonial rule in Africa. The book raises questions about the role that psychiatry holds in the Western imagination as accepted wisdom for healing human distress. What took place at Ingutsheni - first under British colonial rule, followed by UDI and the leadership of Ian Smith - needs to be more widely known. Similar institutions were built throughout the Empire, and many still exist throughout the world.
