T Mangena
Biographic Data
| ID | 47250 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Mangena |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Mangena |
| SIGNATURE | MANGENA T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Great Zimbabwe University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2333-763X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Narratives of Shona Divorcees: Decolonial Challenges to African Feminist Thought
Although marriage was highly valued in Shona traditions, missionary Christianity introduced a much more rigid, monogamous marriage in which women were domesticated as (house)wives and mothers and economically dependent on their breadwinner husbands. African feminisms, which emerged in response to Western feminist hegemony, have not always adequately interrogated this norm of marriage and its impact on women. Sidelining single women, especially di…
Kubereka: Singleness, childlessness and non-biological mothering in Shona culture
This article uses the Shona concept of kubereka (procreation or carrying a child on the back) to examine never-married women’s experiences of joys and anxieties surrounding (non)biological mothering in a socio-cultural context whose constructions of parenthood and motherhood reveal multiple contradictions. Shona cultural norms suggest that ‘everyone has a child’ in the sense that kinship systems always position individuals as parents in some rela…
Reimagining ecological justice: Intersections of Unhu and African eco-feminism in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Tsitsi Mapepa’s Ndima Ndima
Precarity of the (Employed and Unemployed) Educated in Zimbabwe in Valerie Tagwira’s Trapped (2020)
Zimbabwean writer Valerie Tagwira's novel Trapped (2020, Harare: Weaver Press) is set in Harare between the latter part of 2016 and November 2017, the period leading to the ousting of Robert Mugabe, the late former president of Zimbabwe, from power. The novel provides a glimpse into the lives of three protagonists, all of whom are university graduates, (un)employed, and forced to hustle for survival. Through these characters, Tagwira dramatises t…
Personal Names, Naming and Identity (Re)negotiation among Zimbabweans in the Diaspora
This article discusses how Zimbabweans in the diaspora name their children to think through the dynamics of diasporic identity negotiation. Using qualitative data gathered through virtual ethnography, I grapple with the question how names and naming strategies allow Zimbabweans in the diaspora to imagine and negotiate what it means to belong to home and being in the diaspora. I make two conclusions from this study. First, I argue that there is a …
Personal names and naming theoretical concepts in selected texts of Yvonne Vera and Petina Gappah
This article analyses the ways in which two internationally renowned Zimbabwean women writers, Yvonne Vera and Petina Gappah, show a fascination with names in their novels, and in the process call attention to theories and key concepts about personal names and naming practices. One of the main aims of this article is to complement the isolated discussions of the value of names as narrative strategies in Vera and Gappah’s novels. In particular, th…
Hauntings of the metaphysical empire? Anthroponomic patterns in contemporary Zimbabwe
In this article, we discuss personal names and naming patterns in contemporary Zimbabwe as a way of thinking through the hauntings of the metaphysical empire. We are interested in how the metaphysical empire, particularly through the process of linguicide, ‘invaded’ the ‘mental’ space of the colonized and significantly changed the way people use English and indigenous languages to name children. We examine anthroponomic patterns to tease out cert…
Gendering roles, masculinities and spaces: Negotiating transgression in Charles Mungoshi’s and other writings
This article discusses perceptions of Shona dominant masculinities in Charles Mungoshi’s and other writings. The texts analysed in this article are set in different socio-historical contexts – during the colonial and stretching to the contemporary times; in rural, urban and diaspora spaces. Collectively, the texts offer the reader textual spaces to trace the strategies used by heteropatriarchal dominant masculinities to maintain dominance within …
Narratives of women in politics in Zimbabwe’s recent past: The case of Joice Mujuru and Grace Mugabe
This study analyses media narratives of Joice Mujuru’s fall from Zimbabwe’s political hierarchy and Grace Mugabe’s speeches during the “Meet the People” rallies that were held in Zimbabwe’s ten political provinces between 2015 and 2017. Media texts about Joice Mujuru’s political demise are analysed as reproductions of gender stereotypes used to justify women’s marginalisation in politics, while Grace Mugabe’s speeches are read as political perfor…
