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 research interests include memory culture, cross and intercultural studies, the teaching of German as a foreign language, gender, and literary studies. In addition, she worked as an intercultural trainer and trainer of trainers for the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg’s projects, “Pre-integration – Living and Working in Germany (AMIF)” and “Mein Weg nach Deutschland (MWnD).” She is also a co-author of “Und jetzt WIR,” a German textbook for learners in Africa, currently used in numerous schools across the continent.
MIASA Project: Imagining retributive/reparative justice within Shona indigenous cosmologies in contemporary Zimbabwean literature
This research project foregrounds African epistemologies in ongoing global debates about justice, trauma, and reconciliation. Drawing on Shona cosmology, the study positions concepts such as ngozi and mamhepo as critical lenses through which to reimagine retributive and restorative justice in the aftermath of traumatic events in Zimbabwe’s history. Zimbabwean literary texts such as Chikwava’s Harare North (2009) and Tshuma’s House of Stone (2019) are key when grappling with the question of avenging spirits in the aftermath of traumatic experiences such as the Gukurahundi genocide of the early 1980s and the bloody political turmoil of the early 2000s. These literary texts offer a valuable literary site to explore cosmological logics of justice. In Shona belief, the presence of ngozi and mamhepo signifies a marked rupture in the moral fabric of a society, thus suggesting that justice is not simply juridical, as in Western epistemologies, but rather metaphysical and intergenerational.
Selected publications
Gwatirisa, Yemurai. “Representation and memorialisation of the Gukurahundi genocide in Zimbabwe. ” In Agyepong, Dorothy Pokua, et al., eds. Teaching Transformations: Trends in Sub-Saharan Africa. Aisthesis Verlag, 2025.
Ncube, Gibson, and Yemurai Gwatirisa. “Naming and Remembering the Unsayable.” Subversion, Resistance and Contestations: The Politics of Names and Naming in Zimbabwe 50, 2025.
Gwatirisa, Yemurai. Building Sustainable Peace through the Arts in Zimbabwe: Policy Options in the Post-Gukurahundi. Social Science Research Council, 2024.
Ncube, Gibson, and Yemurai Gwatirisa. “Literary Texts as Sites of Alternative Memorialisation, Memory-Making and Archive-Making.” Remembering Mass Atrocities: Perspectives on Memory Struggles and Cultural Representations in Africa. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023.
Chikwangura-Gwatirisa, Yemurai. “Remembering a Traumatic Past: The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Zimbabwe.” Namibian Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Communication Studies 16.2, 2022.
