In this talk, Chido Muchemwa will be presenting on her postdoctoral project, “Queering the Indigenous and Indigenizing the Queer: Precarious Archives in Zimbabwe.” Her work is interested in the relationship between queerness and indigeneity in Zimbabwe. Her talk will cover her development of usahwira as a queer African theory. The Shona concept of usahwira is a traditional covenant that formalised kinship between friends. In precolonial Zimbabwe, queer people used usahwira as a way hide same-sex relations under the guise of respectability. In the 80s and 90s, Queer Zimbabweans embraced it to show that queerness is indigenous and not a western import. Muchemwa is developing a historical account of usahwira to develop a Zimbabwean theory that meets queer Zimbabweans on their own terms. Instead of aiming to make African queerness legible to western formulations, the work shows that there are specific rooted African subjectivities that only become visible when we encounter queer Africans on their own terms.
Bio: Dr. Chido Muchemwa is a University of Toronto Scarborough postdoctoral fellow (2025-27) in the Department of English. She holds a PhD in Information from the University of Toronto and was awarded a Governor General’s Academic Medal. Muchemwa is the author of Who Will Bury You And Other Stories, shortlisted for the Ontario Trillium Book Award in 2025.