Maurice Taonezvi Vambe
Biographic Data
| ID | 181780 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maurice Taonezvi Vambe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maurice Taonezvi |
| FAMILY NAME | Vambe |
| SIGNATURE | VAMBE M T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Africa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0070-5049 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Theorising Zimbabwe post-2017: A Literary and Imaginative Perspective
International and Zimbabwean scholars have correctly interrogated the negative consequences of the 16 November 2017 military coup in Zimbabwe by Emmerson Mnangagwa. Debating Zimbabwean politics post-2017 has also meant emphasising the continuation of Robert Mugabe’s politics imagined as unproblematically overflowing into the Mnangagwa post-2017 era. Critics from the social sciences continue to underplay the uniqueness of Mnangagwa’s coup in its p…
Zimbabwe: The Fall from a Jewel Status
This introduction prefaces a collection exploring why Zimbabwe, once a breadbasket in southern Africa, has fallen deeper into crisis. This article reflects on, reconceptualises, and critiques Zimbabwe’s socio-economic and political decline occasioned by ZANU PF’s militant nationalism. Contributors to this collection debate post-2017 Zimbabwe from historical, political, legal, gender, media, and literary perspectives. This interdisciplinary approa…
Moving Beyond Protest Sensibility: Chenjerai Hove’s Love and Other Ghosts (2009)
Chenjerai Hove is one of the most prolific writers in Zimbabwe in the English language. Hove has written novels, poetry and some critical essays. He has also written in the Shona language. Although, Hove's creative ouvre has received some important critical evaluation, most of these evaluations are on his novels. However, recently, critics have taken an interest in Hove's poetic works. In 2009, Chenjerai Hove completed a collection of poems calle…
Introduction: African and Diasporan Poetry
(2017). Introduction: African and Diasporan Poetry. Journal of Literary Studies: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 78-81
Playing with the Tensions between Animal and Human Allegories in Ignatius Mabasa's Novel Imbwa Yemunhu [ Youdog ]
This article aims to uncover how Ignatius Mabasa’s novel Imbwa Yemunhu [Youdog] (2013) uses story, narrative, and allegory as symbolical responses to a range of crises in contemporary Zimbabwe. The article analyzes how human experiences are recreated in the narrative form of allegory. Musa, the main character of the novel, reflects on and refracts his multiple lives through the prisms of hedonistic, nationalist, and Christological allegories. All…
Hypertextuality and the Economic Novel in Zimbabwe
Recent surges and advances in the popular use of electronic technology such as Internet, email, iPad, iPhone, and touch-screens in Africa have opened up great communicative possibilities among ordinary people whose voices were previously marginalized in traditional elitist media. People far apart geographically and living in different times can communicate rapidly and with great ease. This technological revolution has challenged and broken down b…
Violence and Genocide in African Literature and Film
Studies on violence and genocide in Africa have for many years relied on the disciplines of history, sociology, and individual testimonies to make sense of the crimes against humanity. The main justification for using anthropological and sociological accounts to explain violence and genocide in Africa has been encouraged by an empiricist research culture that relied on quantitative methods to measure the impact of violence and genocide in Africa.…
Violence, Cynicism and the Cinematic Spectacle of (Mis)Representing African Child Soldiers in Black Hawk Down and Blood Diamond
The aim of this article is to explain why and with what ideological effect Western film directors depict the African child soldier as victim, reluctant recruit and unwilling participant in Africa's violent wars in Black Hawk Down (Scott 2001) and Blood Diamond (Zwick 2007). Using Agamben's ideas of the “state of exception” (Agamben 2005) and the “paradox of sovereignty” (Agamben 1998), this article engages symbolical processes by which the formal…
Songs that won South Sudan's political independence: A Warchild perspective
The aim of this article is to explore the significance of the songs that enabled South Sudanese child soldiers to survive the horrors of the war of independence. The genre of the song has often been used to imagine the contours of new African nations but this has been done by men using the figure of women to represent the emergent nation. The views of children – let alone the war child through whose mind the images in the songs that create the ne…
Song, narration and nation in Africa
Children's welfare in Zimbabwean music: Insights from selected artists
