Stanley Nyamfukudza’s The Non-Believer’s Journey: A Critique of Zimbabwe’s Nationalist Discourses

This article argues that The Non-Believer’s Journey (1980), a novel by Zimbabwean author Stanley Nyamfukudza, is a narrative which is sceptical of the anticolonial nationalist project, specifically the liberation struggle of the 1970s in the then colony of Rhodesia. The discussion insists that Nyamfukudza’s novel subverts histories, metanarratives, and group identities that nationalists use in their attempt to concretise the idea of a homogeneous nation. In subverting these histories and narratives, Nyamfukudza shows that although the colonised black people in Rhodesia occupy the margins of the colony, they cannot be imagined in terms of homogeneity because they have different subjectivities. The article concludes that nationalism’s quest for homogeneity ironically becomes a force that represses the very colonised people that it seeks to liberate.