Representations of the land reform programme in selected Zimbabwean short stories and Mutasa’s Sekai, Minda Tave Nayo (Sekai, We Now Have the Land): A fait accompli?
Keywords:
Zimbabwe Jambanja, Chimurenga, Fast Track Land Reform, Xenophobic dispossession, land Imbalances.Abstract
The issue of the Land Redistribution Programme in the Zimbabwean literary geography is vexed and
moot. This is because, like the politics which energised it, it is embedded in different ideological, social,
economic, racial, gender and ethnic standpoints. It is this that makes some writers see it as a grand act
of final decolonisation whose intention was to empower landless black natives. On the other hand,
others see its bloody and violent nature and the attendant survival imperatives as something that will
have to be addressed in future because it created other imbalances. There are yet others who try to
straddle the two extreme positions by looking at the programme’s negatives and positives. The
research interrogates how this momentous period in Zimbabwe’s life is represented in literature and
why the different writers take the positions they take. In doing this, the researchers use selected
English short stories produced after 2000 and a Shona novel on the same issue. The stories are written
by both white and black writers.