While there has been a growing interest in protecting the rights of children globally, it is worth noting that there has been limited exploration of how Zimbabwean music addresses children. Scholarly studies on music in Zimbabwe have generally been characterised by the same weakness that runs through the study of literature: neglecting children's issues. For instance, as AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) has killed many parents and guard…
Music, land and liberation theology: Mai Charamba's ‘ Africa ’ and Fungisai Zvakavapano-Mashavave's ‘ Hamheno anoramba? ’
The aim of this article is to explore the textual meanings of Mai Charamba's song, Africa, and Fungisai Zvakavapano's Hamheno anoramba. This article investigates how the music of the two female artists expresses the subject of land, in the context of liberation theology. We have purposefully sampled these two artists – first, because they sing about ownership of land and natural resources, which are themes that dominate current discourses in Zimb…
Decolonising the ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ in women's fiction: Tsitsi Dangarembga'sShe No Longer Weeps(1987) and Federico Garcia Lorca'sDona Rosita the Spinister(2008)
The aim of this article is to participate in the debate on the ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ that is popularised in Latin America, and has found succour in some African universities despite the fact that its origin is in Western Europe. The article does not intend to be exhaustive of all the orphic dimensions to this debate; rather, we intent to raise questions on the suitability and timing of the introduction of this debate in Africa and Latin Ame…
Songs of Biafra: Contrasting Perspectives on the Igbo genocide in Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn: A novel of the Biafran War (1993) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2007)
The songs sung on the battlefront in Eastern Nigeria by Igbo people in their struggle for cultural and political autonomy from the rest of Nigeria between 1967 and 1970 have been described as ‘Biafra's powerful weapon’. The songs were used in mobilizing Biafrans to go to war, and imaginatively the songs suggested the possibility of an independent Biafra country ruled predominantly by the Igbo people, most of whom resented their discrimination in …
Popular songs and the creation and expansion of Shona orthography in Zimbabwe
Music research in Africa has tended to focus on the analysis of lyrics in search of overt political content. This has yielded enormous and sometimes incisive academic work. However, research in music is yet to explore the political economy of the infrastructure of music production from composition, recording, marketing and paying of royalties. One aspect of music research that has also received little scholarly attention is the role of songs not …
Introduction: Theorising African-Language Literatures in the Twenty-First Century
African-language literatures have grown in surges during the period of decolonisation that spans nearly 50 years. Despite impressive publications, two tendencies in the appreciation of African-language literatures have dominated: there is the literary quasi-anthropological perspective whose focus has been to excavate African-language literatures in search of preserved traditional African values, very much perceived as immutable. While this approa…
Fantastic Subversion of the African Postcolony in Songs of Enchantment
This article explores the elements of the fantastic in Ben Okri's novel Songs of Enchantment. The novel has received little critical attention on its own terms. In contrast, this article demonstrates that Songs of Enchantment contributes to African cultural renaissance by questioning the politics of Nigeria in particular and the African postcolony in general. This article argues that through the spirit-child, Azaro, Songs of Enchantment not only …
Zimbabwe genocide: Voices and perceptions from ordinary people in Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces, 30 years on
Studies on genocide in Zimbabwe in particular, and the world in general, focus on the number of people who die. However, significant attention now needs to be directed towards understanding the conditions under which the people of Matabeleland and the Midlands live after Gukurahundi. It is imperative to consider the importance of the voices, views and perceptions of the surviving victims regarding how they move on with their lives. Furthermore, i…
French genocide in Algeria: The role of memory in artistic representation of colonial violence in the novel,The Seine was Red (1999)
The aim of this article is to explore the role of the novel, The Seine was Red, in surfacing memories that reconstruct French genocide in Algeria. The article uses Leila Sebbar's novel, The Seine was Red, to demonstrate that immigrant communities in France in 1961 experienced violence from French police, and that this violence allows the author to manifest the layers of narratives of genocide in Algeria. The Seine was Red complicates the notion o…
Emerging perspectives on genocide and violence in Africa
