Oliver Nyambi
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 653233 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Oliver Nyambi |
| PRENOMES | Oliver |
| SOBRENOME | Nyambi |
| ASSINATURA | NYAMBI O |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of the Free State |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7080-9951 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 28 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2014 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
“Doc, He Was Strangled by Diabetes!”
In the South African episode of AI Murray’s comedic documentary series Why Does Everyone Hate the British Empire? , he features the popular South African comedian Loyiso Gola as a local commentator tasked with interrogating the lingering vestiges of British colonialism in the country. Gola, whose usual comedy thrives on the absurdities of colonial and Apartheid projects in South Africa, deploys humour to reflect on colonial and Apartheid remains …
Visuality, sick bodies, and the politics of the healthcare crisis in Zimbabwe
Country and countryhood
Country is a recurring metaphoric trope in NoViolet Bulawayo’s novels, Glory and We Need New Names, that layers multiple meanings of the nation as a post-colonial political project. This trope recurs in neo-nationalist discourses where competing constructions of progress in Zimbabwe pervade, for instance, the former President Mugabe’s personalising discourses of Zimbabwe as his, and the current President Mnangagwa’s linguistic constructs of post-…
Contested Liberations, Transitions and the Crisis in Zimbabwe
How and when does culture enter the discourse on liberation, transition and crisis in an African post-colony such as Zimbabwe? In a deeply polarised nation reeling from a difficult transition and an unrelenting economic crisis, it is increasingly becoming difficult for the ZANU PF regime to prescribe and enforce its monolithic concept of liberation. This book culls, from contemporary (counter)cultures of liberation and transition, the state of li…
Global Coloniality and Ecological Injustice in Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were (2021)
Postcolonial environmentalism in Africa explores interactions between humans and nature in the context of intensifying ecological violence in the aftermath of formal colonialism and its trademark violence of extractive power. As a critical approach that stresses the influence of colonial remains in everyday socio-political processes and relations, postcolonial environmentalism has been widely deployed to examine the interconnected relationship be…
Virtual Disclosures and Self-emancipations
Online social sites have become popular platforms for reimagining the self and (re)constructing identities. In a consumer-orientated neoliberal global order where bodies have become products to be branded, packaged and marketed, social networks have become ideal platforms for the representation and identification of bodies. Although some studies have examined the discursive construction of identities online, few have focused on the representation…
Such a Thing Does Not Have a Name in his Country
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…
Cultures of Change in Contemporary Zimbabwe
“Beyond the Limits of the Dream”
Myth is notably a complex cultural reality that can be approached and interpreted from various viewpoints. Myths generally tell stories about deities or heroic beings. They can be classified into three types: creation myths, eschatological myths, which describe catastrophic ends of the world and myths of gods and goddesses. What we find in the poetry of Okigbo is a combination of all these myths. Myths are the products of a racial or tribal group…
The Zimbabwean Crisis after Mugabe
Rooting routes to trans-Atlantic African identities
The making and continuous shifts of African identities outside Africa have attracted interest from across critical disciplines. Imaginative literature has achieved a considerable status as a site and optic for critical engagement with evolving dynamics of the diasporization of African identities. This article sets out to extend what is known about this ‘function’ of literature by looking at how representations of female experiences of forced tran…
Land (In)Justice and Ambiguous Conservationisms in Cathy Buckle's Letters of the Zimbabwean Crisis
It is more than two decades now since the earliest state-endorsed appropriations of mostly white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe. The Third Chimurenga – or Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, as the land takeovers were later on officially tagged – triggered an unprecedented economic cataclysm from which the country is struggling to emerge. Over the years, there has been a rush to document, in multiple archives, experiences of the Third Chimureng…
Zulu Poems of (and for) Nature
Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of "lady nature," nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli'sImvunge Yemveloto explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond …
What is behind Myth and History in Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros focuses on its representation of myth and history; narrates the story of St. Lucia with reference to the history of wars and slavery and relates mythical references with common people of St. Lucia. This article analyzes the politics behind the use of myth and history of Caribbean by using alternative modernity vis-a-vis Caribbean discourse. Through mythical references, Walcott revives the native history of St. Lucia as…
Online images and imaginings of home
Migration, be it national or transnational, is often a disruptive and traumatising experience that brings with it loneliness and homesickness. This article investigates how migrants from QwaQwa in the Eastern Free State Province in South Africa (re)imagine and (re)visualize the homeland away from home through social networking. QwaQwa is a remote mountanous area located in the Eastern Free State Province of South Africa. Like most remote areas ar…
Life-Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe
This book explores the unique contributions of various forms of post-2000 life-writings such as the autobiography, epistles, and biographies, to discourses about the nature and socio-politics of what has become known as the Zimbabwean crisis (c. 2000–2009). Much of what has been written about the Zimbabwean crisis – a decade-long period of unprecedented economic collapse and political upheavals in the southern African country – is strictly discip…
