Historical Metaphors of the Self: Chimurenga Names as Autobiography

Abstract

This chapter introduces the idea of the Chimurenga name(s) as an oral autobiography. Scholars of autobiography are used to self-writing as constituting long, elaborate and sometimes written embellished accounts of one’s life. This tradition of self-writing has tended to occlude other forms of self-writing such the oral genres that function as oral acts of inscribing oneself on historical processes that foster better and new social values. In the context of Chimurenga or the liberation struggle of the 1970s in Zimbabwe, individual guerrillas gave themselves names by which to remember their exploits in that war. Nom de guerres, as these names are known in the field of onomastics, rewrote colonial history; their names inscribed the experiences of the guerrillas as a field from which self-identities that echoed with national aspirations were captured. This chapter argues that guerrilla names are a form of self-inscription. Their short forms are as memorable as any longer narratives on self-writing. The different realities that they speak to and address reveal the multiple identities that the guerrillas were able to generate for themselves and in tandem, national history, in the context of the liberation struggle.