The Narratives and Counter-narratives of Zimbabwean Asylum: female voices

Social historians of Africa in general, and of Zimbabwe in particular, have learnt how to make use of colonial criminal court records by reading them both with and against the grain. Now historians of Zimbabwe are being presented with another sort of court record. Many of them are on the Britain Zimbabwe Society panel of ‘expert’ assessors of Zimbabwean asylum appeals. They see the narrative statements of asylum-seekers and the counter-narratives of the Home Office refusal letters. This paper argues that read both with and against the grain these case records offer a revealing way into postcolonial interactions. For the Home Office, as for the British Government in general, we live in a postcolonial world in which memories, legacies and responsibilities of colonialism have become redundant. Meanwhile asylum-seekers reassert the image of imperial Britain as a country of justice and fairplay. Taking the cases of Zimbabwean women asylum-seekers the paper reveals the dialogue between these two perceptions of ...