ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the mythology of spiritual ancestors mediates between self and political community, or self and homeland, in contemporary Zimbabwean political subjectivity. Reading Panashe Chigumadzi’s autobiographical essay These Bones Will Rise Again (2018) through the lens of “biomythography”, Moji relates Chigumadzi’s intimate memoir of her grandmother’s death to the prophetic words uttered by Mbuya (grandmother) Nehanda, a Shona spiritual leader in the first Chimurenga (struggle for independence), before she was killed by the colonial forces in 1898. As a political leader of the second Chimurenga (1966–1979) Robert Mugabe’s removal as president or “Father of the Nation” in November 2017 (touted by some as a fourth Chimurenga) forms the crux of Chigumadazi’s critique how the myth of the “Mother of the Nation” was appropriated and transformed Nehanda into a nationalist symbol by Zimbabwe’s ruling party ZANU-PF. Moji ultimately illustrates how These Bones Will Rise Again, as a bildungsroman of both the author and the Zimbabwean nation, reflects on the past, present, and possible futures of “revolutionary” struggle through the eyes of a new (and supposedly) born-free generation.
