Department of African Languages and Literature
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The Department's Mission is to achieve and maintain academic and scholarly excellence in both research and teaching of African Languages and literature. With African culture as its wider research area, the Department's activities are therefore integral to the cultural development of the nation at large particularly in areas of language and cultural knowledge. <br> Both the Department's academic staff and students consider indigenous linguistic and literary knowledge in its various forums as significant contributory factors to the nation's sustainable development and therefore are committed to improve the Department's activities in this respect. <br> Although its aim is to end up teaching all languages of Zimbabwe as well as including some other African languages outside Zimbabwe, at present the Department is focusing on Shona and Ndebele which have a biggest number of speakers. The two languages especially Shona are widely spoken in all provinces in Zimbabwe.
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Taking a melodic approach in preventing road accidents: an instructive therapy from Charles Charamba's song, Musatyaire Makadhakwa.
(2016-08)It is envisaged that music influences emotions, but little attention has been given to understanding how it affects emotion regulation in driving accidents. To the music therapist, an understanding of this phenomenon has ... -
Echoing Silences as a Paradigm for Restorative Justice in Post-conflict Zimbabwe: A Philosophical Discourse
(Zambezia, 2006)Drawing corroborative data from Echoing Silences (1997), an internationally acclaimed Zimbabwean liberation war novel written by Alexander Kanengoni, the article explores some perspectives on the history of violent pasts ... -
A Critical Re-Engagement With Stultifying Gender Binaries in HIV and AIDS Related Shona Novelistic Discourses.
(2006-09-12)The paper is an exposition and a critique of selected novelistic voices in Shona whose subject matter also includes HIV/AIDS. Yet, the informing philosophy on Aids in the novels is gender difference as the modus operandi ... -
Perspectives From the Past, Technology of the Present and the Future: A Critical Appreciation of the Oral Aesthetic in Mapenzi (1999) and Masango Mavi (1998)
(2006-09-12)The paper critically analyses the contrastive use of Shona oral art forms in Chiwome’s Masango Mavi and Mabasa’s Mapenzi. It proceeds from realisation that the two writers identify with Shona people’s oral experiences, ... -
Mass Neurosis, Entrapment, Closure and the Race’s Race of Life in Masango Mavi(1998) and Mapenzi (1999).
(2006-09-12)This paper critically analyses the projection of the African image and the condition of the African race as depicted in Emmanuel Chiwome’s Masango Mavi (1998), and Ignatius Mabasa’s Mapenzi (1999) in the broad context ... -
Harare Shona Slang: A Linguistic Study
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2000)This article discussed the linguistic origins and forms of the Shona language and examines words and phrases that are normally used casually in Harare. It illustrates that slang is a informal language that generally follows ... -
An Afro-centred View of HIV/AIDS as a Long Term European Project in Africa
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2006)Aids is an inverted colonialism. For this reason, the paper discusses HIV/AIDS as a new technology of African domination and exploitation in the 21st century and beyond. It transcends the mere understanding of HIV/AIDS ... -
Victimhood in Mungoshi's Shona Novels: A Critical Study.
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2005)The paper is a deliberate problematisation of the study of Mungoshi’s Shona literature with a view to initiate new critical perspectives absent in current Shona critical scholarship. We problematise the study of the ... -
Saying 'No' Without Saying 'No': Indirectness and Politeness in Shona Refusals
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2002)Indirect communication patterns are often a means to save the interlocutor’s face: avoiding open refusals is a clear example of that. The Shona of Zimbabwe, like other African peoples, sometimes avoid direct responses ... -
The Language of Ethnic Contempt: Malawian-Zimbabwean Shona Rivalry
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2002)The contact between the Shona and immigrants from Malawi dates back to more than six decades ago. Throughout this period, the ethnic relations of the two groups have been represented in fiction, drama and popular music ... -
The Flash Back and the Flash Forward Techniques in Ndebele Novels
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2001)This article examines how Ndebele fiction employs the flash-back and flashforward techniques. It observes that use of letters, old pictures and unplanned meeting of old friends are the common tools of flash-back while ... -
Some Aspects of the Architecture of the Possesive Noun Phrase in Bantu
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2000)Possessive nouns phrases are minimally made up of at lest two Noun phrases (NPs) that are possessively ralated to each other. In this article we argue that the syntactic order in which these noun phrases appear is not as ... -
Metaphors in Shona: A Cognitive Approach
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2003)This article discuses the pervasiveness of metaphors in everyday Shona language. It argues that metaphorical expressions are not mere words, but they are part of a much bigger way of conceptualising things. Examples are ... -
Managing 'Face' In Urban Public Transport: Polite Request Strategies in Commuter Omnibus Discourse in Harare
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2001)This article examine the request strategies in commuter discourse invlovling the bus crew(conductors, touts and drivers) and passengers in Harare. The present study consider requests in commuter transport as face threatening ... -
Street Remarks, Address Rights and the Urban Female: Socio-linguistics Politics of Gender in Harare
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2000)This article explores and describes the socio-linguistics and cultural features of street remarks that take place between unaquainted people in the streets of Harare. Concern here is the male-to-female remarks. It seems ... -
Naming the Pandemic: Semantic and Ethical Foundations of HIV/AIDS Shona Vocabulary
(University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2002)The article investigates the names that Shona-speaking people in contermporary Zimbabwe create and use in casual communication on the Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome(HIV/AIDS), the messages transmitted through these ... -
A Socio-linguistic Interpretation of the Social Meanings of Kingship Terms in Shona Urban Interactions
(University of Zimbabwe, 2003)This article provides an interpretive analysis of Shona native speaker's of kingship terms of address as forms of communicative resources to invoke social meanings in non-kin relations. Two types of data were used for the ... -
More Than Mere Linguistics Tricks: The Socio-pragmatic Functions of Shona Nicknames Used by Shona-Speaking People in Harare
(University of Zimbabwe, 2004)The article demonstrate how urban Shona- speakers often use nicknames as linguistics resources to perform a variety of social functions in everyday informal interactions. The intention of this article is twofold: to ... -
Reflections on the Proposed Ndebele-Shona/Shona-Ndebele Dictionary
(2005-10-27)Abstract: The master plan of the ALLEX Project includes a Ndebele–Shona dictionary in its proposed dictionary projects. Bilingual dictionaries are common in Zimbabwe, especially earlier ones with the language pairs ... -
Lingustic Rights in Multilingual Africa
(2005-10-27)Language issues have long been a problem in Africa. Language policies that have been pursued by most African countries after independence are similar in most cases as countries faced more-or-less the same linguistic reality, ...
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