Current Institutional Affiliation
Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts, University of Zimbabwe

Award Information

Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa: Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship 2016
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
Drama Department, University of Cape Town
Chains of Memory in the Postcolony: Performing collective remembering in Namibia and Zimbabwe.

This study investigates the performative representations and remembrance practices of two specific historical events ie. the German government-initiated aggression on the indigenous people in present day Namibia from 1904 to 1908. The second event is the Zimbabwean government-led aggression against the people settled in the Midlands and South Western regions of Zimbabwe from 1982 to 1987. The research pays attention to how contemporary performative representations of these chronologically, and geographically distinct events evokes and facilitates remembering of the events, in the countries themselves and the diaspora. The research is an engagement with memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in remembrance performances of mass violence in the postcolony. The research seeks to investigate the relationship that exists at the intersection of violence, memory and space. It pays attention to how memory is remembered and performed in what I argue are two unacknowledged historical episodes of genocide.

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