SheMurenga: The Zimbabwean Women's Movement 1995-2000

by Shereen Essof

This book demonstrates the place of women's movements during a defining period of contemporary Zimbabwe. The government of Robert Mugabe may have been as firmly in power in 2000 as it was in 1995, but the intervening years saw severe economic crisis, mass strikes and protests, the start of land occupations, intervention in the war in the DRC, and the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Shereen Essof shows how Zimbabwean women crafted responses to these and other events, and aimed for a feminist agenda that would prioritise the interests of the rural and urban poor. Rejecting both the strictures of patriarchy and the orthodoxies of established feminism, she demands that Zimbabwe's women be heard in their own voices and in their own contexts. In doing so she writes a book that combines scholarly integrity with a wild, joyous cry for liberation.

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eBook ISBN: 9781779222213

Reviews

"Shereen Essof has written a fascinating account of a significant period on the Women's Movement in Zimbabwe. In the 1980s there was a sense that the movement was a 10-point programme: legal rights, access to resources, equal pay for equal work, maternity leave … We thought that when we’d checked off that list, we’d be done. The story that emerges through this book shows that whatever we thought we’d ‘ticked’ to enable a society of choice has not been enough. As we move into the future, Essof has provided us with a history that should not be forgotten, and tools to re-ignite our feminist fire.": Hope Chigudu, Lead consultant, HopeAfrica