Unsung Heroines and Violence for the Land: Narratives of Elderly Women Farmers' Experiences in South Africa and Zimbabwe

Abstract

Scholarly evidence from African flag-democracies reveals that although women were central to the liberation struggle, narratives of their participation and contribution let alone the violence they suffered on their bodies during the fight for land are invisible from post-independence discourses. In Zimbabwe, female freedom fighters were reduced to sexual objects who merely went to war to perform 'reed dance' for the male freedom fighters. Subsequently, the negative labelling limited women's chances post-independence and even deterred them from enjoying the fruits of the land they fought hard for. This negativity, in many African contexts where women struggled for democracy, not only trivialises their contribution but renders invisible their bodies from the land they fought for. Although women's contribution to democracy in South Africa is acknowledged through the annual celebration of the August 9 1956 women's march to the Union Buildings, the commemoration does not do justice to...