A review by archytas
These Bones Will Rise Again by Panashe Chigumadzi

challenging reflective slow-paced

3.75

"After years of staring up at the looming portrait of Mugabe waiting for our lives to change ‘when the old man goes’, a moment we came to think could only be occasioned by death, the moment has come and gone and we find ourselves where we were when we first began the wait. The wait for his departure weighed down so heavily on our hearts and minds that it constrained the spirit of radical political imagination that has allowed us to make and remake ourselves time and again over the centuries. In the same ways we limited our political imagination to the end of colonialism, with dire consequences for our post-independence years, Mugabe’s end represented the end of our political imagination."

This fascinating extended essay looks at Zimbabwean history, focusing on the stories of women who act over men who talk. Chigumadzi weaves her desire to 'know' the woman who became her Mbuya with the story of one of a Shona resistance fighter and concepts of cyclical re-emergence to examine the movement against Mugabe as part of a bigger pattern/shift. If all that sounds intimidating, this is a readable account, even if real understanding, might require more depth with the subject