ABSTRACT
This chapter is centred on portrayals of movement between urban and rural space in Zimbabwe: Shimmer Chinodya’s latest novel Strife (2006), Lawrence Hoba’s short story collection The Trek and Other Stories (2009), and Place of Birth (2006) by the Australian-Zimbabwean writer Graham Lang. The discussion focuses in particular on the ideological and political semantics of rural and urban space in recent Zimbabwean writing in English, and to the conflicts which can occur when literary figures move from one place to another. The selected texts engage with a long-standing literary imaginary revolving around a perceived dichotomy between village and city which endures in literatures from diverse African regions and literary periods. The three texts show that the Third Chimurenga is obsessed with marking out difference and at the same time remarkably negligent of different spatial realities and histories: it lumps together diverse rural localities (villages in the communal lands, big commercial enterprises, small holder farms created from formerly white-owned commercial enterprises) into one terrain which carries the burden of a nativist fantasy of authenticity and belonging and is imagined in opposition to the urban.
