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Acknowledgements First and foremost, the editors would like to express thanks to each other for manfully broaching the subject of manhood at a time when much of the enthusiasm about ‘real men’ has been depleted by the current crisis in Zimbabwean nationalism and patriarchy. Our tentative probing of the subject in August 2004 at the Zimbabwe Book Fair grounds, amid the noises of bees and hailers, and subsequent intellectual exchanges on the subject, have convinced us that the book has a place in the current struggles in Zimbabwe. Recent events have also convinced us that entrenched interests in Zimbabwean politics do get unsettled with good books, as even a mere biography by Edgar Tekere, one of the fathers of the nation, elicited hostile responses from a sterner father of the nation, Robert Mugabe: ‘The machinery is not biographies, the people who vote for us are the ordinary people of Zimbabwe’. (He imagined the book as a missile aimed to unseat him from power!) We want to thank Irene Staunton of Weaver Press, for her patience with the editors and contributors. With deadlines constantly shifting, some writers dropping out at critical stages in the development of the book, she did not give up. We must also thank Irene and Murray for their constant search for newer subjects, and the sacrifice this entails. May they live to be more than ‘8 plus 3’ years! Kizito would like to thank his colleague Robert Muponde, a tireless communicator who has managed to establish links across three continents on this book project. Robert thanks Kizito for his very stimulating insights and critical passion and a positive stubborn spirit without which he would not have been able to survive his life-threatening workplace and the deprivations associated with hostile anti-intellectual cultures. It was Kizito’s idea to start collaborative research on the subject of ‘fathers and fathering of stories ’ in Zimbabwe. Our greatest indebtedness goes to the contributors who believed in the project. We thank them for their excellent essays, their time and energy, as well as for the contribution they have made to this growing field of study. Last but not least, we thank our families in allowing us to invest so much of their valuable time into a project that we hope will turn us into better men and kinder fathers. ix x ...

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