Content uploaded by Nathan Moyo
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Nathan Moyo on Sep 29, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
This article was downloaded by: [Great Zimbabwe University]
On: 20 February 2015, At: 08:15
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Click for updates
Pedagogy, Culture & Society
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpcs20
Representations of ‘difficult
knowledge’ in a post-colonial
curriculum: re-imagining Yvonne
Vera’s The Stone Virgins as a ‘pedagogy
of expiation’ in the Zimbabwean
secondary school
Nathan Moyoa & Jairos Gonyea
a Department of Curriculum Studies, Great Zimbabwe University,
Masvingo, Zimbabwe
Published online: 12 Feb 2015.
To cite this article: Nathan Moyo & Jairos Gonye (2015): Representations of ‘difficult
knowledge’ in a post-colonial curriculum: re-imagining Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins as a
‘pedagogy of expiation’ in the Zimbabwean secondary school, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, DOI:
10.1080/14681366.2015.1008560
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2015.1008560
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Representations of ‘difficult knowledge’in a post-colonial
curriculum: re-imagining Yvonne Vera’sThe Stone Virgins as a
‘pedagogy of expiation’in the Zimbabwean secondary school
Nathan Moyo*and Jairos Gonye
Department of Curriculum Studies, Great Zimbabwe University, Masvingo,
Zimbabwe
This study reframes Yvonne Vera’s novel, The Stone Virgins as a potential
secondary school literature text in the Zimbabwean curriculum through
which a pedagogy of expiation could be re-imagined. The argument is
that the traumatic experiences that Zimbabwe has gone through as a
nation require open re-engagement and debate. The study thus employs
the notion of ‘difficult knowledge’as a heuristic to engage with
harrowing past events represented in The Stone Virgins in ways that may
console and provoke students and teachers into acknowledging collective
guilt. Thus, the study advocates for the inclusion of the text in the school
syllabus so as to provide space for critical re-engagement with the
nation’s unhealed wounds in order to promote expiation and healing.
Keywords: difficult knowledge; curricular trauma; pedagogy of
expiation; pedagogy of discomfort; historical trauma; school curriculum
Introduction
This study reframes Zimbabwean female writer Yvonne Vera’s novel, The
Stone Virgins (2002), as a potential secondary school literature text in the
Zimbabwean curriculum through which a pedagogy of expiation could be
imagined and promoted. The pedagogy of expiation, as that acknowledge-
ment of guilt and acceptance which may compel one to pay atonement,
may be required in Zimbabwe to address the country’s legacy of violent
politics as well as the nation’s attempts to come to terms with her
wounded psyche. Thus, the study rethinks The Stone Virgins as an exam-
ple of what Pitt and Britzman (2003, 755) call ‘difficult knowledge’;
Vera’s novel captures the post-independence excesses of the state in the
Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe in the 1980s, as histori-
cal trauma. As Mlambo (2012, 2) explains, the cycle of violence in the
history of Zimbabwe includes the liberation struggle that freed the country
from white minority rule, but left the black and white races divided. At
*Corresponding author. Email: nmoyo@gzu.ac.zw
© 2015 Pedagogy, Culture & Society
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2015.1008560
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
independence in 1980, the new government proclaimed a policy of recon-
ciliation, yet two years later, unrest broke out in the southern and western
parts of Zimbabwe. This post-independence conflict killed an estimated
20,000 people (Mlambo 2012, 1) as the state launched an onslaught
against perceived anti-government dissidents. Vera’s novel fictionalises this
legacy of violence which has been largely ignored by mainstream histori-
ography. Furthermore, as a way of silencing debate on an otherwise fester-
ing sore on the nation’s psyche, the novel is yet to be included as a set
book at either the national ordinary-level (General Certificate in Education
equivalent) or advanced-level-literature in English Syllabi, despite the fact
that it has received international acclaim.
This study contributes to the debate on the need for national and individ-
ual expiation, which the study of Vera’s novel might offer. It is hoped that
such engagement with what is essentially ‘difficult knowledge’in the
Zimbabwean context of both post-colonial racial and ethnic tensions could
enable students, who are tomorrow’s leaders and teachers, to appreciate that
violence may destroy and traumatise both victims and perpetrators. Such a
discussion would hopefully sensitise them to the fact that violence is not a
preserve of one racial or ethnic group, as Vera succinctly shows in the
novel. Rather, it might affect us all as ‘members of past antagonistic groups’
who bear the scars, but who still need to move on, ‘understand each other
better and, hopefully, find each other’(Mlambo 2012, 20). Hence it is
important to realise that we might all be guilty of violence through perfor-
mance or complicity and that we may need to work towards collective and
individual expiation to assuage what Muponde (2011, 83) calls ‘the
unhealed psychological wounds of war.’
This apparently empowering undertaking has to acknowledge that bring-
ing up issues of violence and trauma in ethnic/post-colonial conflict class-
rooms may result not only in new positive ways of appreciating the lived
experiences, but also in unexpected outcomes. This is so because as Collins
(2013, 131) advises, ‘violence and victimisation are not simply abstract
social puzzles to be solved, but issues that deeply affect the lives of stu-
dents and their loved ones’. Therefore, an inexpert handling of such sensi-
tive topics could trigger ‘irritability’,‘rage’,‘nightmares’,‘withdrawal’,
‘anxiety’, and ‘blocking out’(Collins 2013, 131). These emotions reflect
what Britzman (1998, 118) calls the ‘vicissitudes of difficult knowledge’.
As a novel ‘about people caught up in and destroyed by a public disaster’
(Ranger 2002, 205), The Stone Virgins exemplifies ‘difficult knowledge’
which cannot be taught like any other mundane event that could be more
easily managed through ordinary pedagogical strategies. This is because
some of the students and their teachers may have experienced and/or wit-
nessed the brutality on the ground. Furthermore, the aim is that students not
just ‘learn about’the events as they are represented in The Stone Virgins,
but ‘learn from’the events in ways that may enable them to come to terms
2N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
with the past in relation to their present. As Britzman (1998, 117) explains,
‘learning about an event …focuses upon the acquisition of qualities, attri-
butes and facts, so that it presupposes a distance (or, one might even say, a
detachment) between the learner and what is to be learned’. However, learn-
ing from an event ‘demands both a patience with the incommensurability of
understanding and an interest in tolerating the ways meaning becomes, for
the learner, fractured, broken, and lost, exceeding the affirmations of ratio-
nality, consciousness, and consolation’(Britzman 1998, 118). Therefore, in
the event of The Stone Virgins being taught in contemporary Zimbabwean
secondary schools, there is need for a carefully thought out pedagogy which
could approach the festering wounds of the past with a sensitivity that,
while avoiding apportioning blame, may also accept guilt and seek restora-
tion for all affected groups. This, we suggest, could be the pedagogy of
expiation. It is against this background that this study poses the question:
How might a pedagogy of expiation, promoted through a re-reading of The
Stone Virgins, enable a negotiation and re-engagement with our brutal past
in contemporary Zimbabwe? To explore this issue further, the following
sub-questions are developed:
What are the instances of ‘difficult knowledge’in The Stone Virgins
that are of pedagogical significance?
