Through the life and work of Yvonne Vera, Shereen Essof and Daniel Moshenberg challenge Pambazuka News readers to see a different Zimbabwe, not the one of nationalist desire, but rather the one in which the national project of Zimbabwe is a project of its women, not alone but at the core.

It is April 18, 2005, Independence Day in Zimbabwe. Twenty-five years ago today, Rhodesia disappeared. Where did it go? What happened on that day? Twenty-five years ago, today, the policemen shouted, “Move back! Move back!” … at least according to Yvonne Vera, in her early story, “Independence Day”, a story which cites the women and children lining the streets to see “The Prince from England”, “the Prince, sent by his mother the Queen.”

In that story, Vera makes her readers see the day, that day twenty five years ago that we know will be monumentalized in perpetuity in that place called Zimbabwe. It is a day of flags and freedom. A day in which everyone who is no one who is on the streets is marked by the forced separation of themselves from anyone who is anyone, from the Prince to the Prime Minister. It is a day in which the national markers of `Zimbabwe’ become visible. It is a day in which a man “celebrates Independence properly: with cold beer and a woman.” It is a day in which men use women as men so often do and “when he was through he sent her home.” It was a day in which the State used women to line the streets, to dance at the stadium, and to wave flags. In the end, “in the morning she saw miniature flags caught along the hedge: the old flag and the new.” It was a day when promises were made, it was a day when people were told “everything would be changing soon. Jobs and more money. Land and education. Wealth and food.”

On Thursday, April 7, 2005, Zimbabwean feminist novelist, activist, artist and storyteller, Yvonne Vera died. Yvonne Vera wrote stories of Zimbabwean women. She brought to the surface their voices and narratives and how they are positioned within the postcolonial context. She articulated women’s struggles, historical and current, in the violence and intensity of survival in the everyday. In so doing, Yvonne Vera engaged in a powerful and courageous critique of the nation-building project in Zimbabwe. Her fiction, always historically embedded and materially astute, offers Zimbabweans a vision of an alternative nation, built on the foundations of often-repressed memories and stories.

Yvonne Vera insisted on looking into and accurately evoking the face and mask of betrayal. She described patriarchy: the ways in which colonialism violated women and the ways in which a patriarchal state betrayed ‘its’ people, those who had fought for so long for freedom. She described the ways in which so many men betrayed `the people’, the women and children, to whom they had pledged trust. She wrote of violation after violation, and of the extraordinary hope and forgiveness that seemed to always mark survival, most often of women. While much of her work focuses on the liberation struggle or the period just after Independence, it remains painfully relevant on this Independence Day, twenty-five years ‘later’.

On this Independence Day, in the current global context, Zimbabwe is often represented as invisible or mad. Vera’s five novels and numerous short stories challenge the readers of Pambazuka News to read a different Zimbabwe. Not the one of nationalist desire, but rather the one in which the national project of Zimbabwe is a project of its women, not alone but at the core. In this tale, women are not invisible nor meek nor timid nor a problem nor a pathology nor victim nor, finally, a means to a good celebration. In this story, Zimbabwe is Zimbabwean women.

In her writing Vera insists that no national independence comes from military forces or nation-states declaring, ‘it is over’, as occurs with depressing results at the end of her collection, ‘Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals?’ Rather, as she states at the end of her final novel, ‘The Stone Virgins’, the “task is to learn to re-create the manner in which the tenderest branches bend, meet, and dry, the way the grass folds smoothly over this frame and weaves a nest, the way it protects the cool, livable places within – deliverance.”

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