Such a Thing Does Not Have a Name in his Country: Entanglements of Diaspora and 'Home' Homes in the Zimbabwean Short Story of Crisis
Home, crisis and migration have defined the experience and concept of being post-colonial Zimbabwe(an) for the past two decades. Much has been written about the post-coloniality of this entangled experience and about how, in particular, literary fiction re-discourses normative perspectives of the Zimbabwean crisis, the home, the unhomely and trans-national out-migration. Rarely considered a serious discursive site from which to (re)know the intri…
The Zimbabwean Crisis after Mugabe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Female bodies, agency, real and symbolic violence during the coronavirus pandemic: The experiences of women politicians and activists in Zimbabwe
In May 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joana Mamombe, Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova, all members of the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance, participated in a demonstration to draw attention to escalating poverty among vulnerable communities during the COVID-19-induced lockdown. Immediately after the demonstration they were allegedly abducted, tortured and sexually violated by State security agents. In response to these alle…
Rhodes, Mugabe and the Politics of Commemorative Toponyms in Zimbabwe
This paper is based on former Zimbabwean President Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s ninety-third birthday celebrations. It uses and goes beyond the said ceremony to interrogate the politics of commemorative toponyms in post-independence Zimbabwe. The event took place on 25 February 2017 at a school whose name Rhodes Estate Preparatory School (REPS) was changed to Matopos Junior School prior to the celebrations. The methodological framing of this discussio…
Cultural appropriation and (mis)translation in Petina Gappah’s ‘Washington’s wife decides enough is enough
Based on a close reading of ‘Washington’s wife decides enough is enough’, which is taken from Rotten row, this paper discusses how Gappah deploys the themes of cultural appropriation and (mis)translation to anchor the tensions between tradition and modernity. In the focal story, the writer uses the conflict between a mother-in-law and daughter–in-law to foreground the social and cultural appropriation of the Shona cultural nudity curse, its subse…
The Woman Victim in a Country in Crisis: A Reading of Tagwira's The Uncertainty of Hope
The article is based on my reading of Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope as a feminist text that portrays female victimhood in the context of a failing postcolonial state. Tagwira writes about the experiences of a woman against the background of Murambatsvina, officially termed ‘‘Operation Clean Up.’’ The Zimbabwean Operation Clean Up of 2005 was condemned worldwide; and in her novel, Tagwira gives an often-ignored dimension of a woman’s e…
Figurative and symbolic function of animal imagery in packaging human behaviour in Ndebele and Shona cultures
This paper sets out to discuss how the Shona and Ndebele people of Zimbabwe make use of animal imagery to refer to human behaviour and habits in various situations. In this context, animal traits are drawn from both domestic and wild animals. A discussion of such a conception of human behaviour shall demonstrate that although animalisation largely seeks to denigrate and dehumanise, it is also used to acknowledge positive human qualities. This pap…
Rethinking African Sexualities in the Context of Hiv and Aids: The Life and Death Discourse of ‘Modernised Polygamy’ in Sue Nyathi's the Polygamist
This article is a study of Sue Nyathi's novel The Polygamist as a cultural production dealing with African modern polygamy1 in the context of HIV and AIDS. What is termed ‘modern polygamy’ in this article is a practice where men have several ‘wives’ but not in the African traditional sense, especially within the Shona culture, but in the sense of what is popularised as a ‘small house’ phenomenon. Nyathi's novel is discussed within the following f…
Reflections on how Selected Shona and Ndebele Proverbs Highlight a Worldview that Promotes a Respect and/or a Violation of Children’s Rights
This paper sets out to demonstrate that though the un Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) is the most widely accepted Human Rights Convention and Zimbabwe is one of the 193 states acceding to the treaty, there are still challenges in the promotion of children’s rights. Irrespective of the fact that human rights discourse is believed to be a modern concept and its universal application is contested, this paper also demonstrates that child…