Similarity in the conceptions of heroic character of India’s epic Ramayana and Vietnamese’s epic Damsan
The epic was born at the dawn of humanity, depicting great events of the era when society transformed itself from primitive communal society to a higher organizational form. Epic is a complete picture of people’s lives in the form of telling the story of a hero in the past. In epics, heroic characters play a central role in the epic art world, representing the spirit, talent, courage. Through the hero symbol in the epic, a symbol for community as…
A divided nation? Ethnicity, name-calling and nicknames in cyber Ndebele soccer discourse in Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, ethnicity has long informed the ways people make sense of their membership to the nation. Sport has since the turn of the century emerged as one of the major sites for the performance of ‘patriotic’ and subversive notions of ‘unity in diversity’. This article explores the significance of nicknaming and name-calling by Highlanders Football Club fans on virtual spaces, in illuminating the ethnic threat to dominant conceptions of nation…
Characterisation of unconventional exor-anthroponyms in sport
This study concerns itself with nicknames of Zimbabwean soccer players with a view to understanding not only the process or act of their creation and ascription and the various power dynamics attendant on the processes, but also the nicknames’ semantic and aesthetic structures. The paper argues that the fans’ primary drive to nickname players suggests their intention to participate in a group action that can influence player performance, create, …
Of Bob, Madzibaba Gabriel, and Goblins
Prior to his recalling by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) amid national protests in 2017, Zimbabwe's former president, Robert Mugabe, had, for close to four decades, managed to sustain his rule even when odds seemed overwhelmingly against him. Many studies have broached several aspects of his power-retention strategies and public responses to his rule, mostly from "pure" political science perspectives. This ar…
The Blair that I know is a toilet
Most studies on the political power conundrum in post-2000 Zimbabwe have concentrated more on overt and oftentimes contested manifestations of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) party’s power retention strategies such as violence, intimidation and electoral fraud. The role of language and other subtle forms of political campaign and hegemonic sustenance such as nicknaming is still a grey area. This article argues…
The Postcolonial Condition of Names and Naming Practices in Southern Africa
“The Lion Has Learnt to Speak?” The Novel A Fine Madness and Third Chimurenga Counter-Discourse in Contemporary Zimbabwe
Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised and operationalized the Third Chimurenga—a cache of anti-colonial, anti-West, and anti-opposition narratives that essentially re-constructs political power as inextricably bound up with the liberation struggle, …
Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’
This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbabwe’s national football teams (‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’) to point towards the possibilities they provide for theorising the political (ab)use of the warrior identity in hegemonic (re)constructions of national identity. Unarguably the most popular sport in Zimbabwe, football has become a potential site for the political (re)inscription of national identi…
No more plastic balls”
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspect…
Of weevils and gamatox
Since replacing Ndabaningi Sithole as the party leader in 1975, Robert Mugabe has managed to hold on to power in spite of overt and covert internal and external machinations to the contrary. However, as age is apparently beginning to take its toll on his durability, the succession debate is increasing its tempo. Underlying the discourse of events, processes, personalities, accusations and counter-accusations in this debacle is language. Language …
Such a Thing Does Not Have a Name in his Country
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…
Rooting routes to trans-Atlantic African identities
The making and continuous shifts of African identities outside Africa have attracted interest from across critical disciplines. Imaginative literature has achieved a considerable status as a site and optic for critical engagement with evolving dynamics of the diasporization of African identities. This article sets out to extend what is known about this ‘function’ of literature by looking at how representations of female experiences of forced tran…
Global Coloniality and Ecological Injustice in Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were (2021)
Postcolonial environmentalism in Africa explores interactions between humans and nature in the context of intensifying ecological violence in the aftermath of formal colonialism and its trademark violence of extractive power. As a critical approach that stresses the influence of colonial remains in everyday socio-political processes and relations, postcolonial environmentalism has been widely deployed to examine the interconnected relationship be…
The Blair that I know is a toilet
Most studies on the political power conundrum in post-2000 Zimbabwe have concentrated more on overt and oftentimes contested manifestations of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) party’s power retention strategies such as violence, intimidation and electoral fraud. The role of language and other subtle forms of political campaign and hegemonic sustenance such as nicknaming is still a grey area. This article argues…
Silenced Voices, Resuscitated Memory, and the Problematization of State Historiography in Yvonne Vera's Novel The Stone Virgins
In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in discourses on constructions and reconstructions of national identity. The history of the Gukurahundi (the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe in the early to late 1980s) continues to dominate debates on the politics of ethnic exclusion in contemporary Zimbabwe. This article explores the place of creative fiction in this p…
