ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a "rights reading" of the Zimbabwean folktale tradition as masterfully retold by Charles Mungoshi in Stories from a Shona Childhood. A "rights reading" is a critical enquiry aimed at instilling the virtues of questioning as the very basis of democratic, rights-driven, ethical citizenship. It promotes reading and thinking risks and conditions for re-reading community as well as the kinds of narrative we retell when we perform tradition. By changing the lens on the same body of narratives, through "rights reading", it is possible to locate the possibilities of a "local" literary/cultural theory; critique ideology as common sense. The absence of a reading that might transform the significance of the drought from being the basis of an anti-colonial political imaginary to a permanent sense of agitation against any form of cultural and material lack and social emergency is because readers are expected to draw insinuations when confronted by postcolonial regime and its knack of repeating colonial experiences.