Suffer Little Children: Zimbabwean Childhood Literary Representations in the Context of Crisis
A closer reading of post – independence Zimbabwean short stories shows that childhood is more complex than its traditional conceptions. There are various diverging childhood depictions in literature. is paper explores these divergences, focusing initially on how children are represented as possessing what Muponde and Chihota (2000) call 'taboo shattering instincts in a diseased society'. In societies where there are clear human rights violations,…
Rhodes, Mugabe and the Politics of Commemorative Toponyms in Zimbabwe
This paper is based on former Zimbabwean President Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s ninety-third birthday celebrations. It uses and goes beyond the said ceremony to interrogate the politics of commemorative toponyms in post-independence Zimbabwe. The event took place on 25 February 2017 at a school whose name Rhodes Estate Preparatory School (REPS) was changed to Matopos Junior School prior to the celebrations. The methodological framing of this discussio…
Such a Thing Does Not Have a Name in his Country: Entanglements of Diaspora and 'Home' Homes in the Zimbabwean Short Story of Crisis
Home, crisis and migration have defined the experience and concept of being post-colonial Zimbabwe(an) for the past two decades. Much has been written about the post-coloniality of this entangled experience and about how, in particular, literary fiction re-discourses normative perspectives of the Zimbabwean crisis, the home, the unhomely and trans-national out-migration. Rarely considered a serious discursive site from which to (re)know the intri…
Female bodies, agency, real and symbolic violence during the coronavirus pandemic: The experiences of women politicians and activists in Zimbabwe
In May 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joana Mamombe, Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova, all members of the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance, participated in a demonstration to draw attention to escalating poverty among vulnerable communities during the COVID-19-induced lockdown. Immediately after the demonstration they were allegedly abducted, tortured and sexually violated by State security agents. In response to these alle…
Narratives of women in politics in Zimbabwe’s recent past: The case of Joice Mujuru and Grace Mugabe
This study analyses media narratives of Joice Mujuru’s fall from Zimbabwe’s political hierarchy and Grace Mugabe’s speeches during the “Meet the People” rallies that were held in Zimbabwe’s ten political provinces between 2015 and 2017. Media texts about Joice Mujuru’s political demise are analysed as reproductions of gender stereotypes used to justify women’s marginalisation in politics, while Grace Mugabe’s speeches are read as political perfor…
Personal Names, Naming and Identity (Re)negotiation among Zimbabweans in the Diaspora
This article discusses how Zimbabweans in the diaspora name their children to think through the dynamics of diasporic identity negotiation. Using qualitative data gathered through virtual ethnography, I grapple with the question how names and naming strategies allow Zimbabweans in the diaspora to imagine and negotiate what it means to belong to home and being in the diaspora. I make two conclusions from this study. First, I argue that there is a …
Figurative and symbolic function of animal imagery in packaging human behaviour in Ndebele and Shona cultures
This paper sets out to discuss how the Shona and Ndebele people of Zimbabwe make use of animal imagery to refer to human behaviour and habits in various situations. In this context, animal traits are drawn from both domestic and wild animals. A discussion of such a conception of human behaviour shall demonstrate that although animalisation largely seeks to denigrate and dehumanise, it is also used to acknowledge positive human qualities. This pap…
Suffer Little Children: Zimbabwean Childhood Literary Representations in the Context of Crisis
A closer reading of post – independence Zimbabwean short stories shows that childhood is more complex than its traditional conceptions. There are various diverging childhood depictions in literature. is paper explores these divergences, focusing initially on how children are represented as possessing what Muponde and Chihota (2000) call 'taboo shattering instincts in a diseased society'. In societies where there are clear human rights violations,…
Suffer Little Children: Zimbabwean Childhood Literary Representations in the Context of Crisis
A closer reading of post – independence Zimbabwean short stories shows that childhood is more complex than its traditional conceptions. There are various diverging childhood depictions in literature. is paper explores these divergences, focusing initially on how children are represented as possessing what Muponde and Chihota (2000) call 'taboo shattering instincts in a diseased society'. In societies where there are clear human rights violations,…
