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Abstract
The digital technology sector promotes digitalisation as a greener way to engage in capitalist processes that ensure economic progress. This narrative is misleading as components of the digital sector, such as digital devices, data centres, but also the Internet, are not in fact immaterial but require large amounts of natural resources and often even human labour for their construction and powering. These extractivist practices are based on colonial views and mechanisms, which persist into today. The Afrofuturist movie Neptune Frost (2021) addresses this topic by telling the story of a group of coltan miners in Burundi. Additionally, the movie engages with yet another form of extractivism, namely the exploitation of personal data, which economists also treat as a natural resource. This paper thus examines these various forms of extractivism as they are portrayed in Neptune Frost, including the depicted ways of resisting them.
Abstract
This essay constitutes a response to Marzia Milazzo’s article “ ‘The Hand That Tried to Feed You’: Capture, White Saviourism, and the Dehumanisation of Dambudzo Marechera in Flora Veit-Wild’s They Called You Dambudzo”.
Abstract
Against the background of the 19th century British domination of Ghana, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers (1978) depicts the restorative activities of a group of traditional health practitioners. The paper seeks to place African Indigenous Knowledge Systems at the heart of the resistance to colonialism and imperialism. The paper resorts to a close reading of the narrative guided by perspectives on recuperation provided by Armah, Amilcar Cabral, and Christel N. Temple. Traditional medicinal expertise, ecological awareness, cultural memory, and anthroponymy, as bearers of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems, coalesce to discredit the metropolitan miscomception of Africa as a tabula rasa, thereby infusing confidence into subalternized Blacks towards the dream of a reunified continent. The paper concludes that resistance to the empire entails politics and ethics of healing, empowerment, continuous mental decolonization, and commitment to African reunification.
Abstract
Marechera and his literary texts do not fit easily into Africanist categories of reading, principally due to his vitriolic invocation of the ‘f-word’ when asked if he was an African writer. Despite this iconoclasm, Afro-cosmic creeds undeniably inform aspects of his novella. An Afro-cosmological approach acknowledges non-empirical influences for certain behavioural traits portrayed by various characters in the novella which Marechera utilises and assails to address a ‘diseased’ colonial life. Using Falola’s Ritual Archives (2017), we approach this novella as a repository of Shona social ideation and cultural mythologies of haunting, and the Isisism trope of putting material remains back together. Numerous invocations of Shona cosmologies demonstrate Marechera’s socialisation into an African cosmology which manifests itself in his writing and life in unlimited ways. In sum, we interrogate the author’s use of culture codes to relocate him within an African rationale, thus, unmooring him from the Western-centric frameworks emphasised by Veit-Wild’s memoir (2020). We offer insights into the spirituality surrounding Marechera, his vagabondage and his seemingly self-sabotaging behaviour succinctly summarised by Veit-Wild as ‘biting every hand that fed you.’ Flora Veit-Wild, using the logic of a European, fails to appreciate this aspect of his life. In this article we recentre an African cosmology through the topos of being haunted to conceptualise Marechera’s writing and life to account for non-Western occurrences and modes of psychic distress which find no diagnosis in Western psychiatry.
Abstract
Dambudzo Marechera who died in 1987 remains a fascinating phenomenon in African literary culture. He is very much alive in the visual culture in which he circulates digitally. He is at once posthumous, multiple, and contemporary. Even though Marechera did not live to see the 21st century, he left versions of himself that remain both relevant and resonant. This paper considers the various ways Marechera’s digital afterlives manifest and force us to interrogate the intersections of life, death, personal data and human autonomy and presents a critique of unethical digital resurrection. Who does digital Marechera belong to?
Abstract
This article offers an in-depth reading of Flora Veit-Wild’s They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir (2020) and its contentious racial politics of representation. Through the memoir, which I contend is an apologia pro vita sua, a justification for the author’s own life and work, Veit-Wild seeks to dispel long-standing accusations that she has benefitted from Dambudzo Marechera and his legacy. As she depicts herself as a magnanimous activist and scholar, Veit-Wild reverses the script by portraying Marechera as a “galling scoundrel” who “depended on others to sustain him.” In the process, far from offering an authoritative portrait of Marechera that we can trust, the memoir dehumanises the writer. Suggesting that Veit-Wild’s relationship with Marechera was motivated more by racialised objectification than love and respect, the text reproduces a white saviour narrative that reinscribes racist tropes of representation. While it also engages other works by Veit-Wild, this article delves into They Called You Dambudzo’s (un)critical reception, its unsettling portrayal of Marechera as a spoilt, ungrateful, and mentally ill writer who “had a way of taking for granted whatever was done for him,” Veit-Wild’s self-representation as both Marechera’s victim and saviour, her misappropriation of Marechera’s thought to enforce colourblindness, and the vexed colonial politics of speaking for others that the memoir lays bare.
Abstract
This article weaves the impossibilities of Dambudzo Marechera’s life under colonialism, racism, poverty, and violence, and of love between the Zimbabwean poet and the German scholar, Flora Veit-Wild. In this article, Veit-Wild is characterized as an “unreliable narrator” and “inside trader” due to her relationship with the poet. However, it is this position of Veit-Wild that allows us to decipher one of Marechera’s most difficult poems, “My Arms Vanished Mountains.” In using Veit-Wild as a window into my intepretation of Marechera, I also link Marechera’s poetics with that of a highly unlikely counterpart, Vladimir Nabokov. The impossibilities I allude to find their representation in Dambudzo Marechera’s “My Arms Vanished Mountains,” the poem Veit-Wild saved by chance.