Re-presenting the precolonial past: identity and history in Musaemura Zimunya's Thought-Tracks

This article examines the strategies that Zimbabwean poet, Musaemura Zimunya uses in his collection of poetry Thought-Tracks to re-inscribe the pre-colonial past and the cultural spaces it represents. Probably the most prolific black Zimbabwean poet to date, Zimunya was born in 1949 in the scenic Eastern Highlands in the then Rhodesia and much of his poetry draws its inspiration from the beautiful landscape of this region. The paper contends that Zimunya's re-imagining and rewriting of the precolonial identity sites is designed to fashion, for both the black subaltern and the nation, alternative identities and histories to those framed by monologic narratives of colonial Rhodesia. In addition, the argument demonstrates that his 'doubling-back' to the precolonial past and cultural symbols associated with it, is also meant to locate his nationalist discourses in histories and cultural spaces that have the potential to provide a binding rallying point for the subaltern in the struggle for independence.