Browsing by Subject "Zimbabwe"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    It was difficult in Zimbabwe: a history of imprisonment, detention and confinement during Zimbabwe’s Liberation struggle, 1960-1980
    (2008-10) Munochiveyi, Munyaradzi Bryn
    Between 1961 and 1979, African nationalists engaged in a protracted guerrilla war which ultimately ended white colonial rule in Rhodesia (Rhodesia was Zimbabwe's colonial name). The settler regime responded by imprisoning a large number of activists and those whom it suspected of being aligned with the guerrillas. In this thesis, I am particularly interested in the histories and lived experiences of African political detainees and prisoners whose experiences and contributions towards the liberation struggle have been rendered invisible by dominant historical and state narratives. Broadly, this dissertation argues that although political imprisonment in this period was an extreme version of the colonial experience that combined spatial confinement with curtailed freedoms, racialized abuse, racial segregation, and heightened repression, the prison was also a terrain of struggle. By describing the Rhodesian prison as a terrain of struggle, I mean that the prison was doubly a space of repression and subversion, and that political prisoners were capable of challenging and negotiating their incarceration. I therefore seek to establish that although the Rhodesian prisons were centers of brutality, political detainees were not passive recipients of state penal terror as they actively negotiated, challenged, and subverted oppressive penal regulations. The thesis also argues that, as political hostages of the Rhodesian regime, detainees played a crucial role towards dislodging colonial rule both as producers of powerful critiques of the colonial regime from inside the prison confines and as symbols of African resistance. Methodologically, this project relies primarily upon the oral testimonies of ex-political prisoners, and the prison letters that most of them wrote whilst they were in detention. I also make use of little used documentary evidence such as court records and local African and state-controlled newspaper accounts.
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    On the frontline of caring: a history of African nurses in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe: 1940s -1996.
    (2012-07) Masakure, Clement
    This dissertation puts into focus African women who day and night toiled in hospitals, taking care of the infirm and healing the sick. I examine their hopes and aspirations, their daily work, their struggles and resilience in racialized and oppressive clinical spaces. In this dissertation, I argue that when African women entered colonial healing spaces as State Registered Nurses in the post Second World War period, they used the opportunity to showcase their potential, their expertise, and to contribute to the well being of their people. Using a variety of strategies to adapt to their racial and subaltern positions within clinical spaces, African women played a pivotal role in not only nursing sick bodies, but also nursing the nation, and their struggles within and outside hospitals were part of the larger struggles by ordinary Zimbabweans for self-determination and equality in colonial and post colonial Zimbabwe.
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    Reconceptualizing journalists under captured patrimonial media systems as a fractured interpretive community: The case of Zimbabwe
    (2023-07) Zirugo, Danford
    Journalists within a nation are often described as members of the same interpretive community, especially in liberal Western democracies where their working environments are characterized by stable democratic conditions. This is helped by a sense of cooperation between the news media and the state. Conditions are different in post-colonial nations of the Global South, however, where the relationship between the news media and democracy is not fully developed. In fact, most of the Global South countries are at various democratization stages. They do not have the same levels of press freedom and autonomy as found in North America and Western Europe. As a result, not only are debates about press freedom fierce, but journalistic roles and ethical orientations are also hotly contested. These different journalistic conditions offer an opportunity to examine how journalists in the Global South operate as an interpretive community. Zimbabwe is one such country where journalists have been polarized for the past two decades, amidst press freedom contests. The study examines this debate by looking at Zimbabwean journalists as a fractured interpretive community rhetorically engaged with social interlocutors during key moments like World Press Freedom, newspaper closures, media policy debates, obituaries, and anniversary commemorations. Guided by theories of metajournalistic discourse, post- colonial theory and ubuntuism, textual analysis and interviews are used to examine points of convergence and divergence among Zimbabwean journalists and non-journalists on their conceptualization of press freedom and journalistic roles. This analysis advances general propositions not only about how journalistic interpretive communities operate, but also about how they operate in various contexts and what factors must be considered in understanding how journalistic interpretive communities come into being or get disintegrated.