The Flip Side: Re-visioning Zimbabwe’s Third Chimurenga Land Discourse in Lawrence Hoba’s Short Stories

During Zimbabwe’s past decade, which has been characterised by the state’s (re)configuration of black land ownership as the ultimate sign of liberation, creative literature has emerged as a fruitful site on which to encounter various discourses, versions, and subversions of the meaning of land. While several authors have explored the land and its significance to contemporary political and economic urgencies in terms of the state’s nativist narrative, the turn of the century saw the emergence of Zimbabwean writers who sought to chart alternative imaginings of land and its political, economic, and spiritual significance to the ordinary citizen. This article contends that the short stories in Lawrence Hoba’s collection The Trek and Other Stories epitomises this strand of narrative aesthetic in their critical engagement with the state’s narrative of land. It explores the short stories’ treatment of the land question, particularly their depiction of the ironic ambivalence of black beneficiaries of the government’s land resettlement programme. Finally, the article discusses Hoba’s symbolic characterisation and manipulation of the sincerity and clear-sightedness of the child narrator in constructions of ambiguity in the politics of land and decolonisation.