Literary Texts as Sites of Alternative Memorialisation, Memory-Making and Archive-Making

The representation of the Gukurahundi genocide in the official or state archives focuses on narratives propagated mainly by state-run newspapers. These narratives focus mainly on how the genocide was a government intervention in weeding out dissidents. The official archives do little in capturing the lives and deaths of the victims and survivors. Given such a situation, fictional literary texts have been important in offering sites of imagining alternative visions of Gukurahundi, especially the experiences of victims. A burgeoning body of literary texts such as Yvonne Vera’s Stone Virgins, Christopher Mlalazi’s Running with Mother and Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone has fictionalised Gukurahundi and offered depictions which at times have revealed the graphic violence of this genocide. Thinking with Achille Mbembe’s theorisation of the “archivable” and “unarchivable”, we argue that fictional literary narratives make it possible to archive narratives which have been denied a place in official state archives and deemed unarchivable. Fictional literary narratives create alternative archives of Gukurahundi and engender alternative ways of remembering the genocide and creating memories of it.