Slow repair: gender and restorative justice in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article reports on a ceremony gone awry at Kufunda Village, Zimbabwe, in which women had refused to follow a gendered cultural script of forgiveness and had instead released rather than slaughtered a chicken. They thus reinscribed old symbols with new meanings as a means of contesting patriarchy and beginning a slow process of restorative justice. Kufunda Village was set up as a direct response to conditions of postcolonial modernity in Zimbabwe: the village’s inhabitants see themselves as engaged in a process of learning new ways of inhabiting Zimbabwe in the aftermath of the socioeconomic collapse of the post-2000 era. This paper presents a detailed ethnographic examination of this locally generated example of an invented- tradition-in-process to argue that the refusal of “quick” forgiveness allowed for the development of a slower, more processual form of restorative justice that was seen as being more likely to succeed. I contrast this form of slow change to larger-scale internationally generated models of transitional justice that have been rolled out in the country. I argue that any attempts at restorative justice in Zimbabwe need to recognise justice as a slow, processual and uneven process that needs to incorporate multiple hidden and overt harms.