Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Literature and Language Studies, 2005.

Thesis advisor: Rosanna DeMarco / The purpose of this study was to explore the Zimbabwean women's experiences of being diagnosed and living with HIV/AIDS on a daily basis. This phenomenological study used the van Manen (1984, 1997) method of phenomenological inquiry and approach to phenomenological analysis to uncover the women's experiences and meaning of being diagnosed and living with HIV/AIDS. Seventeen HIV positive women participating in a development of antiretroviral therapies (DART) clinical trial in Harare, Zimbabwe, were recruited through snowball sampling and by word of mouth were interviewed. The study revealed that women experienced the dread of living with suspicion prior to a confirmed HIV diagnosis, pain and suffering when diagnosed, renewal and rebirth from the effects of antiretroviral medications and DART clinical trial while simultaneously experiencing the burden of living with HIV/AIDS. With time the women came to terms with their HIV positive statuses, and used their experiences to help others. The themes living with suspicion of HIV/AIDS and sensing the engulfing anguish of HIV/AIDS were found to be the core essence of being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. The themes knowing the restorative power of antiretroviral medications, the heavy burden of HIV, and finding meaning in being HIV positive were found to be the core essence of living with HIV/AIDS on a daily basis. The findings inform health care providers on the trauma and suffering of being diagnosed and living with HIV/AIDS, and the benefits of antiretroviral medications. These study findings have significant implications for Zimbabwean nurses and other health care personnel committed to improving the lives of women, their families and their communities. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Connell School of Nursing. / Discipline: Nursing.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this research explores Zimbabwean literary and other cultural texts within the broader context of the construction of identities and the politics of inclusion and exclusion in nationalist and oppositional discourses. It also analyzes two texts by major non-Zimbabwean African writers to examine the thematic links between Zimbabwean and other African writing. Through combining historical, anthropological and political approaches with postcolonial, postmodern and feminist critical theories, the thesis explores the ways in which African writing and performance represent alternative histories to official versions of the nation. It further investigates questions of gender and their significance in nationalist discourses and shows how writing on war, trauma and healing informs and develops readers’ understanding of the relationship of the past to the present. Considered together as a coherent body of work, the published items submitted in this thesis explore how Zimbabwean and other African writers, through re-visioning history and writing from oppositional or marginal positions, intervene in political debates and suggest new transformative ways of constructing and negotiating identities in postcolonial societies.

Student Number : 9803321X - MA Dissertation - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / The primary aim of this dissertation is to trace the ways in which Yvonne Vera’s final two novels, Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins, provide a discursive space for the enunciation of subaltern histories, which have been silenced in dominant socio-political discourse. I argue that it is through the deployment of ‘poetic language’ that Vera’s prose is able to negotiate the voicing of these suppressed narratives. In exploring these questions, I endeavour to locate Vera’s texts within the theoretical debates in postcolonial scholarship which question the ethical limitations of representing oppressed subjects in the Third World, as articulated by Gayatri Spivak, in particular. Following Spivak’s claim that subalternity is effaced in hegemonic discourse, I focus on the ways in which Vera’s inventive prose works to bring the figure of the subaltern back into signification. In order to elucidate how this dynamic operates in both novels, I employ Julia Kristeva’s psycholinguistic theory of ‘poetic language’. I argue that Kristeva’s understanding of literary practice as a transgressive modality, which is able to unsettle the silencing mechanisms of dominant monologic discourse, critically illuminates the subversive value of Vera’s fictional style for marginalised subaltern narratives.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / This study sought to identify the bottlenecks in the promotion of Zimbabwean Traditional Medicines (ZTMs) towards improving the national healthcare delivery system. The indigenous medicines lost value and recognition to the Conventional Western Medicines introduced by the British colonialist since 1871 and is still dominating the national healthcare delivery system. There are growing challenges to ensure accessibility of affordable drugs especially for primary healthcare. The World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations (UN) is in support of re-engaging indigenous medical interventions to achieve the Millennium development goals. Indigenous Traditional Medicine Knowledge-Based Systems (ITMKS) form the basis of the main source of health care for about 80% of the population in the developing countries. The implementation of the Zimbabwe Traditional Medicines Policy (ZTMP) has been at a stand-still since inception in 2007. The research used mixed methods involving qualitative and quantitative approaches. Data was collected through desk and field research. Questionnaires and focus group discussions were used to record perceptions and attitudes of key informants. The stakeholders included Traditional Health Practitioners (THPs), Medical Doctors, Pharmacists, Medical Research Council of Zimbabwe (MRCZ) staff, Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe (MCAZ), Traditional Medical Practitioner’s Council (TMPC), Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association (Zinatha), Ministry of Health and Childcare, WHO, Higher Education Institutions (UZ School of Pharmacy staff and students), Christian Groups, NGOs and Prostate Cancer Patients in Harare CBD. The stakeholders sampling framework was obtained from the list of registered practitioners. The stakeholder mapping involved selection of 5 key informants from each focus group obtained through random selection. The Snowball sampling technique was used to follow the closest 5 key informants in each focus group. The key findings established that 80% of respondents agreed to the integration of ZTM. The major bottlenecks were lack of modern dosage forms and standardization to determine quality, safety and efficacy of the ZTM. The study suggests that in order to fast track the integration process, a bottom up implementation strategy providing ZTM advocacy, capacity building in the institutionalization and training of ZTMPs, pharmacists and CMP need to be engaged for a favorable and quick buy-in. The study also recommends further analysis of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) areas of specialization in pharmaceutical practice in order to improve treatment outcomes.