Reflections on how Selected Shona and Ndebele Proverbs Highlight a Worldview that Promotes a Respect and/or a Violation of Children’s Rights
This paper sets out to demonstrate that though the un Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) is the most widely accepted Human Rights Convention and Zimbabwe is one of the 193 states acceding to the treaty, there are still challenges in the promotion of children’s rights. Irrespective of the fact that human rights discourse is believed to be a modern concept and its universal application is contested, this paper also demonstrates that child…
Rethinking African Sexualities in the Context of Hiv and Aids: The Life and Death Discourse of ‘Modernised Polygamy’ in Sue Nyathi's the Polygamist
This article is a study of Sue Nyathi's novel The Polygamist as a cultural production dealing with African modern polygamy1 in the context of HIV and AIDS. What is termed ‘modern polygamy’ in this article is a practice where men have several ‘wives’ but not in the African traditional sense, especially within the Shona culture, but in the sense of what is popularised as a ‘small house’ phenomenon. Nyathi's novel is discussed within the following f…
Figurative and symbolic function of animal imagery in packaging human behaviour in Ndebele and Shona cultures
This paper sets out to discuss how the Shona and Ndebele people of Zimbabwe make use of animal imagery to refer to human behaviour and habits in various situations. In this context, animal traits are drawn from both domestic and wild animals. A discussion of such a conception of human behaviour shall demonstrate that although animalisation largely seeks to denigrate and dehumanise, it is also used to acknowledge positive human qualities. This pap…
The Woman Victim in a Country in Crisis: A Reading of Tagwira's The Uncertainty of Hope
The article is based on my reading of Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope as a feminist text that portrays female victimhood in the context of a failing postcolonial state. Tagwira writes about the experiences of a woman against the background of Murambatsvina, officially termed ‘‘Operation Clean Up.’’ The Zimbabwean Operation Clean Up of 2005 was condemned worldwide; and in her novel, Tagwira gives an often-ignored dimension of a woman’s e…
Cultural appropriation and (mis)translation in Petina Gappah’s ‘Washington’s wife decides enough is enough
Based on a close reading of ‘Washington’s wife decides enough is enough’, which is taken from Rotten row, this paper discusses how Gappah deploys the themes of cultural appropriation and (mis)translation to anchor the tensions between tradition and modernity. In the focal story, the writer uses the conflict between a mother-in-law and daughter–in-law to foreground the social and cultural appropriation of the Shona cultural nudity curse, its subse…
Rhodes, Mugabe and the Politics of Commemorative Toponyms in Zimbabwe
This paper is based on former Zimbabwean President Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s ninety-third birthday celebrations. It uses and goes beyond the said ceremony to interrogate the politics of commemorative toponyms in post-independence Zimbabwe. The event took place on 25 February 2017 at a school whose name Rhodes Estate Preparatory School (REPS) was changed to Matopos Junior School prior to the celebrations. The methodological framing of this discussio…
The Zimbabwean Crisis after Mugabe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Female bodies, agency, real and symbolic violence during the coronavirus pandemic: The experiences of women politicians and activists in Zimbabwe
In May 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joana Mamombe, Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova, all members of the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance, participated in a demonstration to draw attention to escalating poverty among vulnerable communities during the COVID-19-induced lockdown. Immediately after the demonstration they were allegedly abducted, tortured and sexually violated by State security agents. In response to these alle…
Narratives of women in politics in Zimbabwe’s recent past: The case of Joice Mujuru and Grace Mugabe
This study analyses media narratives of Joice Mujuru’s fall from Zimbabwe’s political hierarchy and Grace Mugabe’s speeches during the “Meet the People” rallies that were held in Zimbabwe’s ten political provinces between 2015 and 2017. Media texts about Joice Mujuru’s political demise are analysed as reproductions of gender stereotypes used to justify women’s marginalisation in politics, while Grace Mugabe’s speeches are read as political perfor…
