The New Prison Narrative in Zimbabwe: Re-Imagining (In)Justice in the Second Republic

Abstract

The prison has long functioned in Zimbabwe’s official post-colonial history as a symbolic, ideologised, and often politicised mnemonic of colonial injustice. This conception of the prison allows for its convenient summoning and implementation in hegemonic (neo)nationalist identity projects of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU PF) party. As a metaphor of colonial oppression and injustice, the colonial prison enters ZANU PF’s “patriotic” narratives of self-legitimation as a historical testament of nationalist rites of passage to political power that define and ring-fence nationalist sacrifice. It would be fascinating, in the context of the proliferation of various forms of prison narratives in post-colonial Zimbabwe, to consider what is (un)changing with the meaning of the prison vis-à-vis its paradoxical function as, on one hand, a symbolic monument archiving liberation struggle sacrifice and, on the other, a site of inspiration for incarcerated opposition activists to chart alternative forms of liberation from “liberation.” Using a purposefully selected set of prison writings and anecdotes, mostly in the form of epistles and speeches by jailed Zimbabwean opposition activists, this article argues that new prison narratives use the prison as an aesthetic and discursive metaphor for unsettling the state’s epistemic justice in Zimbabwe. Invoking Maria Pia Lara’s ideas about the disclosive effect of narratives by oppressed groups, the article looks at how certain aesthetic constructions of political victimhood in prison narratives create a new logic of justice. It explores the various ways in which the post-colonial prison in Zimbabwe is re-imagined in emerging prison narratives that portray it as emblematic of a new form of injustice that underscores the inherent instability of post-colonial justice in independent Zimbabwe.