How might the instances be engaged with as a basis for negotiating
and re-engaging with the past?
What strategies could teachers employ to promote expiation in the
classroom?
We pose the above questions because we realise that Zimbabwe is a nation
yet to come to terms with its bruised past despite the promise of national
reconciliation made by the then Prime Minister of a nation celebrating her
independence in 1980. Robert Mugabe had appealingly remarked that
The wrongs of the past now stand forgiven and forgotten …I urge you,
whether you are White or Black, to join me in a new pledge to forget our
grim past, forgive others and forget, join hands in a new amity and together,
as Zimbabweans, trample upon racialism, tribalism and regionalism and work
hard to reconstruct and rehabilitate our society as we re-invigorate our eco-
nomic machinery.
1
As educators in Zimbabwe, we draw inspiration from the above words, not-
withstanding the limitations that arise from a call to ‘forget’rather than to
confront the past in order to move forward. As Farley (2009, 538) reminds
us, the curriculum and pedagogy could be a basis for confronting ‘evil’so
as to help students make sense of the conflicts in their lived worlds.
Furthermore, McConaghy’s(
2003, 11) question: ‘Is good pedagogy and
good curriculum only that which consoles –not that which provokes?’leads
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 3
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
us to re-imagine The Stone Virgins as both consoling and provoking in the
Zimbabwean context. Similarly, Espiritu’s(
2012, 11) question, ‘How might
the teacher’s pedagogy embody, even as it represses the very crises of the
subject matter it seeks to represent?’sensitises us to the contradictions and
complexities that inhere in pedagogy and content when enframed as ‘diffi-
cult knowledge’. All these lead us towards a yearning for an education that
could emotionally soothe and mentally provoke both teachers and students
into using knowledge to ‘craft and alter’the essence of humanity itself
(Britzman 1998, 19). However, a pedagogy of expiation with its envisaged
emotional capacity to promote affect could address such realities and educa-
tional challenges, if education is to be a means of intervention in the social
reworking of the contemporary post-conflict society in Zimbabwe.
The study is organised as follows: firstly, the conceptual framework that
informs the discussion is presented; secondly, an historical and political
overview of the novel is given; and thirdly, there is a reframing of incidents
as ‘difficult knowledges’along the main themes of the text. The study then
discusses ways in which the literary text could be the basis of the pedagogy
of expiation in its engagement with an embittered history. The study con-
cludes by suggesting how Cephas, a character in the novel, could be taken
as a symbol of expiation and national restoration.
‘Difficult knowledge’as the basis of a pedagogy of expiation
This section discusses Britzman and Pitt’s notion of ‘difficult knowledge’as
involving developing pedagogies that could enable handling of curriculum
issues that deal with representation of social traumas, violence, genocide
and social injustice (Britzman 1998,2003). Some key questions that educa-
tors might need to consider are ‘what makes knowledge difficult in teaching
and learning?’and ‘what is it to represent and narrate “difficult knowl-
edge”?’(Pitt and Britzman 2003, 755). For Britzman (1998), engaging with
difficult knowledge could lead both teachers and students to resolve that
‘Never again’should injustice, trauma and genocide be visited upon a peo-
ple for whatever reason. The act of teaching may thus become an ethical
mandate which makes education itself a crisis and the process of teaching a
not-taken-for-granted assumption with predictable outcomes.
In this study, we map the above notions of ‘difficult knowledge’on The
Stone Virgins as a way of understanding how its location in the contempo-
rary Zimbabwean school curriculum could be the basis of engaging with the
excesses of the past in order to arrive at hope and restoration. However, the
novel, with its forms of ‘difficult knowledge’, could constitute a pedagogi-
cal challenge to ‘teachers and students, who, in efforts to understand such
knowledge, may be confronted with affective traces of an internal history
made from primal helplessness, disillusionment and crises of authority and
(not) knowing’(Farley 2009, 538). In our view, there is a need for a
4N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
pedagogy that triggers individual and collective acknowledgement of guilt
and expiation that may be necessary in healing the ‘unhealed psychological
wounds’of Zimbabwe’s past wars (Muponde 2011, 83). Such a pedagogy
may require re-envisioning Zimbabwean classrooms as sites that could
encourage the ‘playing out [of] the uneasy negotiation between one’s own
experience of loss and another’s account’of guilt and suffering (Garrett and
Schmidt 2012, 192). This is why we suggest a pedagogy of expiation as
one which could enable contemporary Zimbabweans to negotiate and
re-engage with their brutal past and not merely forget or apportion blame.
This would, in Britzman’s(
1998) terms, constitute learning from the events
and not learning about the events.
The pedagogy of expiation finds resonance in tropes such as ‘pedagogy
of discomfort’(Boler 1999); ‘pedagogy of dangerous memories’;‘pedagogy
of suffering’(Buhler 2013); ‘pedagogy of disruption’(Leonardo and Porter
2010); and ‘productive pedagogies’(Lingard and Keddie 2013). The above
pedagogies foreground a commitment to critical pedagogical practice that is
transformative, liberatory and committed to social justice. According to
Boler (1999, 177), the gist of these pedagogies is centred on recognising
‘how emotions define how and what one chooses to see, and conversely,
not see’.
The envisaged pedagogy builds on the above notions, in that, it could
provoke and exhort self and socio-criticism, introspection, vicariousness and
empathy that may go beyond mere apportionment of guilt as informed by
binaries of victim/victimiser, state/dissident violence. A pedagogy of expia-
tion could extend from and stretch these other pedagogies by evoking in
those who are exposed to it a desire to atone for the wrongs of the past as
Vera illustrates through her fictional character, Cephas. It also posits that
forgetting the past is not the solution. Instead, matters have to be confronted
in order to address that ‘profound hopelessness and loss, and a sense that
no other person or group will intervene’(Britzman 2000, 43). In Zimbabwe,
this sense of hopelessness has been exacerbated by a culture of silence on
the brutal past, as Vera illustrates through marginalised characters, particu-
larly females, in the novel. Thus, if the novel is brought into the school cur-
riculum it may constitute what Heybach (2012, 26) calls ‘a sort of
curricular trauma’in that the Zimbabwean contemporary classroom com-
prises individuals of varied experiences whose reactions, based on their
interpretation of the traumas, could include ‘profound silence, guilt, and
defensiveness rather than understanding’. At the same time, a pedagogy of
expiation might offer opportunities for teachers and students to negotiate
and re-engage with these realities and not be encouraged to forget or repress
them. In the following sections we hypothesise on the curricular implica-
tions that both teachers and students may encounter were this important text
to be studied in secondary schools in Zimbabwe. However, we begin by
providing a brief historical and political context for the novel.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 5
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
Historical and political context of The Stone Virgins
The complex forces that shape the people of Zimbabwe, and that are the
subject of The Stone Virgins, need to be understood in a historical context
which extends from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial. As Mlambo (2013,
239) points out, Zimbabwe has always been a dynamic, multicultural com-
munity. In the pre-colonial era various ethnic groups coexisted within a trib-
utary system and at times engaged in warfare when tribute was not paid.