Such a Thing Does Not Have a Name in his Country: Entanglements of Diaspora and 'Home' Homes in the Zimbabwean Short Story of Crisis
Home, crisis and migration have defined the experience and concept of being post-colonial Zimbabwe(an) for the past two decades. Much has been written about the post-coloniality of this entangled experience and about how, in particular, literary fiction re-discourses normative perspectives of the Zimbabwean crisis, the home, the unhomely and trans-national out-migration. Rarely considered a serious discursive site from which to (re)know the intri…
Personal names and naming theoretical concepts in selected texts of Yvonne Vera and Petina Gappah
This article analyses the ways in which two internationally renowned Zimbabwean women writers, Yvonne Vera and Petina Gappah, show a fascination with names in their novels, and in the process call attention to theories and key concepts about personal names and naming practices. One of the main aims of this article is to complement the isolated discussions of the value of names as narrative strategies in Vera and Gappah’s novels. In particular, th…
Hauntings of the metaphysical empire? Anthroponomic patterns in contemporary Zimbabwe
In this article, we discuss personal names and naming patterns in contemporary Zimbabwe as a way of thinking through the hauntings of the metaphysical empire. We are interested in how the metaphysical empire, particularly through the process of linguicide, ‘invaded’ the ‘mental’ space of the colonized and significantly changed the way people use English and indigenous languages to name children. We examine anthroponomic patterns to tease out cert…
Gendering roles, masculinities and spaces: Negotiating transgression in Charles Mungoshi’s and other writings
This article discusses perceptions of Shona dominant masculinities in Charles Mungoshi’s and other writings. The texts analysed in this article are set in different socio-historical contexts – during the colonial and stretching to the contemporary times; in rural, urban and diaspora spaces. Collectively, the texts offer the reader textual spaces to trace the strategies used by heteropatriarchal dominant masculinities to maintain dominance within …
Precarity of the (Employed and Unemployed) Educated in Zimbabwe in Valerie Tagwira’s Trapped (2020)
Zimbabwean writer Valerie Tagwira's novel Trapped (2020, Harare: Weaver Press) is set in Harare between the latter part of 2016 and November 2017, the period leading to the ousting of Robert Mugabe, the late former president of Zimbabwe, from power. The novel provides a glimpse into the lives of three protagonists, all of whom are university graduates, (un)employed, and forced to hustle for survival. Through these characters, Tagwira dramatises t…
Personal Names, Naming and Identity (Re)negotiation among Zimbabweans in the Diaspora
This article discusses how Zimbabweans in the diaspora name their children to think through the dynamics of diasporic identity negotiation. Using qualitative data gathered through virtual ethnography, I grapple with the question how names and naming strategies allow Zimbabweans in the diaspora to imagine and negotiate what it means to belong to home and being in the diaspora. I make two conclusions from this study. First, I argue that there is a …
Reimagining ecological justice: Intersections of Unhu and African eco-feminism in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Tsitsi Mapepa’s Ndima Ndima
Narratives of Shona Divorcees: Decolonial Challenges to African Feminist Thought
Although marriage was highly valued in Shona traditions, missionary Christianity introduced a much more rigid, monogamous marriage in which women were domesticated as (house)wives and mothers and economically dependent on their breadwinner husbands. African feminisms, which emerged in response to Western feminist hegemony, have not always adequately interrogated this norm of marriage and its impact on women. Sidelining single women, especially di…
Kubereka: Singleness, childlessness and non-biological mothering in Shona culture
This article uses the Shona concept of kubereka (procreation or carrying a child on the back) to examine never-married women’s experiences of joys and anxieties surrounding (non)biological mothering in a socio-cultural context whose constructions of parenthood and motherhood reveal multiple contradictions. Shona cultural norms suggest that ‘everyone has a child’ in the sense that kinship systems always position individuals as parents in some rela…
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (12 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · History (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)