Nationalist Defence: Just Whose Agenda Is It? A Look at the Placement of Women in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War Novels

When analysing the role of gender in conflict the first myth that needs to be exploded is that of the absence of women from the battleground. As this paper examines the placement of women in issues of national defence an analysis of the tenets of nationhood, nationalism will be carried out through the discussion of Zimbabwe’s liberation war novels. Textual analysis supported by secondary sources reveals the trend by the authors (especially the male ones) to trivialize the contributions of the women who ‘dare’ to go to war. What emerges in this research which is anchored in Africana Womanism, is that the issue if nationalist service is still fraught with gender overtones even though the past 20 or 50 years have seen a number women getting positions of authority in politics – female Chairperson of the African Union, female Prime Minister in Liberia, female Vice President in Zimbabwe, female Vice Prime Minister in Zimbabwe only to mention a few. This little number shows that the battle for female representation in matters of the nation is not yet over. It is ‘not yet uhuru’ for women. Previous writings on the marginalisation of women simply scratched on the surface of the matter and did not dig up the real problem, the foundation of the problem,that of nationalism as a gendered discourse, for this is where all issues of marginalisation emerged.