FyaMoneka: exploring the erasure of women within Zambian history

Abstract

This Master of Fine Art submission, comprising of an exhibition and mini-thesis, explores the erasure of women's narratives from Zambian history and collective memory. As a point of entry into the broader conversation of narratives of women marginalised in certain historicised events, this research analyses the narratives of Julia Chikamoneka and Alice Lenshina that are held in the collective memory of Zambian history. It focuses on the representations of narratives of women during and beyond colonial times, while hinging particularly on these two characters' encounters with and against British rule in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Titled FyaMoneka: Exploring the Erasure of Women Within Zambian History, the mini-thesis examines the representations and positioning of women's political activities within the liberation narrative that is recorded in the National Archives of Zambia (NAZ) and the United National Independence Party (UNIP) Archives. This mini-thesis highlights the fact that women have been written out of Zambia's liberation narrative in the NAZ and the UNIP Archives, and remains mindful of the inherent modifications and erasures of women's accounts over time, including the obfuscation or the absence of certain archival materials. This mini-thesis prospectively reconstructs Chikamoneka's and Lenshina's narratives using traces of their histories within collective memory through re/visiting processes of re-archivisation. The exhibition, titled ChaMoneka (It Has Become Visible): UnCasting Shadows, explores death and representations of death, where death is conceptualised as a metaphor for the erasure of women's historical narratives, whereas the body represents the narrative. Based on an exploration of the relationship and tensions between collective memory and history, death within this exhibition is thematised as the course of fading away and a continuous process in which women's narratives are erased.