Texts written by some white Zimbabweans in the post-2000 dispensation are largely shaped by their authors' endeavor to contest the loss of lands they held prior to the onset of the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP). Written as memoirs, these texts are bound by the tendency to fall back on colonial settler values, Rhodesian identities, and Hegelian supremacist ideas in their narration of aspects of a conflict in which tropes such as truth, justice, patriotism, and belonging were not only evoked but also reframed. This article explores manifestations of this tendency in Eric Harrison's Jambanja (2006) and Jim Barker's Paradise Plundered: The Story of a Zimbabwean Farm (2007). The discussion unfolds against the backdrop of the realization that much of the literary-critical scholarship on land reform in post-2000 Zimbabwe focuses on texts written by black Zimbabweans and does not attend to the panoply of ways in which some white-authored texts yearn for colonial structures of
This article explores the identity-construction capacity of place names. Since place names are icons of identity, and symbolic representations of a people's memory and belonging, the article analyses the use of place names in the creation of distinct racial identities for places in Salisbury (the presentday Harare) during the colonial era in Zimbabwe. This article views a place as a concept which goes beyond the physical dimension, since it is discursively constructed. The article gives special attention to Salisbury because it was the capital city of Rhodesia. As such the place-naming trends in Salisbury were repeated throughout the country. Place naming is part of the wider process of attaching an identity on the landscape partly because place names carry aspects of the lived experiences of a particular people. In addition, a name is a cultural symbol which projects fears, hopes, aspirations and the general belief system of a people. It is a critical component of the intangible heritage of a people. Rhodesia had a rigid system of racial segregation. The article examines the nature of the relationship between place naming and the colonial separate development policy given that the same colonial administrative system also superintended over the official place-naming system through approving and standardising all official geographical names. The article analyses three components of the built environment, namely street names in residential areas, names of residential areas and school names.
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