While Africa was going through this most exciting re-definition of itself, Rhodesia (which became known as Zimbabwe at independence in 1980) was conspicuous by its absence. In 1965 the minority settler white government unilaterally declared its independence from Britain, African nationalists took up arms and began a 15-year-long guerilla war, Britain succeeded in getting the United Nations to impose comprehensive economic sanctions against the rebel colony, and Rhodesia was isolated by the world and, like a closed wound, began to fester from within. White settler writers continued to write as if their setting was Arcadian England of the English Romantics. Early African writers of the 1960s wrote autobiographies thinly disguised as "histories" or "fiction" and as the despair in the land deepened, writers of the 1970s wrote works which carried that despair and disillusionment. Later, Zimbabwean writers were to be referred to as "the lost race," and Zimbabwean literature has always been out of step with the general movement of ideas on the African continent. The search for Zimbabwean identity as seen through its literature reflects a tortured period of mind in the 1960s and 1970s, a brief moment of brightness in the early 1980s, and a relapse into disillusionment almost immediately thereafter. 

Zimbabwean writers do not share a common voice. Rather, they represent individual voices of "teachers, preachers, non-believers," and others who are not easy to categorize. This course will explore these various voices against the informing ideas that swept across Africa at the time of their writing and that immediately impacted on their world in Rhodesia, in Zimbabwe, and account for the strife in the efforts at definition, identity-formation and divided loyalties (including a strong sense of loyalty to the self).

Professor Ranga Zinyemba is visiting this winter from the University of Zimbabwe. (Class added after Time Schedule printed; meets with CHID 498E; sln:7990.)