Pre-colonial and Colonial Violence in Zimbabwe: A Literary-cultural Exegesis

Violence has, in history, pervasively attended processes, events, and ideas of making and unmaking modern nation-states, more so in previously colonized societies where colonialism manifested as brute and psychic violence, and revolutionary wars of liberation became rites and routes of passages to liberation. Theorizing the physical but mainly mental processes of traversing such routes in his chapter “Concerning Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), the Martinique-born liberation psychiatrist Franz Fanon famously noted that decolonization is inherently a physically and psychologically violent phenomenon. Born out of violent forces in violent conditions by violent paternalists, the postcolonial nation is inevitably entangled in precarious cycles of violence with complex roots in pre-colonial and colonial violence. The violence as well as its memory palimpsests evolutionary trajectories of becoming and being postcolonial. Creative literature has long functioned as a fascinatingly complex site from which to encounter the many dimensions and dynamics of violence in Zimbabwe. The literary archive of violence multiplies lenses into the violence and how it occurs as a performed and experienced rite of nation-ness. Using purposefully selected scenes of pre-colonial and colonial violence from several Zimbabwean literary texts, this chapter explores their representations of violence, focusing on what they tell us about its immanence in the historical evolution of group identities and relations. Borrowing from Fanon’s insights on the psychology, materiality, and race of violence, the chapter centres violence as a temporal motif and concept that is fundamentally rhizomic in the social and political ordering of societies, branching out into many different leads that unravel its “necessity,” causes, forms, and nature.