Girls of War and Echoes of Liberation: Engaging Female Voices through Chimurenga Songs about Zimbabwe’s Armed Struggle

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholarship on war songs in Zimbabwe tends to emphasise male-centred discourses that ignore the role of female combatants’ views and voices of the struggle in “narrating the nation” (with H. K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 1990). The aim of this article is to restore female voices by female combatants to convey their own realities about Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. Although there are many songs sung by women about the armed struggle, this article samples three songs to demonstrate that women used different methods to raise people’s political consciousness through the power of song. The songs to be textually analysed are “Zvinozibwa neZANU” (“Only ZANU knows about it”); “Tora Gidi Uzvitonge” (“Take the gun and liberate yourself”) and “Kugarira Nyika Yavo” (“To defend their country”). This article will demonstrate how women singers broke the silence by fighting in the liberation of Zimbabwe through the gun and the song.