Rethinking the notion of chimurenga in the context of political change in Zimbabwe
Chimurenga music was popularised by Africans during the struggle for independence in Zimbabwe in the 1970s. Its creators were freedom fighters struggling against colonialism. This music was articulated from guerrilla bases in Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia, and from some local artists inside Zimbabwe. Chimurenga music protested against the exploitation of Africans by colonialism, and also critiqued the oppression of women within African society.…
Introduction: Understanding African musical imaginary
Postcolonial shona fiction of zimbabwe
The aim of this article is to apply a version of postcolonial theory to understand the representations of struggles for land in the Shona novel of Zimbabwe. Since the year 2000 there has been an intensification of the use of language that describes land in Zimbabwe in terms that suggest that people have a common way of understanding and relating to this land. This language of oneness between Africans and the land attempts to forestall debate abou…
Theorising african-language literatures in the twenty-first century
Contributions of African literature to the African Renaissance
This article explores how African creative artists have participated – and continue to participate – in creating African identities that promote the idea of a cultural movement of African literary Renaissance. The article divides the phases of the African literary Renaissance into four cultural movements that emerged from the struggle against colonial oppression. The cultural nationalist artistic movement of the 1950s is discussed first, followed…
Popular Songs and Social Realities in Post-Independence Zimbabwe
The analysis of popular songs in post-independence Zimbabwe has received little attention. The few analyses that have been attempted remain fragmentary and notoriously insist on a uniform worldview for the singers. This tends to blur ideological differences in the sensibilities of the singer's response to the realities of independence. Moreover, an overemphasis on a homogenous perspective on independence by the singers also tends to underestimate…
Zimbabwe genocide: Voices and perceptions from ordinary people in Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces, 30 years on
Studies on genocide in Zimbabwe in particular, and the world in general, focus on the number of people who die. However, significant attention now needs to be directed towards understanding the conditions under which the people of Matabeleland and the Midlands live after Gukurahundi. It is imperative to consider the importance of the voices, views and perceptions of the surviving victims regarding how they move on with their lives. Furthermore, i…
Zimbabwe's creative literatures in the interregnum: 1980–2009
Creative literary cultures, unlike the visible political institutions such as education, law and the security forces, are less amenable to total destruction even in the face of the most brutal and dictatorial regimes. The possibilities that creative cultures can be manipulated by tyrants can never be doubted and in post-independence Zimbabwe, the scars of abuse of creativity by the ruling elites abound. However, creative literary cultures work wi…
Elements of the abject and the romantic in the novelInyenzi: A Story of Love and Genocide(2007)
One of the major challenges of writing the Rwandan genocide is how to move away from figuring it as a spectacle, without minimising the significance of the genocide in the cultural history of Rwanda. Although nearly a million Tutsis and some moderate Hutus perished in the Rwandan genocide, some Tutsis and moderate Hutus survived. Yet very little creative art has devoted itself to exploring in metaphors and images how these people survived. Celebr…
Racializing ethnicity and ethnicizing racism: Rethinking the epistemic conditions of genocide in Africa
This article examines and critiques current scholarship on African genocide. It begins by considering the theoretical approaches to the study of genocide and outlines some of the pitfalls that should be avoided. The discussion then moves to an analysis of the work of Mahmood Mamdani Mamdani , M. ( 2004 ). Beyond settler and native as political identities: Overcoming the political legacy of colonialism . Paper presented at the First Conference of …
Thomas Mapfumo's ‘Toi Toi’ in context: Popular Music as Narrative Discourse1
A central motif in Paul Gilroy's exploration of ‘Black Atlantic Sounds’2 is the paradoxical way in which popular music names and marks its discursive territory as it attempts to assign meanings to
Orality in the Black Zimbabwean Novel in English
The question of the extent to which African orality exerts an influence on the black Zimbabwean novel in English has taken centre stage in recent critical debates. One view is that a revived African cultural nationalism during the war of liberation claimed for its own purposes that African orality was always resistant to colonial policies. According to this view, colonialism’s attempt to suppress African culture instead generated among Africans a…
