Denomi/Nation: Envisioning Possibilities of Reconstructing an Alternative Zimbabwe in Muzorewa’s Rise Up and Walk

Abstract

Political developments in Zimbabwe in the new millennium have per force called for a re-look at the very concepts that inform the bedrock of nationhood and belonging to the nation state. They call for questions that interrogate the ways in which certain memories and processes have been privileged as constitutive of the elements that gave birth to the Zimbabwean nation. The political whirlwind that became acutely defined between 1997 and 2009 demands that several modes of remembering Zimbabwean nationhood be allowed to contest and be interpreted in different ways in an effort to envision a better Zimbabwe. The point of departure in such a project is to view nations as products of collective memory that come into being through narrative. Yet one must hasten to say memory as public/private practice, and particularly in post-colonial Africa, is in crisis especially given its selective nature (Werbner 1998). Nevertheless, the above point is an admission that the Zimbabwean nation as it exists today or at any other time is constructed through narratives. Such a conceptualisation is critical to the understanding that nations are not “rooted in antiquity and are not self evidently natural”, and that they are, if anything, “products of invention and social engineering” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1993). This is despite the apparent fixity in terms of geographical and cartographic representation which tends to give nations as permanent entities, and imagine them as having resulted from particular processes and not others.