“The Lion Has Learnt to Speak?” The Novel A Fine Madness and Third Chimurenga Counter-Discourse in Contemporary Zimbabwe

Abstract

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, for long an exclusive site of the party’s claims to political legitimacy. The Third Chimurenga often manifested in the form of political rhetoric by political leaders and reinforced by an array of cultural performances such as song and other forms of spectacular dramaturgy such as national commemorations. The literary text is the latest participant in the Third Chimurenga politics and aesthetics. In this article, I read Mashingaidze Gomo’s novel A Fine Madness as a Third Chimurenga literary narrative, centering on how its representations of the post-2000 political and economic crisis relates to the underlying counter-discourse of the empirical Third Chimurenga. This article dialogues with the nature of the connection between Gomo’s novel and the empirical Third Chimurenga. This reading reveals how the literary text exploits the affective and aesthetic dimensions of creative art to portray a vivid picture of the Third Chimurenga, which can move the reader to a new consciousness of issues around Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and the contemporary land politics.