Men with Broken Backs and Other Infirmities: Unsettling Masculinities in Charles Mungoshi’s Fiction

Most of Charles Mungoshi’s fiction was written within a context of militaristic masculinities pre- and post-independent Zimbabwe, when the strong and healthy male body was valorised in Zimbabwean writing and life. His portrayal of men with physical infirmities, particularly spinal injuries, challenges the Chimurenga (war of liberation) rhetoric with its hypermasculine script that privileges the tough and healthy male body in service of the family and nation. Mungoshi’s calling on the corporeality of men’s bodies and the limits of physical ability exposes the conflicts and anxieties of maleness at a time when such “unmanning” was problematic and continues to be for some critics of Zimbabwean literature. Such critics view Mungoshi’s focus on men with infirmities as devoid of literary value, pessimistic, of little value to the liberation struggle and nation-building in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Yet through the trope of male bodily incapacitation, this paper argues, Mungoshi challenges a masculinism that demands that men should have strong bodies they can deploy to control familial and national space. By paying attention to the two languages that Mungoshi wrote in – English and Shona – this paper unpacks one of Mungoshi’s least acknowledged but most telling contributions to Zimbabwean writing – images of male infirmity that attempt to re-envision Zimbabwean masculinities.