The book is the result of a collaboration of scholars from southern Africa and overseas, whose work emphasises hitherto overshadowed subjects of literature, exposing new and untried approaches to Zimbabwean writing. The contributors focus on pluralities, inclusiveness and the breaking of boundaries, and elucidate how literary texts are betraying multiple versions and opinions of Zimbabwe, arguing that only a multiplicity of opinions on Zimbabwe can do the complexity of the society and history justice.

Gender studies in Zimbabwe have tended to focus on women and their comparative disadvantages and under-privilege. Assuming a broader perspective is necessary at a time when society has grown used to arguments rooted in binaries: colonised and coloniser, race and class, sex and gender, poverty and wealth, patriotism and terrorism, etc. The editors of Manning the Nation recognise that concepts of manhood can be used to repress or liberate, and will depend on historical and political imperatives; they seek to introduce a more nuanced perspective to the interconnectivity of patriarchy, masculinity, the nation, and its image. The essays in this volume come from well-respected academics working in a variety of fields. The ideals and concepts of manhood are examined as they are reflected in important Zimbabwean literary texts. However, if literature provides a rich vein for the analysis of masculinities, what makes this collection so interesting is the interplay of literary analysis with chapters that provide a critical examination of the ways in which ideals of manhood have been employed in, for example, leadership and the nation, as a justification for violent engagement, in the field of AIDS and HIV, etc. Manning the Nation: Father figures in Zimbabwean literature and society sets the stage for a fresh and engaging discourse essential at a time when new paradigms are needed.

Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (1993) signaled the presence of new and remarkable writing in Zimbabwe, and her four subsequent novels have confirmed her stature as one of the most important African novelists of the 1990s. Her art is alert to public life; and manifests the decisive moments of Zimbabwe's anticolonial resistance, the growth of the township culture and the competing demands of the city and the rural home. She records public experience through the consciousness of her female characters; but in prose as densely allusive as poetry, does not allow her style to register with a conventional realism, her characters always experiencing more than they understand, and seeing more than they and the reader may recognize. This work brings together critics from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, demonstrating through a diversity of approaches the complex beauty of Vera's work. It shows how Vera expanded the formal possibilities of the African novel by placing the experiences of women at the center of literature, and in so doing, retold and recreated Zimbabwe's history and imaginative life.

A magical coming-of-age tale in rural Zimbabwe

Ah, you’ve arrived. Sit down, please, and make yourself comfortable. There may not be much dinner tonight – Father is still out of work; Mother can’t do anything with those stunted maize plants in the stony ground – but at least you are here, in Gushure Village, home to unsurpassed raconteurs and the Guramatunhu family, who know that telling stories staves off hunger.

Surprise awaits at every turn: thoughts and conversations bloom into poems, political speeches and songs. You will find instructions for cooking a hare, for how to defend yourself when a dead snake is your enemy’s chosen weapon, how to speak in war tongues, how to compose a fist and aim it at a tree trunk, how to eliminate animal terrorism in a time of rabies, how to rehearse the body-viewing of a good-looking corpse, how to rock under flying okapis with The Double Shuffle, and how to practise your lovemaking technique on a
woman drawn in the sand.

At a time when cooked ants constitute a feast, the future nevertheless holds abundant prospects for the boy who devours words. But there is an unexpected fork in the road for this book louse, and plenty of wondrous twists and shocking turns.

Hilarious, poetic and poignant, Robert Muponde’s vibrant coming-of-age story of Ronald Guramatunhu brings to life rural Zimbabwe from The Second Chimurenga to independence. There are malevolent mermaids, eccentric shamans, outrageous relatives, fearsome teachers, and men who transform into hippos in a tale that captures all the magic of childhood.