Women as Artists in Contemporary Zimbabwe, and: Theatre, Performance and New Media in Africa (review)

The Bayreuth African Studies series continues to publish some of the most informative and interesting books on African cultural issues, often filling gaps left by other collections. Women as Artists in Contemporary Zimbabwe and Theatre, Performance and New Media in Africa extend that record.

The main strength of Kerstin Bolzt’s book is the amount of factual information it provides about the five chosen artists, for both their biographies and the cultural contexts that nurtured them. This should allow it to become a major reference book, spanning three different media. Stella Chiweshe and her daughter, Virginia Mukwesha, are musicians; the late Yvonne Vera was a writer; Ingrid Sinclair is a filmmaker; and Tsitsi Dangaremgba spans both literature and filmmaking.

Boltzt’s introduction examines the status of women’s creativity in various media during the precolonial, colonial, and independence periods. She also has a section on gender and nationalism in feminist theory, which is very useful, since her major thesis is that her chosen artists, while not necessarily defining themselves as feminists, mount major challenges to patriarchal attitudes, especially concerning women’s role in the postindependence nation. The rest of the book provides a methodical account of the chosen artists. In each chapter a biographical section is followed by a placing of the artist within the Zimbabwean traditions of her medium, followed by an analysis of the work itself, giving particular attention to innovations that challenge patriarchy.

The early chapters on Stella Chiweshe and Virginia Mukwesha spend much necessary space explaining the spiritual and political significance of their chosen musical instrument, the mbira. Bolzt relies heavily on earlier analyses by Paul Berliner and Moreblessing Chitauro, Caleb Dube, and Liz Gunner, but assembles this material and links it to the biographies of the mother and daughter musicians in a handy package that offers some fresh insights. The historical context shows how difficult it was for Chiweshe and Mukwesha to avoid being stereotyped as loose female entertainers, a fate that continues to threaten Zimbawean women artists nearly thirty years after independence.

The next section on Tsitsi Dangaremgba and Yvonne Vera requires less contextualization, since the bulk of their output has been literary. Bolzt methodically synopsizes Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions and Vera’s Nehanda, Without a Name, and Butterfly Burning. She shows how these novels deconstruct the myths of Zimbabwean womanhood, and particularly motherhood. Even though most of the novels are set in a precolonial or colonial period, Bolzt demonstrates how myths are so important in sustaining the hegemony of the postcolonial state that the novels of Dangaremgba and Vera continue to send uncomfortable reverberations through Zimbabwe’s ideological state apparatus.

In the case of Tsitisi Dangaremgba, in addition to anatomizing Nervous Conditions, Bolzt examines the reasons why the novelist became disenchanted with literature and moved into filmmaking. Bolzt pays particular attention to Neria, the widely acclaimed film about women’s legal rights in Zimbabwe. Bolzt’s narrative is sensitive to the dilemmas that Dangaremgba faces in her new career, particularly the contradiction between her filmmaking ambitions and the agenda set by the Non-Government Organizations and other sponsors who finance her films.

The last section in the book deals with Ingrid Sinclair’s film-making, focusing largely on her most famous film, Flame. Bolzt traces the familiar history of Sinclair’s problems with the Zimbabwean Government and ZNLWVA (the Zimbabwean National Liberation War Veterans Association), particularly bearing in mind her British origins. More subtly, however, Bolzt speculates on creative tensions caused by Sinclair’s need to project a female perspective of the Second Chimurenga, without undermining the genuine heroism of the male “comrades.”

There are some weaknesses in Women as Artists in Contemporary Zimbabwe. Occasionally the chilly hand of PhD thesis writing is rather too obtrusive, for example in the business-like...