Colonialism both inferiorised the Black people and accentuated ethnic rival-
ries among indigenous groups (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2011). These differences
have since been used to explain the violent nature of Zimbabwean politics
as represented in Vera’s novel. For example, with the attainment of indepen-
dence, the nation state was confronted with the challenge of fostering a
common nationhood among disparate groups. This was exacerbated by a
liberation movement which fractured into two formations, namely the
Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and Zimbabwe African National
Union (ZANU). The fissures were to prove problematic immediately after
independence, occurring along apparently ethnic lines with ZAPU being
predominantly Ndebele-aligned and ZANU seen as Shona-aligned. As
Worby (1998, 564) has noted, the new nation state of Zimbabwe came to
be imaged along Shona metaphors and heroes, while the Ndebele was
identified with exogenous histories that were internalised as heresies. The
subsequent violence has tended to be seen along these ethnic binaries.
Vera’s novel draws on this conflict but subverts these simplistic representa-
tions that have sought to rationalise bloodshed.
Vera’s(
2002) novel fits into Hutcheon’s(1988, 107) description of a
historiographical metafiction, which has an elastic ‘truth’relation between
‘story’and ‘history’. Here, fiction has allowed the writer to represent the
probable as history, and she has transformed historical fact into improbable
fiction. As a fiction writer, Vera could choose to preoccupy herself with a
singular incident without the constraints of historical accuracy in the same
manner an academic historian might choose to remain silent on known his-
torical realities. Thus, in literary representations of the post-colonial nation
at large, The Stone Virgins emerges as the most subversive and representa-
tive account of what Bennett and Kennedy (2003, 1) call the ‘unspeakable
trauma that must never be forgotten yet can never be completely spoken’.
Therefore, when the novel is situated as a school text, it might offer oppor-
tunities for negotiating and re-engaging with what is an otherwise unspeak-
able past through a pedagogy of expiation. The following section teases out
instances of difficult knowledge as they are represented in the novel.
Instances of ‘difficult knowledge’and its challenges
Vera’s novel represents the physical as well as the psychic violence of the
early years of post-independence Zimbabwe. Apparent in the violence is the
6N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
complicity of the state and its agents while the ‘dissidents’or rebels repre-
sented by a character, Sibaso, are not exempt from this brutality. Vera com-
plicates her narrative by suggesting that the general trauma that pervades
rural Kezi is state-engineered as well as being beyond the control of the
state. In this complexity, she thus reinvents Sibaso, the ‘dissident’, as nei-
ther Shona nor in the employ of the state. Sibaso is presented as a trauma-
tised perpetrator shaped by the discourses of colonialism and the
nationalism that fuelled the liberation wars but he also finds himself disillu-
sioned by the betrayal that is independence. For this reason, he brutalises
his own Ndebele compatriots, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, in ways that make
the episode of violence irreducible to mere ethnic differences. Thus, the
people of Kezi find themselves ensconced between two violent forces, the
rebel fighters and the state soldiers.
The Stone Virgins offers multiple versions of interlinked episodes of
Zimbabwe’s history beginning with the establishment of colonial cities such
as Bulawayo in the early 1900s, the expectant liberation struggle years of
the late 1970s, the post-independence civil war era of the early 1980s and
the subsequent hope of restoration. The novel opens by firmly establishing
the colonial city space where the colonial administration establishes a new
order, rearranging the urban zones into commercially valuable grids. This
reminds readers that colonialists bring with them ‘modern’architecture, new
values, exotic plants and flowers, in fact, a new culture as well as a con-
tested space. To settlers, this is testimony of the civilising and modernising
intent of colonialism. For the African character, this orderliness (street
names, monuments, buildings) is, however, only superficial because the
colonial town is just like any such other (such as Johannesburg) –a tempo-
rary abode. In Bulawayo, there are discriminatory racist laws that deprive
Africans of free movement and free cultural association in public places
hence the simmering anti-colonial sentiments. Such laws restrict black
‘Zimbabweans’strictly to ekoneni (by the corners) as meeting places for
‘this city is divided, entry is forbidden to black men and women’(Vera
2002, 10). Such ‘othering’also plays itself out in the Shona-Ndebele
relations in post-independence Zimbabwe.
The above accounts are characteristic of oppressive rule, the fear of
intermixing and free flow of ideas as might appear in Habermas’(1984)
public sphere. This antipathy towards democratic gatherings where people
can communicate freely is re-enacted much later in the novel. Soldiers of
the Shona-dominated post-independent state destroy and burn Thandabantu
Store, accusing the shopkeeper of offering malcontents a venue to talk and
plot against the new government. At the same time, the bifurcations within
the city, and the contrast between rural Kezi and urban Bulawayo, establish
the ways in which race and geography intersect as markers of difference
and therefore the underlying racial ‘othering’. When enframed in pedagogi-
cal relations this ‘othering’may constitute ‘difficult knowledge’that could
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 7
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
lead students to discuss the Fanonian (1963) conceptualisation of the
colonial world as a divided, compartmentalised space, with whites and
blacks apart. The following section offers an exemplar of how Vera employs
difficult prose to purvey difficult knowledges.
Decapitation and mutilation of women
A passage depicting an incident of traumatic proportions in the novel
recounts the decapitation of Thenjiwe as well as the facial mutilation of
Nonceba. It is one of the most graphic descriptions of rape and mutilation
scenes in Zimbabwean literary history. It raises the question of how carnal
desire surfaces out of such conflict circumstances, why rape seems a natural
correlative to male assertion of dominance and the proof of their masculin-
ity. The following passage describing the rape scene vividly illustrates ‘diffi-
cult knowledge’in as far as appreciating the psychology of a rapist is
concerned:
He [Sibaso] pulls her body up, and holds her still. As suddenly, her thighs
feel pain, a hot liquid coursing down to her own knees. He draws her entire
body into his own. Mute. He is a predator, with all the fine instincts of
annihilation. She, the dead, with all the instincts of the vanquished. (Vera
2002, 62)
The explicitness as shown in this passage illustrates knowledge that curric-
ula typically deliberately avoid. In our view, this ‘difficult knowledge’could
jolt students out of their ‘comfort zones’and may prompt them to make
connections to the visceral aspects of literary engagement and their lived
realities. It is for this reason that the text deserves to be included among the
secondary school literature set books. However, engaging with such a pas-
sage in a classroom environment requires pedagogical tact. As Collins
(2013, 132) testifies, an inexpert handling of similar sensitive issues may
actually disempower students and teachers, making them feel more vulnera-
ble. Therefore, a pedagogy of expiation which could allow the repressed
and unspeakable to be openly confronted without the desire to blame or
deny but arrive at new understandings of why this could have happened
might replace the sense of helplessness with appreciation and sustainable
hope.
