Black Zimbabwean women and ‘jambanja’ in Eric Harrison's Jambanja (2006): An Africana Womanist exegesis

Abstract

This article discusses Eric Harrison's representation of black Zimbabwean women's participation in the country's post-2000 land reform programme in Jambanja (2006), an autobiographical text that narrates Harrison's/Harry's loss of Maioio Estate to new black owners in the Chiredzi District of Zimbabwe. It deploys Africana Womanist critical rubrics to advance the contention that Harrison misconstrues and misrepresents the struggles, experiences and motivations of black Zimbabwean women during the land reform programme, a process that is canonised in both popular Zimbabwean discourses and the text under analysis as jambanja, although, as will become clear in the unfolding of the discussion, the motivations for the representation of the process as such in the two areas are not concomitant. The touchstone of the critique is the observation that the African women's concern with self-definition and self-preservation that Harrison castigates in the narrative emerges against the historical backdrop of black subjugation during the heyday of colonialism and its informing ideology of white supremacy and black inferiority. This makes it pertinent that Harrison's Jambanja (2006) be examined in light of the emphasis that Asante (1998) and Hudson-Weems (2004) apply on the critical importance of the availability of the Afrocentric perspective in the discussion of all phenomena relating to the African experience in history.