This qualitative study analyses gendered metaphors in selected Zimbabwean Shona songs. The study explores how musicians deploy gendered metaphors to propagate, reinforce or challenge gender views and positions held in the Zimbabwean contemporary society. The corpus of data comprised Shona popular songs released between 1988 and 2018 and down loaded from You-tube. The songs were transcribed, translated into English and metaphors identified and interpreted using a combination of the Pragglejaz Group (2007), Steen (2007) and Charteris-Black (2004) metaphor identification methods. Charteris-Black’s (2004) Critical Metaphor Analysis was adopted as the key theory and method of analysis. The analysis drew support from Lazar's (2007) Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, Foucault (1980) and Butler's (1990) ideas on discourse and gender. The findings reveal that Zimbabwean musicians singing in Shona discursively use gendered metaphors to construct, reinforce or challenge views and positions on gender. While the metaphors describe and evaluate men and women positively and negatively for ideological purposes, the metaphors largely marginalise women more than men. The metaphors therefore, have the effect of legitimising and naturalising male dominance in the Zimbabwean society. However, the same musicians occasionally utilise metaphor discoursal power to resist, challenge and control the dominance. Metaphors become a conduit through which topical contemporary gender issues, norms and values, gender views and positions are highlighted and debated. Two contesting ideologies were noted: one ideology emphasised that women are inferior to men and men should tolerate them for their weaknesses and the second projected women as men’s equals and that men and women roles complement each other. It is the conclusion of this study that gendered metaphors in Shona song lyrics allow musicians to discursively and for ideological purposes reinforce, contest and negotiate various gender perspectives making metaphors a powerful tool for shaping views on gender. Therefore the research, recommends that stakeholders recognise and promote the critical role played by language on inculcating gender perceptions in such domains as music, to come up with language programmes that promote gender parity and equality in society. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / Ph. D. (Languages, Linguistics and Literature)

Bibliography: leaves 255-295 / The study of the Church of Christ’s ‘Identity- and Mission-Continuity’ in the Zimbabwean context explores how the Christian faith should be interpreted and contextualised in Africa. The Church of Christ in Zimbabe (COCZ) is a Christian movement claiming to be representative of the ethos of the Church that was founded by Jesus Christ on the day of Pentcost. The thesis raises critical questions of Christian identity and transformation in missionary founded churches like the COCZ in an attempt to contribute towards a locally based study of the Church. Consciousness to being a Church founded by Jesus Christ has implications for Christian unity (oneness) and ecumenism in the COCZ, and its wider Christian networks1. Use of its theological tenets, which are indeed congruent with its projected identity, to explore its history when it came to Zimbabwe in relationship to its founding charism helped because of scarcity of literature on the history of Christian denominations in Zimbabwe. This thesis has followed four objectives that are related to the four stages of experiences by the Church Jesus Christ founded, namely, the (1) early Church, (2) reformation evangelism, (3) missionary enterprise and, (4) contemporary (African) expressions of the faith. This study has investigated the origin and reasons for the formation of the Church in the midst of others; and why its missionaries chose Zimbabwe where there were other denominations. Local experiences of the Church after the departure of white missionaries motivated this study with questions on how the process of inculturating the gospel in the COCZ raised, especially the tension between continuity and discontinuity, linking and delinking, similarity and dissimilarity as well as diversity and diference. Creative synthesis on what Jesus intended; what missionaries brought; and what the God of history is doing in the contemporary life and efforts of the Church were implied and/or explicated. Using a two-pronged approach to the study, the thesis has, first, unearthed (primary) documents like minutes from church board meetings by Europeans (with misionary thinking that developed from these origins), to contextual (secondary) documents (on how local theologians in the context have engaged the different Christian doctrines in the Zimbabwean context). Secondly, an empirical method was used to interview and distribute questionnaires to a number of individuals, inclusive of those who were in the COCZ leadership and ordinary members. Data collection tools were semi-structured, giving respondents freedom to express themselves and/or their views on what the COCZ was doing and what they believe must be done. Data from interviews and questionnaires were correlated with views expressed in the written sources. The data was interpreted heuristically, in order to give light to new knowledge that was being formed in the process. As an interpretive tool, hermeneutics (the phenomenological approach using Atlas.ti 8 (SPSS, Nvivo 8) - for verbatim transcription) was made key in looking into the context, culture and religion of the COCZ. The thesis attempted to create a dialogue by relating identity, communal ontology and epistemology to the empirical study findings, literature and the methodology. Ecology and gender were some of the indispensable aspects of theology, crucial for human survival, harmony and peace that were discussed because they were neglected in the COCZ. The thesis also revisted differences and similitudes found in the gospel in relationship to the intended and unintended 1 Unity and oneness expressed in John 17 [“Et Unum Sint” – That they may be one], emphasise the sociality of the Godhood through the doctrine of perichoresis, which is unity of the Godhead in the economy (our) of salvation. xiii cultural contributions of the Ndebele and Shona so far, with the purpose of repositioning the COCZ within its own transformative framework. This helps the Church with a strategy of how to model its theology in an African context and how to learn from its past with the view to transform itself for the 21st century Zimbabwe. The study is not exhaustive on the nature, history and mission of the COCZ, and many avenues like hermeneutics, church polity, public theology, conflict studies and church doctrine can be carried out using the COCZ as a case study. In all, the study has laid a foundation for the contextualization, evangelization, inculturation and incarnation of the gospel of Jesus Christ through the COCZ in a postmodernist society. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / D. Phil. (Systematic Theology)