A similarly gripping instance of ‘difficult knowledge’in the novel
recounts how Sibaso rapes Nonceba soon after he decapitates the sister,
Thenjiwe, with a surgical precision that leads to Vera’s rhetorical remark of
horror in the words:
How did a man slice off a woman’s head while a bucket was carried above
it? How did a man slice a woman’s throat and survive? (Vera 2002, 67)
8N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
The sheer brutality represented above may trigger trauma in the readers,
some of whom may have memories of those who have survived such hor-
rors. These horrors echo what for Britzman (1998,2003) makes ‘difficult
knowledge’, as teachers have to respond pedagogically to students’unpre-
dictable responses to such encounters. Therefore, as Espiritu (2012) reminds
us, more is required of educators and students than simply teaching and
learning about historical trauma even when it is fictionalised. Thus, in advo-
cating for the inclusion of the novel in the school curriculum, we are cogni-
sant of the disruptions that both teachers and students may experience.
However, if such disruptions are expertly handled in an emotionally condu-
cive environment, they may foster an engagement that may lead to acknowl-
edgement of wrongs done, and a resolve to say ‘Never again’. We believe
this is an imperative in a contemporary Zimbabwe which still finds it diffi-
cult to look itself squarely in the face and, as recent electoral violence illus-
trates, is not immune to sporadic outbreaks of violence.
Yet another instance of a harrowing ‘othering’of the marginalised mem-
bers of the Zimbabwean community that constitutes ‘difficult knowledge’is
enacted by state soldiers. Their horrific act is represented in the voice of a
haunted woman; the state soldiers had forced her to chop her husband to
death with an axe, while her sons watched in horror (Vera 2002, 80). This
woman becomes mentally deranged as described below:
A WOMAN SCREAMS. Her voice sweeps down the corridor like a hot
liquid. Her voice is high. Something pitiful is pouring out of it, something
unstoppable. Her voice is muffled, suddenly held down. Many people are
holding her down. The woman is destroying a thought in her mind. She is
getting rid of something. Only light and sound can cleanse a mind; not touch.
She is cleansing her mind. The woman calls endlessly, down and down the
corridor. How long is the corridor? How long has the woman been crying?
Something is vanishing. Snuffed. She is dying. She is silent. No, her voice is
louder. She is alive in the room. Her voice is in Nonceba’s mind. The voice
is standing right next to her bed. There. (Vera 2002, 79)
The irony is that such an inconceivable act of inhumanity is apparently per-
petrated by soldiers of the state who should be the guardians and not ene-
mies of the community. The lamentations of the woman are an example of
what Zembylas (2013, 69) calls ‘hauntology’. The woman’s horror and
trauma echo Nonceba’s own and, at the same time, may impact on the read-
ers, inviting them to be not mere spectators but also witnesses to the horrific
suffering of women, and the marginalised, in general. However, for an
uncritical reader, the woman appears more as only a voice without a defined
body. And students not conversant with the post-modern style may ask who
and where this woman is ‘coming from’. The above passage, therefore,
illustrates some of the challenges of post-modern narration where we
encounter multiple narratives, incomplete voices, overlapping, extending
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 9
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
and sliding voices. However, in The Stone Virgins the female voices, sug-
gesting hope and ‘promise’at first, especially on the eve of independence,
slide back to haunted vulnerability. The classroom triggering of such haunt-
ing experiences might open suppressed experiences that may haunt students
and teachers, and it may be possible that these will provide material for dis-
cussion. An expert appreciation of the represented hauntology above might
encourage testimony and witnessing, resulting in debates that may lead to
appreciation and acknowledgement of wrongs done in the past.
Readers of The Stone Virgins may thus be sensitised not only to the suf-
fering of females, but also to their capacity as symbols of hope and restora-
tion as evidenced in the bandages on Nonceba’s mutilated lips. The
bandages signify hope for a recuperation of her voice that might enable
Nonceba to speak her own story and that of the traumatised woman who
lost the power to articulate the wrongs that male soldiers inflicted on her in
Kezi. In her attempt to recover her speaking voice, Nonceba bravely
re-engages with a traumatic past that would normally be left suppressed.
She therefore represents what the brutalised nation may need to do, that is,
face the past, no matter what unpleasantness it carries.
The symbolism of Kezi as ‘difficult knowledge’
Kezi, the rural setting of the novel, is a colonial creation of the Land Tenure
and Land Apportionment Acts (1930) that pushed members of the Black
population from more fertile land into rocky and thorny bush. Yet, Kezi is
also presented as a vibrant environment where the villagers anticipate the
liberation war which they hope will save them from poverty and exploita-
tion. Its most visible symbol is Thandabantu Store, linked to Bulawayo by
the bus whose approach in Kezi is awaited daily. Thandabantu Store is rep-
resented as a social hub of rural Kezi. People meet on the veranda, socialise
and exchange all kinds of information that demonstrate that people are on
the verge of an important transition, a transition poised to ironically debar
them from healthy national debates.
It is to Kezi that Cephas (the symbol of hope and expiation in the novel)
travels from Bulawayo to take a breath of fresh air, only to fall in love with
Thenjiwe who symbolises the fecund environment ‘and embodies the Kezi
landscape’(Ranger 2002, 207). Yet, it is also Kezi which witnesses some of
the most traumatic incidents of the post-independence era. For it is in Kezi
that Sibaso emerges from the sacred hills of Gulati to violate the two sisters
and then self-righteously declare that it is the new state which has betrayed
the people of Kezi, not scapegoats like him.
