Suchergebnisse

English, as global language, has had great influence over most languages of the world for nearly two centuries now. The expansion of English is no exception in Rwanda, though. For the last two decades, the importance of English has been felt in the day to day activities of Rwanda. English became a third official language in Rwanda just after the 1994 genocide and a compulsory language of instruction since January 2009. This paper discusses the use of English in post-genocide Rwanda and its impact on French, over a borrowing one, Kinyarwanda and French. English has risen sharply for the last two decades because of the will of the Rwandan government to find ways of communicating with the external world in a more powerful language, English, than the previously predominant one, French. It also highlights major domains where English speaks of its strength and the factors that led to the spread of English.

This article discusses the central "ignored" role that women play in disseminating vital societal information through folklore. It explores the limited conceptions and constructions of their roles in literature and the media today where they are confined to housekeeping duties. It argues that through story-telling—the cornerstone of communal revitalisation—women play a pivotal task in ensuring the well-being of their communities. In advancing this argument, the article takes into account the fact that folktales have formed the basis of African formal education and training, which was meant for cognitive development of the African child. The major concern is, despite the tremendous contribution of women into the development, re-engineering and redesigning of the society, women are not taken or taking themselves seriously when it comes to societal decision-making issues. This paper mainly depends on a literature review and qualitative research methodology. A sample of 25 homes was selected randomly in the Bikita District of Masvingo Province in Zimbabwe. Data were collected orally from the story-tellers. Thereafter, an analysis was undertaken to establish the strategic role of women in disseminating information.

Texts written by some white Zimbabweans in the post-2000 dispensation are largely shaped by their authors' endeavor to contest the loss of lands they held prior to the onset of the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP). Written as memoirs, these texts are bound by the tendency to fall back on colonial settler values, Rhodesian identities, and Hegelian supremacist ideas in their narration of aspects of a conflict in which tropes such as truth, justice, patriotism, and belonging were not only evoked but also reframed. This article explores manifestations of this tendency in Eric Harrison's Jambanja (2006) and Jim Barker's Paradise Plundered: The Story of a Zimbabwean Farm (2007). The discussion unfolds against the backdrop of the realization that much of the literary-critical scholarship on land reform in post-2000 Zimbabwe focuses on texts written by black Zimbabweans and does not attend to the panoply of ways in which some white-authored texts yearn for colonial structures of power and privilege. This article evinces that the reincarnation of colonial settler values, Rhodesian identities, and Hegelian supremacist ideas undermines the discourse of white entitlement more than it promotes it. Values and identities of the colonial yesteryear on which this discourse is premised are not only anachronistic in the 21st century; they also obey the self-other binary at the heart of the patriotic history pedestal that was instrumental in the Zimbabwean regime's post-2000 populist deployment of the land grievance to reconstruct itself as the only and indispensable champion of African interests in Zimbabwe.