Expounding selected Shona novelists’ perspectives on ritual murder

Abstract

The paper interrogates selected Shona novelists’ perspectives on ritual murder. It establishes that while the selected novelists manage to address the very topical issue of ritual murder, it is observed that rather than construing the phenomenon in the broader context of politics and economics, the literary creators are obsessed with blaming victims for the crime. It further notes that such a parochial and linear projection of ritual murder is uncritical and novelists therefore need to expose the hegemony of the capitalist economic system that impacts negatively on the human moral fibre and in turn push individuals to partake in such an inhuman and barbaric practice as ritual murder. The impingement of life-furthering values by the capitalist system seems to breed avarice such that it is simplistic, narrow and linear to give a mere surface reflection of avaricious consumerism inherent in businessmen in which the traditional healer is a catalyst of ritual murder while exonerating the capitalist economic system which is the incubator of this malady. Appreciation of the literature is guided by Afrocentricity against the backdrop that it places history and culture at the centre of any analysis.