When the soldiers of the post-colonial state come searching for rebels,
life in Kezi is disrupted. The soldiers round up the people at Thandabantu
Store, force them into a room and then set it on fire thereby, literally, roast-
ing them alive. Among them, is Mahlathini, the storekeeper. Through the
10 N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
portrayal of incidents of this sort, Vera (2002) succeeds in suggesting
colonial Kezi is a far more livable place than post-colonial Kezi. The state
soldiers’cleansing mission in Kezi is characterised by a betrayal and
desolation echoed in nature’s drought and the heavy pursuing smell of the
marula fruit. For, by 1985 the state had replaced the refreshing scents of
pre-independence euphoria with this relentless olfactory assault made
unpleasant by the decomposing bodies that lay unburied. In describing the
unprecedented, ‘unquenchable scent’of the marula, Vera falls short of
describing the putrefying odours of the unclaimed bodies of victims of the
civil war that grips the ‘naked cemetery’of Kezi (Vera 2002, 118, 143). It
is for this reason that Vera, through Cephas, remarks that:
‘Kezi is a naked cemetery.’[…]‘Is this not what everyone is calling Kezi, a
naked cemetery where no one is buried and everyone is betrayed? There is
no certainty of life, only death. To die here is to be abandoned to vultures
and unknown graves. No one knows how many people have died. No one
knows when it will end, and if it will end’. (Vera 2002, 143)
It is ‘difficult knowledge’to accept that a post-colonial state that was also
the vanguard of the nation’s liberation could be complicit in the murder of
its own citizens. The irony is that the people of Kezi appear under more
threat from the post-colonial state soldiers as well as from fellow country-
men and women than they were under their erstwhile European colonisers.
If this text is engaged with in the classroom, students and teachers may find
that references to the putrefying smell trigger discomforting and haunting
encounters they may not soon forget. For example, they may be moved to
pose the questions that have been asked with reference to the Nazi genocide
of European Jewry which include: ‘How could anyone do this to other
human beings? How could such horror really happen?’(Simon and Eppert
1997, 184). As they argue, these questions ‘are symptomatic, returning
again and again as answers to them fail to resolve the difficult concerns
trauma testimony continually evokes’(Simon and Eppert 1997, 184). Such
questions may evoke a pedagogy that emphasises ‘collective witnessing’
(Boler 1999, 6) and could engage with the contradictory and emotionally
complex dimensions of banditry, violent nation-statism and individual
co-implication of guilt. It is such pedagogical encounters that may inspire
Zimbabwean students and teachers to confront ‘the complexities and con-
tradictions’of their ‘haunting’past history (Zembylas 2013, 69) and move
towards expiation through an acknowledgement as Nonceba succeeds in
doing at the end of the novel in contrast to Sibaso.
Sibaso as the voice of counter betrayal
The character Sibaso enables a discussion of the betrayal of the ideals of
independence as ‘difficult knowledge’that complicates the process of
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 11
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
acknowledgement of guilt and expatiation. The liberation war exposes him
(as a freedom fighter) to the leaders’betrayal of the ideals of the revolution
and the post-independence atrocities only confirm his new found cynicism.
He interprets these betrayals as true fruitions of history. It might be useful
to draw from Sibaso’s philosophy in a contemporary Zimbabwean society
which is grappling with curriculum content which borrows rather heavily
from a national historiography that has a narrow reading of patriotic history
and its representation (Phimister 2012). Therefore, an appreciation of
Sibaso’s character, among teachers and students, could become a way of
engaging with a form of ‘difficult knowledge’where teachers and students
may learn to appreciate how best to account for each other’s contributions
in whatever endeavour. For instance, Sibaso draws on his participation in
the liberation struggle to deconstruct the dominant narrow nationalist narra-
tive that seeks to marginalise the Ndebele and delegitimise the contributions
of fighters from Matabeleland. Operating in the discourse of ‘them’and
‘us’, Sibaso tells his own version of Zimbabwe’s war and conflicts, a ver-
sion that has been downplayed by a patriotic historiography (Ranger 2004).
Sibaso observes:
Independence is the compromise to which I could not belong. I am a man
who is set free, Sibaso, one who remembers harm. They remember nothing.
They never speak of it now, at least I do not hear of it. (Vera 2002, 89)
A pedagogy that encourages expiation and vicariousness might promote a
perspective that is both critical and appreciative of both Sibaso’s actions
and those of his antagonists. Sibaso’s remarks, above, may represent the
sidelined version of the liberation struggle complete with claims of bitter
memories of the atrocities of the liberation war. Sibaso’s reminiscences
reveal that the representation of national histories is never inclusive of
whole communities but, as Ahonen (2001) puts it, at the service of identity
politics. As such, it is bound to promote exclusivist tendencies, wittingly or
not, through what it chooses to remember and what to forget. It is therefore
important for teachers to remember that there could be students and teachers
who might share Sibaso’s experiences and thoughts and those who might
have suffered from such characters’actions. The remarks also echo what
Medina (2011, 11) calls the lived experiences and memories of those whose
marginalised lives have become the silent scars of forgotten struggles. For
in Sibaso’s version, they too (ZAPU) have contributed and sacrificed much;
they too have received gunshot wounds and have permanent internal scars –
the trauma –but do not find their narratives represented in history. As the
recent historiography of Zimbabwe shows, the ruling party not only
monopolises the victimhood of the liberation period (Muponde 2004) but
also immediately ‘reinvents’their former allies (ZAPU) as the new enemies
of the state and thus proceeds to try to annihilate them, once the common
12 N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
white enemy is defeated. Therefore, an understanding of violence as
‘difficult knowledge’is particularly important since the nation privately
bears scars and silently holds memories from these experiences. In this
regard, a pedagogy of expiation in the classrooms could provide ‘spaces for
personal injury and private terrors to be translated into public considerations
and struggles’(Giroux 2003, 14) in ways that might help participants know
more about each other and empathise with others in their sorrows.
Thus, the significance of The Stone Virgins as a school text could lie in
its insistence on a multiplicity of versions of post-colonial Zimbabwean his-
tory, including Sibaso’s. A classroom discussion of such suppressed and
marginalised remembrances (Medina 2011, 12) might serve the cause of
expiation and restorative hope because it might encourage an embracing of
the disparate narratives of liberation and yet represent a movement towards
accepting responsibility for crimes committed in the name of dominant
national narratives. The representation of alternative histories in The Stone
Virgins may enable a discussion of marginalised voices whose stories are
often unheard. Therefore, subjecting Sibaso’s ruminations to analysis could
possibly lead to both empathy and revulsion for the betrayal Sibaso imagi-
nes he suffers. Different students are likely to remember diverse vernacular
histories of the liberation struggle extant in their communities, some domi-
nant, others repressed. This may become a difficult way of arriving at the
multiple meanings of history, with people as victims, agents or non-agents
in it. Difficult questions such as: Does history create people or do people
make history could be discussed. A conducive environment could allow
teachers and students to discuss some of the untold versions of their diverse
nation’s history typified in Sibaso’s story. However, while Sibaso seems to
represent the masculine atavistic tendencies that prevent him from express-
ing remorse, Cephas represents the brave and yet contrite male who reaches
out to the female other in order to atone for the wrongs his male brothers
may have committed.
