ALA Lecture: January 24, 2026 – Gibson Ncube

On the ALA YouTube Channel

Sponsored by the Queer African Studies Caucus of the African Literature Association (QASALA)

In this paper, I examine how Zimbabwean writers Chido Muchemwa and T. L. Huchu engage with the mythology of the njuzu (water spirit) to reimagine the entanglements of gender, embodiment, and ecology. Anchored in Shona hydrocosmologies and informed by queer and decolonial theoretical frameworks, this paper (which is part of a larger study) considers how the njuzu–a figure of fluidity, transgression, and metamorphosis–unsettles the epistemic boundaries that exist between human and nonhuman, physical and metaphysical, self and environment. Drawing on Isabel Hofmeyr’s idea of “going below the waterline”, I offer close readings of two short stories: “Finding Mermaids” by Muchemwa and “Njuzu” by Huchu. I argue that both writers recuperate Shona hydrocosmological imaginaries to dislodge colonial, heteronormative and anthropocenic logics that have long structured conceptions of gender, personhood and relationship to the natural world. By foregrounding njuzu’s ambivalent and generative potential, these texts propose hydrocosmology as a decolonial mode of thought that decentres the power of heteronormativity and human exceptionalism. In so doing, the selected texts articulate a relational ontology that is grounded in fluidity, reciprocity, and multiplicity. I therefore set out to advance the argument that in the Zimbabwean literary imagination, reading water and below it becomes not merely a metaphor for challenging hegemonies but a medium through which gender diversity and ecological consciousness co-constitute one another in ways that open new theoretical pathways for thinking queerness and the environment beyond Western paradigms of both ecology and identity.

Gibson Ncube is a Senior Lecturer at Stellenbosch University. He has published extensively in the fields of postcolonial African literatures and cultural productions. His interdisciplinary research spans comparative literature as well as queer and gender studies. He is the author of the book Queer Bodies in African Films (2022) and co-author of the book Southern African Queer and Trans Narratives in Digital Landscapes (2026). He is the current French Book Review Editor of the Canadian Journal of African Studies. He also sits on several editorial boards, including Nomina Africana, Imbizo, and the Journal of Literary Studies, the Journal of African Cultural Studies and the Nordic Journal of African Studies. Between 2020 and 2022, he co-convened the Queer African Studies Association of the African Studies Association. He has held fellowships at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, National Humanities Center (North Carolina), Leeds University and Oxford University. He is currently the Mzee Suleimann Nyembwe Visiting Chair of African and Diasporic Literary and Cultural Studies at Tübingen University (Germany).

Megan E. Fourqurean is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She specialises in postcolonial Anglophone literatures with a focus on the intersection of embodied religious practice, queer theory, and ecocriticism in African continental and diasporic writing. She is interested in how literature mediates the porous boundaries between material and spiritual understandings of embodiment and more-than-human relations. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Literature, Critique and Empire Today; Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa; Science Fiction Studies and ARIEL.