In the Zimbabwean past, farming societies utilized mineral resources for their own use and for exchange to local and regional populations, as well as to markets beyond African borders. Successful agriculture was constrained by environmental hazards, principally unpredictable and often inadequate rainfall. Farming communities managed this predicament in various ways. It is likely that some groups used mineral resources found in the vicinity of their settlements to produce materials or items to exchange. The social contexts that defined the nature of mineral production and exchange altered between the mid-first and mid-second millennium AD, as social ranks emerged and political and economic systems became increasingly complex. The thesis is a commentary on how the motivation of society to broaden its resource base, to improve the benefits to households and to society in general, contributed to the emergence of leaders and, ultimately, of an elite class. The focus of the research is on iron and copper production because the author has examined gold production thoroughly in a previous study. Four published papers outline the history of iron and copper production in Zimbabwe. The papers provide case studies of the scale and social context of iron and copper production and exchange.

The present study employs the frameworks of postcolonial literary theory, sociolinguistics, and the social psychology of language use to compare the nature, function, and meaning of English in the delineation of cultural and social identities in anglophone Zimbabwean and Trinbagonian literatures. The construction of cultural and social identities in these literatures inheres in how certain Zimbabwean and Trinbagonian novelists use various linguistic devices to contextualize the English language in their respective cultures, and how they employ the English language to articulate and reinforce colonial, counter-colonial, and other heteroglossic social discourses arising from conflicts of race, class, and gender in the Zimbabwean and Trinbagonian contexts. Chapter One outlines the nature of the research and sets up the terms and categories that will feature prominently in the analysis. Chapter Two examines the place of English in the socio-economic and cultural history of Zimbabwe and of Trinidad and Tobago, and offers a description of the indigenous or other national languages which play prominent roles in the linguistic configuration of the two nations. The chapter also critically reviews the attitudes of some prominent post-colonial writers, particularly from the African and Caribbean regions, to the use of English as a medium of artistic creativity. Chapter Three engages with narrative idiom and characters' idioms and comments as they relate to (a)the nativization of English in selected Zimbabwean novels and the use of English and other indigenous languages for articulating social norms and certain situational imperatives, and (b) the power and politics of English as an instrument for domination, manipulation, oppression, the construction of elitist identity, the reproduction of unequal power relations, and of resistance to such social injustice. Chapter Four addresses issues discussed in Chapter Three, but with reference to the Trinbagonian literary context. Chapter Five, the conclusion, synthesizes the arguments by pointing out the sociolinguistic similarities and differences between Zimbabwean and Trinbagonian Literatures analyzed in the study. Furthermore, the concluding chapter not only indicates the values of an interdisciplinary project such as this one for both linguistics and literary studies, but it also delineates certain research options for the future. The dissertation generally concludes that the construction of Zimbabwean and Trinbagonian identities in and through language can be read as a mode of resistance to the homogenizing, assimilative practices of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Thus, the detailed documentation provided in this study of the range of linguistic and socio-cultural differences between Zimbabwean and Trinbagonian literatures on the one hand, and other works of English (especially the acrolectal varieties) on the other, establishes that while there is no single, stable Zimbabwean or Trinbagonian identity that is constituted in the language of literary texts to set up in contrast to an imperial British or American one, the fact of differences is indisputable.

No description available.

This dissertation is a study of women and utterance in contexts of violence in the three selected novels written by the late Yvonne Vera: Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994), and The Stone Virgins (2002). A study of the representation of women in particular is appropriate because their role in the making of the history of Zimbabwe has been deliberately undermined or ignored by 'patriotic' historians and politicians alike. This study incorporates a historical and post-colonial feminist analysis of women and their empowerment through utterance in Vera's novels. Their achieving utterance is seen as a way of countering a past tendency to focus on women being victims of patriarchal ideologies with little being done to expose the degree and nature of women's resistance against oppressive, socially constructed gender relations. The kind of violence experienced by Vera's women is both physical (rape and murder) and psychological. Two dimensions of utterance have been explored in this study. Firstly, the study examined what the characters can and cannot say about their conditions of suffering. This entailed an examination of their cultural and contextual limitations as well as their personal difficulties. Secondly, the study investigated how Vera, writing some fifteen years after the events she depicts and with the advantage of hindsight, represents her women characters as agents of their own recovery from the violation perpetrated against them. This involved an analysis of Vera's utterance and her thematic concerns, especially her revisioning of history in breaking the silence of her women characters. Positioned in relation to existing critical works on Vera's novels, this study's contribution to the critical debate has been its demonstration of how Vera, through the use of her narrative technique and unique poetic style was able to challenge the conditions of women in the past in a way that has relevance to present-day Zimbabwe and offers possibilities for the future Zimbabwe. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

The thesis provides a feminist analysis of the Zimbabwean women writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), reading the novel as a critique of African patriarchy. The thesis examines the different ways in which African patriarchy broadly manifests itself regarding the subaltern position of women. It then analyses a range of feminist theories, extracting from them concepts useful to an understanding of the novel. Finally, the thesis analyses in detail Dangarembga’s novel in the light of an understanding of African patriarchy and feminist theories. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.