Imagining a Nation: History and Memory in Making Zimbabwe

✍ Scribed by Ruramisai Charumbira

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 305
• Series: Reconsiderations in Southern African History
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In Imagining a Nation, Ruramisai Charumbira analyzes competing narratives of the founding of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe constructed by political and cultural nationalists both black and white since occupation in 1890. The book uses a wide array of sources―including archives, oral histories, and a national monument―to explore the birth of the racialized national memories and parallel identities that were in vigorous contention as memory sought to present itself as history. In contrast with current global politics plagued by divisions of outsider and insider, patriot and traitor, Charumbira invites the reader into the liminal spaces of the region’s history and questions the centrality of the nation-state in understanding African or postcolonial history today.

Using an interdisciplinary methodology, Charumbira offers a series of case studies, bringing in characters from far-flung places to show that history and memory in and of one small place can have a far-reaching impact in the wider world. The questions raised by these stories go beyond the history of colonized or colonizer in one former colony to illuminate contemporary vexations about what it means to be a citizen, patriot, or member of a nation in an ever-globalizing world. Rather than a history of how the rulers of Rhodesia or Zimbabwe marshaled state power to force citizens to accept a single definition of national memory and identity, Imagining a Nation shows how ordinary people invested in the soft power of individual, social, and collective memories to create and perpetuate exclusionary national myths.

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Orthography, Language Use, and Historiographies
Introduction
1 Far from the Tree
2 War Medals, Gendered Trials, Ordinary Women, and Nehandas to Remember
3 Remembering Rhodes, Commemorating Occupation, and Selling Memories Abroad
4 A Country Fit for White People
5 Re-Membering African Masculine Founding Myths in the Time of Colonialism
6 African Autobiography
7 Educated Political Prisoners, a Guerrilla Matron, and the Gendered Pursuit of Independence
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index