The Zimbabwe crisis as captured in Shona metaphor

Abstract

This article examines the metaphors that the Zimbabwean Shona speakers created to communicate various messages concerning the socio-economic and political crisis that has been occurring in their country since the year 2000. The data for this study came from two sources, namely, field notes from participant observations taken of naturally occurring interactions in the public and private spheres from August to December of 2008 and semi-structured interviews conducted with Shona speakers of varying age groups, educational status, religious and political affiliation, and gender. This article considerably draws analytical insights from the Cognitive Grammar (CG) framework which looks at metaphor as a conceptual and linguistic phenomenon that involves a mapping relation between two domains, namely, the source domain and the target domain. This theory argues that metaphor, as a cognitive tool enabling us to draw on our previous experience of the world with familiar issues and mapping them...