ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Cathy Buckle’s book of letters Can You Hear the Drums? and partly on her autobiography African Tears. It presents Maria P. Lara’s theorisation of self-narratives by marginal groups as morally textured, to read Buckle’s letters as transformative narratives that reflect personal experiences of social injustice in affective ways that can compel readers to reflect on the justice of transformation. In Buckle’s letter, the time of violence is not merely an apologetic site for rejecting Third Chimurenga perceptions of the political significance of the time in which the Third Chimurenga is being prosecuted. The time of violence as defined by Buckle’s first encounter with farm invaders evokes the farm invaders’ conduct as manifesting selfish motives that are clearly removed from a genuine decolonising discourse concerned with the equitable use of land resources.
