ABSTRACT
Blood, Sweat and Treason represent a shifting dynamic in literary engagements with the Zimbabwean post-2000 economic and political crisis. Henry Olonga’s autobiography presents a unique “sporting” vista into ways of seeing and theorising the Zimbabwean post-2000 crisis. Sport became part of a national narrative for which, invoking its unique characteristics as a competitive group social phenomenon, Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front could circulate and entrench its hegemonic fictions of national solidarity, unity of purpose, and patriotism. In Zimbabwe, sport at the national level creates a momentary situation when the politically dominant idea of nation and contestations to it clearly plays out. Across the world, sport has long been a potential site for political contestations. The history of intranational and international sport is littered with political polarisations, constructions, and deconstructions of certain personal and social, and localised and nationalised identities.
