Wandering a Gendered Wilderness: Suffering and Healing in an African Initiated Church

Isabel Mukonyora

Abstract

This monograph uses an anthropological method of research to access information about an oral tradition by which concepts about God, nature, evil, and paths to redemption are found to belong to gendered lived experiences of reality. Driven by a social climate of conflict and general harsdhip, this book shows how Shona people from Zimbabwe construct a theology featuring their landscape as a religious symbol of oppression, but also as the place to go on Exile and give expression to biblical hope for liberation. To read this book is to read an interdisciplinary study of the history of religion among the Shna and to come to terms with their politics of land use in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe.