Public Lecture: Beyond the Official Archive: Understanding Ngozi and Justice in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature; Speaker: Yemurai Gwatirisa

Abstract

What happens when the dead refuse to remain in the past? How might African cosmologies of spiritual accountability illuminate the unresolved injustices of genocide and political violence? And what forms of justice become imaginable when the dead return as agents demanding confession, reparation, and moral redress? This lecture examines how contemporary Zimbabwean literary texts, particularly Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009) and Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone (2019), grapple with how indigenous beliefs are used to understand questions of justice in the aftermath of traumatic historical experiences, including the Gukurahundi genocide of the early 1980s and the violent political turmoil of the early 2000s. Situated at the intersection of literary anthropology and African Indigenous Knowledge Systems, the lecture explores ngozi within Shona cosmology as a framework for understanding justice, historical accountability, and the enduring consequences of violence. Literary texts function as unofficial counter-archives capturing obscured historical experience. Harare North and House of Stone use spiritual presence and ancestral demands to narrate violence and confront unresolved injustice. Shona cosmology treats ngozi as a moral rupture requiring confession, ritual, and reparation. The dead act as metaphysical agents demanding redress, challenging secular or state-centred justice. The lecture argues that attending to ngozi yields a culturally grounded justice where historical violence imposes ethical claims, making restoration of relations inseparable from addressing past wrongs.

Yemurai Gwatirisa is an Adjunct Lecturer of German in the Department of Education and Language Skills, Faculty of Health and Education at Botho University in Gaborone, Botswana. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen University in Germany and in 2023, was awarded the African Peacebuilding Network Individual Research Fellowship by the Social Science Research Council. Her recent publications explore how fictional texts and poetry act as counter-archives that challenge official state narratives.

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/68432986862?pwd=sYvvqBCJ8r16dDKembVDsH65Rrxp94.1

Meeting-ID: 684 3298 6862
Code: U1FFHe6vf