Land (In)Justice and Ambiguous Conservationisms in Cathy Buckle's Letters of the Zimbabwean Crisis
It is more than two decades now since the earliest state-endorsed appropriations of mostly white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe. The Third Chimurenga – or Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, as the land takeovers were later on officially tagged – triggered an unprecedented economic cataclysm from which the country is struggling to emerge. Over the years, there has been a rush to document, in multiple archives, experiences of the Third Chimureng…
A divided nation? Ethnicity, name-calling and nicknames in cyber Ndebele soccer discourse in Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, ethnicity has long informed the ways people make sense of their membership to the nation. Sport has since the turn of the century emerged as one of the major sites for the performance of ‘patriotic’ and subversive notions of ‘unity in diversity’. This article explores the significance of nicknaming and name-calling by Highlanders Football Club fans on virtual spaces, in illuminating the ethnic threat to dominant conceptions of nation…
Of Bob, Madzibaba Gabriel, and Goblins
Prior to his recalling by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) amid national protests in 2017, Zimbabwe's former president, Robert Mugabe, had, for close to four decades, managed to sustain his rule even when odds seemed overwhelmingly against him. Many studies have broached several aspects of his power-retention strategies and public responses to his rule, mostly from "pure" political science perspectives. This ar…
Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’
This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbabwe’s national football teams (‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’) to point towards the possibilities they provide for theorising the political (ab)use of the warrior identity in hegemonic (re)constructions of national identity. Unarguably the most popular sport in Zimbabwe, football has become a potential site for the political (re)inscription of national identi…
Cultured to Fail? Representations of Gender-Entangled Urban Women in Two Short Stories by Valerie Tagwira
There is a subtle yet discernible connection between the post-2000 political power struggle and the gender struggle in Zimbabwe. In both cases, a patriarchal power hierarchy shaped by tradition and history is perpetuated and justified as the mark of the nation’s unique identity. In cultural, political, and economic spheres, the status of most urban Zimbabwean women is still reflected as inferior to that of most men. During this economic and polit…
Silenced Voices, Resuscitated Memory, and the Problematization of State Historiography in Yvonne Vera's Novel The Stone Virgins
In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in discourses on constructions and reconstructions of national identity. The history of the Gukurahundi (the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe in the early to late 1980s) continues to dominate debates on the politics of ethnic exclusion in contemporary Zimbabwe. This article explores the place of creative fiction in this p…
The Postcolonial Condition of Names and Naming Practices in Southern Africa
“The Lion Has Learnt to Speak?” The Novel A Fine Madness and Third Chimurenga Counter-Discourse in Contemporary Zimbabwe
Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised and operationalized the Third Chimurenga—a cache of anti-colonial, anti-West, and anti-opposition narratives that essentially re-constructs political power as inextricably bound up with the liberation struggle, …
Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’
This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbabwe’s national football teams (‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’) to point towards the possibilities they provide for theorising the political (ab)use of the warrior identity in hegemonic (re)constructions of national identity. Unarguably the most popular sport in Zimbabwe, football has become a potential site for the political (re)inscription of national identi…
No more plastic balls”
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspect…
Of weevils and gamatox
Since replacing Ndabaningi Sithole as the party leader in 1975, Robert Mugabe has managed to hold on to power in spite of overt and covert internal and external machinations to the contrary. However, as age is apparently beginning to take its toll on his durability, the succession debate is increasing its tempo. Underlying the discourse of events, processes, personalities, accusations and counter-accusations in this debacle is language. Language …
The Blair that I know is a toilet
Most studies on the political power conundrum in post-2000 Zimbabwe have concentrated more on overt and oftentimes contested manifestations of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) party’s power retention strategies such as violence, intimidation and electoral fraud. The role of language and other subtle forms of political campaign and hegemonic sustenance such as nicknaming is still a grey area. This article argues…
A divided nation? Ethnicity, name-calling and nicknames in cyber Ndebele soccer discourse in Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, ethnicity has long informed the ways people make sense of their membership to the nation. Sport has since the turn of the century emerged as one of the major sites for the performance of ‘patriotic’ and subversive notions of ‘unity in diversity’. This article explores the significance of nicknaming and name-calling by Highlanders Football Club fans on virtual spaces, in illuminating the ethnic threat to dominant conceptions of nation…
Characterisation of unconventional exor-anthroponyms in sport
This study concerns itself with nicknames of Zimbabwean soccer players with a view to understanding not only the process or act of their creation and ascription and the various power dynamics attendant on the processes, but also the nicknames’ semantic and aesthetic structures. The paper argues that the fans’ primary drive to nickname players suggests their intention to participate in a group action that can influence player performance, create, …
