Dissident Narratives: Representations of Wars of Liberation in Zimbabwean and South African Fiction and Film

By choosing some exemplary fiction and film texts from Zimbabwe and South Africa, I seek to examine certain tendencies in the scholarship surrounding the extremely violent processes often reduced to the familiar and somewhat simplistic phrase, "the liberation struggle." Broadly, I interrogate the relationship between the violence of the events so described and the memory of them in the selected films and fiction. In both countries, settler colonialism lasted well into the second half of the 20th century, a fact that means virtually all the filmmakers and writers who represent the narratives of war in both countries have a living memory of them.;This study positions itself within the emerging body of scholarship on the literary and cinematic representations of violent conflict which characterized Africa's encounters with the West. In southern Africa, this violence is principally between indigenous Africans and the European settlers. Over and above this generalized conflict, this study also brings into focus the violence visited upon other racial and social groups such as Indians, Coloreds, women, the youth and the vast majority of the masses whose participation characterizes all phases of African activism. South Africa and Zimbabwe provide excellent examples of the anatomy of this violence due to the enduring colonial domination of these geo-political areas, the uncompromising brutality of colonial rule and the racially-coded legislation that gave legal force to oppression and marginalization. The singular contribution of this study to existing literature of colonialism and the struggle against it is its specific focus on the nature and legacy of wartime violence on the social groups mentioned above and its place in contemporary imagination and cultural practices.;My choice of subject is premised on the supposition that in the euphoria of political victory, Zimbabwe and South Africa forgot or selectively remembered the nature and impacts of violence in shaping group and national identities. This study, then, revisits the liberation struggles in Zimbabwe and South Africa as lieux de memoire to interrogate the recent history of violence and its memorialization via the prisms of fiction and cinema.