Heroes and Heroines in Zimbabwean Fiction

This paper was developed from a talk that I gave on heroes and heroines in Zimbabwean fiction at the now defunct Book Café in Harare, Zimbabwe. By the time they invited me, my hosts had already come up with a clearly demarcated guideline of who heroes and heroines are, and connected these heroes and heroines to what they called 'revered' values of 'our' society. My response was not to follow that template, but to create a separate deconstructionist taxonomy that questioned such an assumption. This deconstructionist adventure was based on the belief that heroes/heroines are not the same for everyone, especially in a post-independence Zimbabwean society characterised by conditions that are far removed from the promises of independence. Thus, in a country whose independence has been postponed because of various factors, including a leadership whose form of governance involves violence against its citizens in the name of protecting them, a monolithic view of heroes/heroines and revered values needs to be interrogated. Zimbabwean literature offers an inventory that refuses to pander to my hosts' template, and it is this inventory that I used to question the assumption that Zimbabwe was one, huge, happy and united national family because based on its many literary texts, what we have is a dystopian family still trying to find its way and define its heroes/heroines.