Zimbabwe: The Fall from a Jewel Status
This introduction prefaces a collection exploring why Zimbabwe, once a breadbasket in southern Africa, has fallen deeper into crisis. This article reflects on, reconceptualises, and critiques Zimbabwe’s socio-economic and political decline occasioned by ZANU PF’s militant nationalism. Contributors to this collection debate post-2017 Zimbabwe from historical, political, legal, gender, media, and literary perspectives. This interdisciplinary approa…
Hypertextuality and the Economic Novel in Zimbabwe
Recent surges and advances in the popular use of electronic technology such as Internet, email, iPad, iPhone, and touch-screens in Africa have opened up great communicative possibilities among ordinary people whose voices were previously marginalized in traditional elitist media. People far apart geographically and living in different times can communicate rapidly and with great ease. This technological revolution has challenged and broken down b…
Amilcar Cabral: National Liberation as the Basis for Africa's Renaissances
One of the major critical issues of debate in Africa is the question of revitalizing African cultures. In South Africa, this has been given the name of African renaissance, and it is perceived as a continental ideology. However, debates are mired in essentialisms that have obscured rather than clarified the potentially unifying effect of the notion in Africa. In this article we contribute to the critical debate on the meanings of African renaissa…
The portrayal of Africans in agricultural films of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe): 1940S to 1950s
One of the most effective cultural tools used by the colonial governments in Africa to make their rule acceptable to African indigenous populations was film. In Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) the colonial government created the Central Film Unit whose major aim was to teach Africans new agricultural methods. The response by Africans to this colonial initiative was mixed. Some welcomed and enjoyed the films and made use of the skills that the fi…
Fictional depictions of land resistance in southern Africa
Due to the political past of most of the southern African countries, land restitution and land redistribution are imperatives for political, social and economic stability ... the land reform cannot b
History and the ideology of narrative in Charles Mungoshi'sNdiko Kupindana Kwamazuva(1975)
It is the intention of this essay to analyze one of Mungoshi's novels in the Shona language: Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva (How Time Passes). It has been acclaimed as stylistically Mungoshi's most innovative creative work. Critics Emmanuel Chiwome and Vitalis Nyawaranda have each drawn attention to the use of the technique of ‘stream of consciousness’ in the novel. Other than merely asserting that Mungoshi borrowed this technique from the Irish write…
Dambudzo Marechera's Black Sunlight: Carnivalesque and the subversion of nationalist discourse of resistance in Zimbabwean literature
This paper examines Black Sunlight (1980), a novel by Dambudzo Marechera, in the light of critical reappraisal of narratives of national resistance in the 1990s in Zimbabwe. Black Sunlight was published in 1980, the year of Zimbabwe's independence when most black Zimbabweans viewed the coming of that independence as the vindication of Nehanda's prophecy that her “bones” shall rise and Africans will rule themselves. Novelists such as Edmund Chipam…
Popular Songs and Social Realities in Post-Independence Zimbabwe
The analysis of popular songs in post-independence Zimbabwe has received little attention. The few analyses that have been attempted remain fragmentary and notoriously insist on a uniform worldview for the singers. This tends to blur ideological differences in the sensibilities of the singer's response to the realities of independence. Moreover, an overemphasis on a homogenous perspective on independence by the singers also tends to underestimate…
The instabilities of national allegory: The case of Dambudzo Marechera's the house of hunger and black sunlight
HIV/Aids, African sexuality and the problem of representation in Zimbabwean literature
Fiction is one site where the elements of African sexuality are represented both as static reality and sometimes as dramatised cultural debate. The major aim of this article is to see how far the cultural context of the transmission of the disease as represented in Zimbabwean literature confirms colludes with or else interrogates Zimbabwean notions about how it is spread from person to person. Representation is itself a source of social knowledge…
Thomas Mapfumo's ‘Toi Toi’ in context: Popular Music as Narrative Discourse1
A central motif in Paul Gilroy's exploration of ‘Black Atlantic Sounds’2 is the paradoxical way in which popular music names and marks its discursive territory as it attempts to assign meanings to