Cephas as a symbol of expiation
The character of Cephas presents an exciting example of ‘difficult knowl-
edge’and how one might arrive at expiation of one’s guilt. When Cephas
leaves the suffocating colonial city to catch a breath of fresh air in Kezi, he
fatefully stumbles into an ideal love-at-first-sight relationship with Thenjiwe.
This ideal relationship however crumbles when Cephas expresses non-
commitment. Cephas cannot fathom his entangled destiny with Thenjiwe
and thus thinks their relationship can be easily forgotten. However, Vera
configures Thenjiwe as the embodiment of the natural environment of Kezi,
its seasons and fecundity and therefore as not the loose type. Cephas is
therefore represented as being mistaken in his decision to leave Kezi, a
decision which haunts him. Much later, with the benefit of hindsight, he
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 13
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
expresses the wish to study Nonceba’s person in order to understand
Thenjiwe. Cephas therefore seizes the opportunity offered by Nonceba’s
troubles to perform penance and expiation.
Cephas is blameworthy because, unlike an historian, he does not give
himself time to learn of his girlfriend’s people and past. Cephas retreats the
moment Thenjiwe broaches debate about studying each other’s culture, an
act that could probably have prompted a marriage proposal. Therefore, the
moment their relationship transforms from being merely physical to being
intellectually reciprocal, Cephas opts out. He presumes that Thenjiwe is
pushing him away, when she is only nudging him to be introspective. When
he eventually leaves, only to read about Thenjiwe’s decapitation months
later, he is overwhelmed by guilt. His feelings of guilt spur him into restor-
ative action. Though Cephas comes back to Kezi ostensibly to pay penance,
he discovers that he is still as carnal a man as ever, a man who can easily
transfer his love for one sister (Thenjiwe) to another (Nonceba). While he
initially rationalises this as a peculiar ‘form of incest’, to love two sisters,
he immediately decides not to take advantage of Nonceba.
Cephas’s redemption, therefore, is in his restrained decision not to ravish
the hapless Nonceba as he did with Thenjiwe, but to patiently hope that
when Nonceba fully recovers she might decide to stay with him uncondi-
tionally. That is when Cephas literally and symbolically engages in the acts
of healing and recuperation of lost love, trust and health. This is why
Cephas is an important character in Vera’s reconstruction plot and in our
envisaging of the pedagogy of expiation. For instance, Cephas accepts self-
sacrifice, and expresses the desire to suffer expiation for the probable
wrongs he has done the opposite sex. This commitment seems to be the
most interesting point in Vera’s therapeutic writing. Such capacity to
acknowledge one’s mistakes, suffer remorse, and a readiness to offer repara-
tions is what the novel seems to offer as an alternative. This willingness to
sacrifice the self, not the other, could be the basis of expiation and healing.
Therefore engaging with these characters in pedagogical encounters may
provoke rather than merely console students and their teachers, and may
thus lead them to volatile experiences that can never be predicted in
advance (Britzman, 1998).
Discussion: teaching literature as ‘witnessing’
As already argued above, Zimbabwe may require a pedagogy of expiation
in order to address her post-colonial legacy of suspicion, silencing and trau-
matisation. The study therefore posits that if the schools’literary studies
curriculum could initiate mutual and candid discussions of the nation’s
sensitive experiences such as ethnic, racial and gender tensions and
victimisations, society at large might take up the same discussions and seek
means to affectively interconnect as a nation of diversity. The pedagogy of
14 N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
expiation that is advocated herein draws on Felman’s(1992) assertion that
real learning (as opposed to the mere passing on of information) results in a
state of crisis that is also volatile, intellectually and emotionally draining,
and fraught with the text where the meaning of the text is always consti-
tuted in the interaction between the reader and the text. This state of volatil-
ity is what we envisage could be achieved in a typical Zimbabwean
secondary school classroom were students to engage with The Stone Virgins
as ‘difficult knowledge’. When episodes in the text are enframed as ‘diffi-
cult knowledge’, they may invite students to leave ‘the familiar shores of
learned beliefs and habits, and swim further out into the “foreign”and risky
depths of the sea of ethical and moral differences’(Zembylas and Boler
2002, 4). To promote that, teachers have to think of classroom activities/
projects/assignments which might encourage students to engage in the dis-
comforting processes of re-defining identities, emotions, knowledges and
practices (Zembylas and Boler 2002). The study argues that a pedagogy of
expiation is that which might extend from these discomforting disruptions
to encourage victims, perpetrators and witnesses of trauma to vicariously
explore each other’s experiences. Perhaps a victim will recognise that the
perpetrator of an atrocity could have been motivated by a desire to avenge
what they perceived as their own prior violation. The problem may thus no
longer be that the ‘other actor’is wrong, but that the cycle always contin-
ues. Such an attempt may enable students and teachers to appreciate the tra-
gic metamorphosis of Kezi as ‘difficult knowledge’, whereby students may
be compelled to reconsider the state soldiers apparently wilful destruction of
a once vibrant life (as symbolised by Thandabantu Store) at the expense of
defending the freedom of the very society they further traumatise. In this
way, the students and teachers may learn to ‘live with loss’which could
entail ‘a learning to live with disquieting remembrance’(Simon, Rosenberg,
and Eppert 2000, 4) or acceptance towards expiation.
The pedagogy of expiation as envisaged in this study is fraught with its
own pedagogical challenges that could promote vulnerability and a sense of
hopelessness rather than the desired hope and restoration. Inviting students
to critically examine the irony that the advent of independence has wrought
on the people of Kezi, in particular, and Zimbabwe, in general, could be a
risky undertaking given the entrenched culture of fear and lack of openness
about the past that pervades the nation. The terms ‘let us not open the
wounds of the past’and ‘let bygones be bygones’are often deployed in the
public arena as silencing technologies to uphold regimes of truth (Foucault
1980). These have embedded forms of selective amnesia (Muponde 2004)
that can make living with the wrongs and human rights violations of the
past bearable. Instead, encouraging students to analyse The Stone Virgins
may enable them to read the text as reflecting injustices that manifest in the
real world around them that may necessitate action on their part. Perhaps,
as they consider the question how such horrors could have been allowed to
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 15
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
happen, they could also ponder on what could be done so that ‘there is no
another Kezi in Zimbabwe’and in the world at large. Such a resolve is a
re-echoing of Adorno’s famous dictum that ‘The premier demand upon all
education is that Auschwitz not happen again’(Adorno 1971, 1). But why
have different ‘Auschwitzs’continued to recur although on smaller scales?