Of Bob, Madzibaba Gabriel, and Goblins
Prior to his recalling by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) amid national protests in 2017, Zimbabwe's former president, Robert Mugabe, had, for close to four decades, managed to sustain his rule even when odds seemed overwhelmingly against him. Many studies have broached several aspects of his power-retention strategies and public responses to his rule, mostly from "pure" political science perspectives. This ar…
Life-Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe
This book explores the unique contributions of various forms of post-2000 life-writings such as the autobiography, epistles, and biographies, to discourses about the nature and socio-politics of what has become known as the Zimbabwean crisis (c. 2000–2009). Much of what has been written about the Zimbabwean crisis – a decade-long period of unprecedented economic collapse and political upheavals in the southern African country – is strictly discip…
Similarity in the conceptions of heroic character of India’s epic Ramayana and Vietnamese’s epic Damsan
The epic was born at the dawn of humanity, depicting great events of the era when society transformed itself from primitive communal society to a higher organizational form. Epic is a complete picture of people’s lives in the form of telling the story of a hero in the past. In epics, heroic characters play a central role in the epic art world, representing the spirit, talent, courage. Through the hero symbol in the epic, a symbol for community as…
What is behind Myth and History in Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros focuses on its representation of myth and history; narrates the story of St. Lucia with reference to the history of wars and slavery and relates mythical references with common people of St. Lucia. This article analyzes the politics behind the use of myth and history of Caribbean by using alternative modernity vis-a-vis Caribbean discourse. Through mythical references, Walcott revives the native history of St. Lucia as…
Online images and imaginings of home
Migration, be it national or transnational, is often a disruptive and traumatising experience that brings with it loneliness and homesickness. This article investigates how migrants from QwaQwa in the Eastern Free State Province in South Africa (re)imagine and (re)visualize the homeland away from home through social networking. QwaQwa is a remote mountanous area located in the Eastern Free State Province of South Africa. Like most remote areas ar…
Cultures of Change in Contemporary Zimbabwe
“Beyond the Limits of the Dream”
Myth is notably a complex cultural reality that can be approached and interpreted from various viewpoints. Myths generally tell stories about deities or heroic beings. They can be classified into three types: creation myths, eschatological myths, which describe catastrophic ends of the world and myths of gods and goddesses. What we find in the poetry of Okigbo is a combination of all these myths. Myths are the products of a racial or tribal group…
The Zimbabwean Crisis after Mugabe
Rooting routes to trans-Atlantic African identities
The making and continuous shifts of African identities outside Africa have attracted interest from across critical disciplines. Imaginative literature has achieved a considerable status as a site and optic for critical engagement with evolving dynamics of the diasporization of African identities. This article sets out to extend what is known about this ‘function’ of literature by looking at how representations of female experiences of forced tran…
Land (In)Justice and Ambiguous Conservationisms in Cathy Buckle's Letters of the Zimbabwean Crisis
It is more than two decades now since the earliest state-endorsed appropriations of mostly white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe. The Third Chimurenga – or Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, as the land takeovers were later on officially tagged – triggered an unprecedented economic cataclysm from which the country is struggling to emerge. Over the years, there has been a rush to document, in multiple archives, experiences of the Third Chimureng…
Zulu Poems of (and for) Nature
Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of "lady nature," nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli'sImvunge Yemveloto explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond …
Such a Thing Does Not Have a Name in his Country
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…
Virtual Disclosures and Self-emancipations
Online social sites have become popular platforms for reimagining the self and (re)constructing identities. In a consumer-orientated neoliberal global order where bodies have become products to be branded, packaged and marketed, social networks have become ideal platforms for the representation and identification of bodies. Although some studies have examined the discursive construction of identities online, few have focused on the representation…
Contested Liberations, Transitions and the Crisis in Zimbabwe
How and when does culture enter the discourse on liberation, transition and crisis in an African post-colony such as Zimbabwe? In a deeply polarised nation reeling from a difficult transition and an unrelenting economic crisis, it is increasingly becoming difficult for the ZANU PF regime to prescribe and enforce its monolithic concept of liberation. This book culls, from contemporary (counter)cultures of liberation and transition, the state of li…
Global Coloniality and Ecological Injustice in Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were (2021)
Postcolonial environmentalism in Africa explores interactions between humans and nature in the context of intensifying ecological violence in the aftermath of formal colonialism and its trademark violence of extractive power. As a critical approach that stresses the influence of colonial remains in everyday socio-political processes and relations, postcolonial environmentalism has been widely deployed to examine the interconnected relationship be…
Political science (22 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (19 obras) · Art (15 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Aesthetics (14 obras) · Politics (13 obras) · African history and culture studies (11 obras) · Gender Studies (11 obras) · History (11 obras)