Orality in the Black Zimbabwean Novel in English
The question of the extent to which African orality exerts an influence on the black Zimbabwean novel in English has taken centre stage in recent critical debates. One view is that a revived African cultural nationalism during the war of liberation claimed for its own purposes that African orality was always resistant to colonial policies. According to this view, colonialism’s attempt to suppress African culture instead generated among Africans a…
Fictional depictions of land resistance in southern Africa
Due to the political past of most of the southern African countries, land restitution and land redistribution are imperatives for political, social and economic stability ... the land reform cannot b
History and the ideology of narrative in Charles Mungoshi'sNdiko Kupindana Kwamazuva(1975)
It is the intention of this essay to analyze one of Mungoshi's novels in the Shona language: Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva (How Time Passes). It has been acclaimed as stylistically Mungoshi's most innovative creative work. Critics Emmanuel Chiwome and Vitalis Nyawaranda have each drawn attention to the use of the technique of ‘stream of consciousness’ in the novel. Other than merely asserting that Mungoshi borrowed this technique from the Irish write…
Musical rhetoric and the limits of official censorship in Zimbabwe
Cultural critics of the Zimbabwean government argue that the passing into law of the 75 percent requirement of local content on television and radio is the most visible expression of musical censorship. The critics argue that control of television and radio helps the government to censor the content of music of those singers whose visions of Zimbabwe do not agree with that of the ruling Zanu-PF. While the idea of 100 per cent local content on the…
Amilcar Cabral and the fortunes of African literature
An able political leader, profound cultural theorist and provocative philosopher of the African struggle for freedom, Amilcar Cabral remains one of the significant African revolutionaries. His theoretical works, particularly National Liberation and Culture, Return to the Source, Identity and Dignity in the Context of the Liberation Struggle and The Weapon of Theory have influenced the direction of creativity in African literature in significant w…
The depiction of black women in popular songs and some poems on Aids in post-independence Zimbabwe
The most serious health concern in Zimbabwe today is the alarming spread of HIV/AIDS. Since 1987, the state radio stations, television channels, public and private print media have been at the forefront, giving information about the AIDS pandemic to the people. But as Danlabi Musa observes, ‘diversity’ and bigger audience are not the function of channel multiplicity’ but have also to do with “...access and programming” (Musa, in Gecau et al. 1996…
The portrayal of Africans in agricultural films of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe): 1940S to 1950s
One of the most effective cultural tools used by the colonial governments in Africa to make their rule acceptable to African indigenous populations was film. In Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) the colonial government created the Central Film Unit whose major aim was to teach Africans new agricultural methods. The response by Africans to this colonial initiative was mixed. Some welcomed and enjoyed the films and made use of the skills that the fi…
Notes on theorizing black diaspora from Africa1
The aim of this article is to offer a critique of Kwame Anthony Appiah's article, ‘New literature, new theory’ (2000 Appiah, K. A. 2000. ‘New literature, new theory?’. Matatu, 7: 57–89. [Google Scholar]), and Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony (2001 Mbembe Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]).These two critical voices have become widely accepted in European and Afric…
Aya Mahobo: Migrant labour and the cultural semiotics of Harare (Mbare) African township, 1930–1970
The boom in the manufacturing industry in Salisbury in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in Rhodesia demanded stabilized inflows of controllable labour. European administration attempted to control, monitor and limit the movement of African labour within the township. To some degree, the colonial governments succeeded in ‘fencing off’ Africans from European‐designated activities. However, in the Mbare and Magaba areas of Harare, some Africans engaged in…
ALT 26 War in African Literature Today
A new song? Subverting discourses of death and ancestral purity in Zimbabwe's music
The aim of this article is to explore the changing perceptions on the discourses of death and purity as articulated in African popular music. In African traditional cultures, the death of a human being is considered a sacred event. It is viewed with fear, confusion and as dislocator of assumed human connectivity and it is then considered inhuman to celebrate the death of tyrant, dictator and even common thieves. African poetry abound in imagery t…
