Edgar tekere autobiography

To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. In Zimbabwe, autobiographies, particularly political ones, are sites of contestations, compositions, decompositions and recompositions of national narratives. In their obsession with the self, they always centre the narrating subjectivity whilst at the same time decentering and recentering others.

This means that in this literary gamesmanship, certain political personalities are displaced, peripherised, and debunked in this historical re-imagination.

A lifetime of struggle by Edgar Zivanai Tekere, , SAPES Books edition, in English Pan African autobiography series.

Tekere in his autobiography, A Life time of Struggle , seeks to impose his political credentials and legitimacy in the national script in the face of what he sees and stigmatises as opportunism by many politicians, and how these politicians were catapulted into positions of power by default. To dramatise this, his autobiography employs binary tropes that mark him out as iconic and a quintessence of virtue as opposed to the insipid, dour, corrupt and wishy-washy others.

Because masculinities and femininities are socially and culturally constructed, they often play significant roles in constructing identities and distinguishing one another. Femininities and masculinities therefore play a key role in nation-building and in the sustenance of national identities.

Edgar Zivanai Tekere (1 April – 7 June ), nicknamed "2 Boy", was a Zimbabwean politician.

This paper explores, through the autobiographies of two luminaries of Zimbabwe"s liberation war, how individual politicians configure their own gender identities and consequently how they configure the masculine and feminine identities of others. The paper posits that the autobiographical mode allows for intimate gendering of the liberation discourse.

It further argues that Tekere celebrates the heroic masculine self; preferring military femininities to domestic ones. He privileges his own masculinity while "feminising" Robert Mugabe. The paper also contends that Chung debunks the perceived manliness of political struggle and its representations by hailing the participation of women in the struggle for liberation.

Her narration of their femininity is in relation to the nation and is structured around the struggle for national liberation, female emancipation and nation-building.