Song and the Zimbabwean film, Flame (1996)

Abstract

The Zimbabwean film Flame (1996) encountered its public life in a controversial way. Its producer Ingrid Sinclair aimed to produce a film that would reveal the seamy side of Zimbabwe's liberation war, the rape of women being the central motive to the narrative plot of the film that sought to symbolically ‘overthrow’ the regimes of heroic images that the armed struggle had monopolised itself. Some ex-combatants, mainly from the ZANLA wing, staged a demonstration against what they perceived as the film's spectacular representation of excessive violence committed on female guerillas by male guerillas. The Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) government felt uneasy with sections of the film that underplayed the representation of heroic aspects of the struggle. Each of the contestatory narratives focused on the content of the film defined in racial and gendered power relations. One aspect that is underplayed is the critical retrieval of the contest between primary and secondary genres of orality in the film. The aim of this article is to foreground these aspects underlining the ambiguous role of popular songs within the film. Elements of primary orality in the film work to deny the potential domination of verbal, visual and audiovisual aspects that make-up Flame's secondary orality. Meanwhile, a case can be made and revealed that song genre simultaneously affirm and contest the collective identities that nationalist, patriarchal ideologies as well as the female centred narratives of the film seek to command for themselves as the authentic textual correlate of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. The result is intriguing in that none of the narratives in Flame are allowed to settle as the only ideological absolutes defining the psyche of the liberation movement.