Diaspora, music, identity and desti/nations in Southern Africa
This article explores the notion of a diaspora and identity in the context of Southern Africa musical cultures. Musical diaspora studies have tended to analyse songs re-recorded in contexts separated from the settings of the initial recordings and production. While this has generated a wealth of critical works and encouraged an awareness of how lyrics migrate from one setting to another, this has not encouraged explorations of musical lyrics by s…
Copyright protection of ringtones in South Africa
In the wake of the current quicksilver advances in technology, generally speaking, intellectual property has had its share of the benefits, and losses, of the exploitation of online works. In copyright law, as in other aspects of intellectual property (Matheson and Bonny 2007 Matheson , J. A. and A. Bonny . 2007 . Text messages: Common short codes – the next venue for trademark disputes? Trademark World 196 (April 2007): 20 . [Google Scholar], 20…
Autobiographical representations of the Rwanda genocide and black diasporic identities in Africa
This article uses the example of the Rwandan genocide to deconstruct notions of African diaspora based on margin to centre and pull and push factors. Representing patterns of African migrations and diasporas through the autobiographical mode reveals multiple genocides that took place not only in Rwanda but in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Umutesi's novel, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (2004) complicates our…
Amilcar Cabral: National Liberation as the Basis for Africa's Renaissances
One of the major critical issues of debate in Africa is the question of revitalizing African cultures. In South Africa, this has been given the name of African renaissance, and it is perceived as a continental ideology. However, debates are mired in essentialisms that have obscured rather than clarified the potentially unifying effect of the notion in Africa. In this article we contribute to the critical debate on the meanings of African renaissa…
Changing nationalist politics in African fiction
The aim of this paper is to explore the transformations taking place in the images of African nationalist politics as depicted in African fiction from Zimbabwe and to examine the new roles that these creative artists have assumed in postcolonial Africa. It is argued that guerrillas in the second Zimbabwe liberation struggle (1963–79) described themselves as ‘comrades’, ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘war veterans’ and that even after the war of 1980–2008…
Racializing ethnicity and ethnicizing racism: Rethinking the epistemic conditions of genocide in Africa
This article examines and critiques current scholarship on African genocide. It begins by considering the theoretical approaches to the study of genocide and outlines some of the pitfalls that should be avoided. The discussion then moves to an analysis of the work of Mahmood Mamdani Mamdani , M. ( 2004 ). Beyond settler and native as political identities: Overcoming the political legacy of colonialism . Paper presented at the First Conference of …
Introduction: The Power of Autobiography in Southern Africa
Biography became an important method of reconstructing the past in Britain and America only in the nineteenth century and by the second quarter of the twentieth century it had, in radical circles at least, come to be regarded as inferior historiography. The cult of the great leader or the record of a person possessed of exceptional qualities may once have justified life stories but in a discipline that was becoming preoccupied with the movements …
Introduction: Fractured Experiences and Porous Narratives
A recent study of Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Autobiography offers a window through which most notable writers from South Africa use self-representation to question and define notions of self, how they relate earlier to later selves and to others, thereby constituting collective and personal identities (Coullie, Meyer, Ngwenya & Olver 2006: 1). The volume foregrounds auto-/biographers' acts of narration through the genre of…
Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo's The Story of My Life
The aim of this article is to critically analyse the problems of the ideologies of narrativity raised in Joshua Nkomo's autobiography The Story of My Life. When this Zimbabwean version of the book was published in 2001, there were speculations and “gossip” that its contents had been tampered with by the Zimbabwean editor. However, a close comparison with the contents of the first edition published by Methuen of London, revealed that there were no…
Sociology (53 works) · Political science (47 works) · Law (41 works) · Art (37 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (34 works) · History (34 works) · Literature (32 works) · Politics (32 works) · Gender Studies (31 works) · Aesthetics (25 works)