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Music narrates personal, communal and national experiences. It is a rich repository of a people's deepest fears, hopes, and achievements, especially as it communicates spirituality, economic, and political realities. This volume examines the multiple roles of music in Zimbabwe, showing how Zimbabwean music has addressed the socio-economic, political and spiritual crisis that the country has endured in the last one and a half decades. While concentrating on the tumultuous 2000-2013 period, the themes that are addressed here are enduring. Thus, the book explores the interplay between music and gender, music and politics, and music and identity construction in Zimbabwe, and it interacts with most of the dominant genres in Zimbabwean music, including Sungura, ZORA, Chimurenga, Gospel and the Urban Grooves. This volume will interest specialists in the study of ethnomusicology, in addition to scholars of literature, religious studies, philosophy, theatre arts, political science, and history.

This article analyses cultural and historical evidence from the Shona and Ndebele experiential context. The Shona and the Ndebele constitute the two largest demographic groups in Zimbabwe. The motivation for the analysis is to contest the assumed universal validity of the feminist gendering of space into private female and public male. Gathering, explaining and interrogating this evidence from an Africana Womanist perspective, it argues that African women's performance space has not been curtailed by limited interpretations of space into private and public. In fact they have been very active in ensuring community survival. Even the often misinterpreted home as a private space, is in fact a strategic arena for the expression of women agency. Thus, the gendered dichotomization of space is not consistent with the dynamics of the African world view in which balance and harmony constitute the modus operandi for every day social action.

This article sets out to validate the Africana Womanist literary theory as an intellectual paradigm grounded in knowledge and values derived from the African people's cultural experiences. It achieves this by analyzing cultural discourse from the continent, drawing particular attention to Shona and Ndebele proverbs and sayings. The Shona and Ndebele proverbs and sayings analyzed in the article candidly express perspectives on mothering/motherhood, which is one of the 18 descriptors advanced by Hudson-Weems in her explication of Africana Womanism (1993 and 2004). Against this background, the article contends that Africana Womanism is built around and informed by African survival technologies evolved over many centuries by Africanans themselves. The article's argument, then, is articulated within the confines of the realization that theories are expressions of culturally derived knowledge. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The research examines the interface of history and fiction. It predominantly focuses on historical fiction on the Zimbabwean liberation war written in Shona, Ndebele and English and published after the attainment of political independence in 1980. Historical fiction on the liberation war is both biographical and autobiographical. Consequently, the study comes to the conclusion that historical fiction is a veritable stakeholder in the history issue in Zimbabwe. It becomes another type or source of history that cannot be papered over when dealing with the nation’s history. In a nation where liberation war history is not only taken seriously, but is also a vigorously contested terrain, historical fiction becomes part of those discursive contestations, particularly on nation and nationalism. It is in this regard that the study problematises the interface of history and fiction by reasoning that historical fiction published in the early 1980s largely advances a state-centered perspective which views history, nation and nationalism in positive terms. This discourse uses history in order to argue for a single nation that derives its identity from the heroic and symbolic guerrilla characters. Nationalism is exclusively presented as humanising and as being the sole legitimate political brand capable of leading the nation. On the other hand, historical fiction written in English and published in the late 1980s onwards represents alternative historical truths that contest nationalism and debunk official definitions of nation. This discourse leads to the pluralisation of perspectives on nation and nationalism. The focus on historical fiction published in three languages used in Zimbabwe is a conscious attempt to transcend ethnicity in critical scholarship. Discussing novels in Shona, Ndebele and English, which are the three main languages in Zimbabwe, makes it possible for the study to draw reasoned conclusions on the bearing of time, language, region and background among others on historical representation. This undertaking brings to the fore how literature responding to similar historical processes appears moderately conjunctive and principally disjunctive. Correspondingly, it also shows various trends in the development of liberation war fiction in Zimbabwe.