Geraldine Mukumbi ‘16

This profile was current as of 2016, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Thesis Title: Violence and Transgression in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Comparative Analysis of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning

I am working with Professor Ocobock on the question of decolonizing higher education institutions. The focus will be on three South African institutions – University of Cape Town, Rhodes University and Stellenbosch University. My work will be reading through curricula, speeches and newspaper material pre and post-Apartheid in order to find out if there are any changes in the rhetoric around the discourse of decolonization. Most importantly the research project will include an exploration of responses to calls for change, with special emphasis on the current ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement at the University of Cape Town to the ‘Open Stellenbosch’ movement at Stellenbosch University.

In the fall of 2014 I received a grant from the Kellogg Institute to travel to the 57th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association on Rethinking Violence, Reconstruction and Reconciliation. This experience allowed me to be a part of a community of African scholars addressing issues of violence from an academic perspective. Inspired by some of the insights I got at this conference, I used funding from the university to spend part of the summer attending the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa where issues around violence and inequality were addressed through art. It is these two perspectives - the academic and creative, that inspired my current senior thesis in which I use post-colonial literature to explore the effects of violence against Zimbabwean women.