Abstract

Jairos Gonye , Thamsanqa Moyo* and Wellington Wasosa

The issue of the Land Redistribution Programme in the Zimbabwean literary geography is vexed and moot. This is because, like the politics which energised it, it is embedded in different ideological, social, economic, racial, gender and ethnic standpoints. It is this that makes some writers see it as a grand act of final decolonisation whose intention was to empower landless black natives. On the other hand, others see its bloody and violent nature and the attendant survival imperatives as something that will have to be addressed in future because it created other imbalances. There are yet others who try to straddle the two extreme positions by looking at the programme’s negatives and positives. The research interrogates how this momentous period in Zimbabwe’s life is represented in literature and why the different writers take the positions they take. In doing this, the researchers use selected English short stories produced after 2000 and a Shona novel on the same issue. The stories are written by both white and black writers.