Drawing on Zimbabwe’s different traumatic episodes including racial, pre
and post-election violence as well as the post-1980 violent clashes (as repre-
sented in The Stone Virgins), respectively, the study argues that the absence
of a commitment to acknowledge diversity in all its forms may exacerbate
commission of murders, torture, rape and social injustice. The novel seems
to re-enact how the curriculum sometimes reflects ‘the stories that we
choose to tell our children’(Grumet 1981, 115) rather than ‘unproblematic
notions of exposure to canonical texts and the cultivation of literacy and
taste of previous times’(Beavis 2008, 25). Analysing The Stone Virgins as
‘difficult knowledge’could also remind us that teaching is not simply a
technical human enterprise of information transmission, cultural assimilation
or career development, but a creative process of healing, re-integration,
remembering and re-collection (Slattery 2006, xxi) with the potential for
individual and collective acknowledgement of past wrongs.
The study contends that analysing the sufferings of different characters
represented in the novel could promote appreciation of life’s difficulties
including loss and private guiltiness. Engaging in such analyses in a class-
room situation is likely to provoke the students differently, and as they wit-
ness the suffering of the characters in their historical and social context,
they may learn from each other the subjective ways in which they perceive
suffering in their lives and those of others. The students are likely to ‘chron-
icle the lived experience of pain, misery, violence and terror …[the] occa-
sions when human dignity is violated and people come to some kind of
grief and harm’(Buhler 2013, 411). In making those visceral connections
the students may learn how these embodied experiences are directly and
causally linked to structural violence, inequity, and injustice. As witnesses
and not just spectators, the students and their educators could realise that
the experience of individual suffering is often actively produced by larger
systemic forces, and thus begin to trace the ways in which individual expe-
riences of suffering exist ‘in a dialectical space between individuality and
sociality’(Buhler 2013, 411). A pedagogy of expiation could, in this con-
text, be employed to negotiate and engage with the narratives and spectacles
of suffering typified in Nonceba, Cephas, Sibaso and the people of Kezi.
Teachers and students may thus engage with naked suffering and its
double-edged implications and possibly utilise these debates as the basis of
re-imagining hope and restoration. This constitutes the basis of expiation of
individual and national guilt. Extending beyond the pedagogy of discomfort
that only shakes individuals out of their ‘comfort zones’, the pedagogy of
expiation may encourage thawing of individual psycho-social weaknesses
16 N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
that militate against acceptance of others. Thus, drawing on Buhler’s work
(2013), it could be inferred that a pedagogy of expiation may invite students
to bear critical witness to their encounters with suffering, to engage in a
praxis of critical listening and reading of the text, and to raise questions
about how contexts shape the societies that students find themselves in.
Through images, symbols and metaphors that represent ‘difficult
knowledge’,The Stone Virgins is likely to expose both teachers and stu-
dents to those issues that are worthy of remembrance and how such
remembrance may inform contemporary perceptions of witnessing to
trauma in Zimbabwe. However, such witnessing may not be completed by
merely enduring the apprehension of difficult stories in the classroom, but
by transporting and translating these stories beyond their moment of
enunciation. This might constitute what Britzman (1998, 118) calls learning
from and not about difficult events. Classroom situations, however, may
present diverse situational challenges that could require attending to. This
might mean reimagining pedagogical spaces in ways that treat education as
neither a means to an end, nor as an end in itself, but as an unpredictable
site, where we could learn to bear witness to the suffering of the
other and accept responsibility for all wrongs committed in the name of
humanity.
A challenge that teachers may encounter therefore becomes one of how
to teach students to read and listen to those silent and dark voices lurking
in The Stone Virgins while at the same time fulfilling curriculum obliga-
tions. This requires that we rethink education as a significant intervention
strategy (Farley 2009) in helping children not only make sense of the con-
flicts in our world but also to learn how to deal with motives and traumas
surrounding conflict. In this way, the classroom could become a ‘community
of memory’in which students struggle with the possibility of witnessing
and pursuing a redemptive course in the interminable renewal of their
understanding and assessment of past events (Simon and Eppert 1997,
186–187). In Zimbabwe, it could also be imperative that we focus on repre-
sentations as they are enacted in the official curriculum as a ‘key instrument
in the formation of collective memory and national identity and a key strat-
egy for attending to issues of how we imagine ourselves, both collectively
and individually’(McConaghy 2003, 3). The country needs a pedagogy of
expiation that might allow for the re-inspection of the wounds that may
have been closed before they had healed in order that real healing could
begin.
Conclusion
This study has examined how Yvonne Vera’sThe Stone Virgins, when
re-imagined as ‘difficult knowledge’in an expert manner in an emotionally
conducive environment, may have potential to be a vehicle of expiation
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 17
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
that could challenge both students and educators to be witnesses of the
regrettable events of their history. The study thus finds Vera’s novel as a
bold attempt to explode the myths of ethno-specificities of violence and
such traits. Furthermore, as Ranger (2002, 207) admonishes, having read
The Stone Virgins, ‘no one can ever again fail to understand how important
it still is to rescue the dead of Kezi from “vultures and unknown graves”
and to reintegrate them into the society of the living’. Those who perished
in the violence in post-independence Zimbabwe as represented in The Stone
Virgins could be a reminder of the sanctity of human life and offer an
opportunity for us to reflect on loss and guilt as well as arrive at expiation
for our complicity in this act of evil. As Martin Luther King (Jr) (1962,1)
rightly asserts: all of us ‘are caught up in an inescapable network of mutual-
ity, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects
all indirectly’. It is in pursuance of this unavoidable human chain of mutual
complicity that The Stone Virgins’last paragraph offers the double hope of
a patient, fledgling personal love and the possibilities of national cultural
acknowledgement and restoration. In describing Cephas, the symbol of
expiation, Vera writes:
He must retreat from Nonceba, perhaps he has become too involved in
replicating histories. He should stick to restorations of ancient kingdoms, cir-
cular structures, bee-hive huts, stone knives, broken pottery, herringbone
walls, the vanished pillars in an old world. A new nation needs to restore the
past. (Vera 2002, 165)
Thus, when presented as ‘difficult knowledge’in pedagogical encounters,
The Stone Virgins could create the spaces that could enable teachers and
students to move beyond inquiry as an individualised process and to con-
front their own complicity as witnesses to the many injustices that charac-
terise their world. In the midst of similar injustices characters such as
Cephas and Nonceba offer us hope that new emotional discursive practices
that lead to both individual and national expiation might emerge.
Meanwhile, we wait with the hope that, with time, The Stone Virgins may
be made a set book in the contemporary Zimbabwean secondary school
curriculum.
Note
1. Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s inaugural speech on 17 April 1980 on the eve
of Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain.
References
Adorno, T. 1971. Education after Auschwitz. Accessed June 12, 2012. infed.org/…/the
odor-w-ardono-on
18 N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
Ahonen, S. 2001. “Politics of Identity Through History Curriculum: Narratives of
the Past for Social Exclusion –Or Inclusion?”Journal of Curriculum Studies
33 (2): 179–194.
