The Noisy Silence of Gukurahundi
Truth, Recognition and Belonging
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4603680 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jocelyn Alexander (University of Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 763-785 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03057070.2021.1954356 |
| OpenAlex | W3205577510 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 23 |
A period of terrible state repression known as ‘Gukurahundi’ indelibly marked the foundational years of the Zimbabwean nation. The perpetrators of that period still hold power. It has never been subject to an official truth-telling process, nor have the responsible actors been held accountable. Instead, irreconcilable narratives about this past have interacted and, for those subjected to violence, proliferated, producing what I call a ‘noisy silence’ at the edges of the nation. This noise rumbles on because of a perpetual failure of public recognition of the violent past, but it does so in highly varied ways and to distinct purposes. I seek to trace the history of this noisy silence from its start in the irreconcilable narratives of the 1980s, themselves powerfully rooted in earlier liberation struggle ideas and relationships, through subsequent decades. Noisy silence sat in between an official, justificatory account of Gukurahundi on the one hand and the fearful, silenced memories of individuals on the other. It occupied a productive middle ground where collective, creative efforts delineated and demanded new political possibilities and terms of belonging through truth-telling, re-imagined and mourned nations and cross-generational attempts to heal and hold perpetrators to account
Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Silence · Sociology · State (computer science · Subject (documents · Truth telling · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Computer Science · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology
Surveillance oversight paradoxes of post-colonial transitions to democracy in Namibia and Zimbabwe
The (mis)Representation of “Illegal” Migrant Life
Family language policy tensions in Ndebele-Shona intermarriages
Unjust forgetting? Vosloo’s just memory and Mnangagwa’s forgetting in violently ruled Zimbabwe
Conceptualising and revealing political resistance in Zimbabwe through (re)naming roads in Bulawayo
Silence, the Unsaid and the Unsayable in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins
Multilingual contestations and the reproduction of English legitimacy in bottom-up linguistic landscape
Gukurahundism, Constitutionality and Ethnonationalist Language Policy Contestations
Response to Marzia Milazzo’s article “ ‘The Hand That Tried to Feed You
Claiming Space
Missing Gukurahundi archives
Discourse Structures, Weaponization of Language and Ethiopia’s Civil War
Gukurahundi as a Cultural Event
Operation Gukurahundi
The Hunger Games’
From “Hungry Translations” to “Co-Journeying”
Blurring the binaries of home/school in Family Language Policy
Violence, Memory and Resistance in Selected Highlanders FC Supporters’ Songs
Memory, nationalism and the media in Zimbabwe
A metaphorical reading of the name Gukurahundi_The_philosophy_concept and memory
Theorising Zimbabwe post-2017
Orphans of Matobo
Through the Camera's Eye
| Unique citing works | 23 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 7,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 22 |