Beavis, C. 2008. “Paying Attention to Texts: Literacy Culture and Curriculum.”
English in Australia 43 (1): 23–31.
Bennett, J., and R. Kennedy. 2003. “Introduction.”In World Memory: Personal
Trajectories in Global Time, edited by Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, 1–15.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boler, M. 1999. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge.
Britzman, D. P. 1998. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic
Inquiry of Learning. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Britzman, D. P. 2000. “If the Story Cannot End: Deferred Action, Ambivalence
and Difficult Knowledge.”In Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the
Remembrance of Historical Trauma, edited by R. J. Simon, S. Rosenberg, and
C. Eppert, 25–57. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Britzman, D. P. 2003. After Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoan-
alytic Histories of Learning. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Buhler, S. 2013. “Painful Injustices: Encountering Social Suffering in Clinical
Legal Education.”Clinical Law Review 19: 405–428.
Collins, A. 2013. “Teaching Sensitive Topics: Transformative Pedagogy in a Violent
Society.”Alternation, Special Edition, 9: 128–149.
Espiritu, K. 2012. “‘Do you know what a tower is?’The Crisis of 9/11 Remem-
brance Pedagogy in Samira Makhmalbaf’s God, Construction and Destruction.”
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 10 (2): 8–36.
Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Farley, L. 2009. “Radical Hope: Or, the Problem of Uncertainty in History Education.”
Curriculum Inquiry 39 (4): 537–554.
Felman, S. 1992. “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.”In
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by C. Caruth, 13–60. Baltimore, MD:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Translated by C. Gordon, L. Marshall,
J. Mepham, and K. Soper. New York: Pantheon Press.
Garrett, H. J., and S. Schmidt. 2012. “Repeating Until We Can Remember Difficult
(Public) Knowledge in South Africa.”Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 28 (1):
191–207.
Giroux, H. A. 2003. “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: Notes on a
Critical Theory of Educational Struggle.”Educational Philosophy and Theory
35 (1): 1–15.
Grumet, M. R. 1981. “Restitution and Reconstruction of Educational Experience:
An Autobiographical Method for Curriculum Theory.”In Rethinking Curricu-
lum Studies: A Radical Approach, edited by M. Lawn and L. Barton, 115–130.
London: Croom Helm.
Habermas, J. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the
Rationalization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.
Heybach, J. A. 2012. “Learning to Feel What We See: Critical Aesthetics and
‘Difficult Knowledge’in Age of War.”Critical Questions in Education 3 (1):
23–34.
Hutcheon, L. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
King, M. L. Jr. 1962. Letter from Birmingham Jail. Accessed August 12, 2012.
http://www.uscrossier.org/pullias/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/king.pdf
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 19
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
Leonardo, Z., and R. K. Porter. 2010. “Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory
of ‘Safety’in Race Dialogue.”Race Ethnicity and Education 13 (2): 139–157.
Lingard, B., and A. Keddie. 2013. “Redistribution, Recognition and Representation:
Working Against Pedagogies of Indifference.”Pedagogy, Culture & Society 21
(3): 427–447.
McConaghy, C. 2003. “On Pedagogy, Trauma and Difficult Memory: Remembering
Namatjira, Our Beloved.”The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 32:
11–21.
Medina, J. 2011. “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-
memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism.”Foucault Studies 12: 9–35.
Mlambo, A. S. 2012. “Becoming Zimbabwe or Becoming Zimbabwean: Identity,
Nationalism and State Building in the Historical Context of Southern Africa.”
Inaugural Lecture presented at the University of Pretoria, October 30, 2012.
Accessed June 24, 2013. repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/.../Mlambo_
paper_2012.pdf
Mlambo, A. S. 2013. “Becoming Zimbabwean: Nation and State-building in the
Context of Southern Africa.”In Nationalism and National Projects in Southern
Africa. New Critical Reflections, edited by S. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and F. Ndhlovu,
235–252. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa.
Muponde, R. 2004. “The Worm and the Hoe: Cultural Politics and Reconciliation
after the Third Chimurenga.”In Zimbabwe: Injustice and Political Reconcilia-
tion, edited by B. Raftopoulos and T. Savage, 176–192. Cape Town: Weaver
Press.
Muponde, R. 2011. “History as Witchcraft: The Narcissism of Warrior Masculini-
ties in Edmund Chipamaunga’s War and Post-War Novels.”In Redemptive or
Grotesque Nationalism? Rethinking Contemporary Politics in Zimbabwe, edited
by S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and J. Muzondidya, 71–89. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. 2011. The Zimbabwean Nation-state Project. Accessed
January 12, 2012. kms1.isn.ethz.ch/serviceengine/Files/ISN/133999/.../en/59.pdf
Phimister, I. 2012. “Narratives of Progress: Zimbabwean Historiography and the
End of History.”Journal of Contemporary African Studies 30 (1): 27–34.
Pitt, A., and D. Britzman. 2003. “Speculations on Qualities of Difficult Knowledge
in Teaching and Learning: An Experiment in Psychoanalytic Research.”Interna-
tional Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16 (6): 755–776.
doi:10.1080/09518390310001632135.
Ranger,T.2002.“History Has Its Ceiling.”In Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the
Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, edited by R. Muponde and M. Taruvinga, 203–216.
Harare: Weaver Press.
Ranger, T. 2004. “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of
the Nation: The Struggle Over the Past in Zimbabwe.”Journal of Southern
African Studies 30 (2): 216–234.
Simon, R., and C. Eppert. 1997. “Remembering Obligation: Pedagogy and the
Witnessing of Testimony of Historical Trauma.”Canadian Journal of Education
22: 175–191.
Simon, R. J., S. Rosenberg, and C. Eppert. 2000. Between Hope and Despair:
Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma. New York: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Slattery, P. 2006. Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era. New York:
Routledge.
Vera, Y. 2002. The Stone Virgins. Harare: Weaver Press.
20 N. Moyo and J. Gonye
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
Worby, E. 1998. “Tyranny, Parody, and Ethnic Polarity: Ritual Engagement with
the State in Northwestern Zimbabwe.”Journal of Southern African Studies 24
(3): 561–578.
Zembylas, M. 2013. “Pedagogies of Hauntology in History Education: Learning to
Live with the Ghosts of Disappeared Victims of War and Dictatorship.”Educa-
tional Theory 63 (1): 69–86.
Zembylas, M., and M. Boler. 2002. “On the Spirit of Patriotism: Challenges of a
‘Pedagogy of Discomfort’.”Teachers College Record. Accessed October 21,
2013. http://www.tcrecord.org. ID Number: 11007.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 21
Downloaded by [Great Zimbabwe University] at 08:15 20 February 2015
