Analysis of: Zenzele:
A Letter for My Daughter
By J. Nozipo Maraire

Dominique Kemp
History 1210-01
Professor Adejumobi
November 17, 2014

The novel, Zenzele1, is so much more than the telling of a good, touching story. Zenzele informs and educates its reader to what it means to be an African. The story is unfolded as a letter from a mother, Amai Zenzele, to her daughter, Zenzele. Reading a mother's perspective on the many different lessons that Amai attempts and hopes to teach and impart upon her daughter is a privilege in itself. Amai Zenzele recollects several anecdotes from her past as inspiration to inform and educate her daughter through her words, her verbal pearls of wisdom. These valuable lessons from her life include …show more content…

"Rhodesia3", was a predominantly white government where native Africans were banned from all manner of well-being. They were denied access to the Euro- suburbs except, of course, when they were going to work as housemaids and nannies to the white children. They lived as slaves in their own country, a continual state of constitutionalized racism that denied them an education, social life and true freedom to come and go as they please in their own hometown. All that was known was deprivation, austerity and labors of a cruel and unusual form of punishment, all because the color of their skin. After many years of bloodshed, death and families ripped apart from each other and countless other struggles to obtain freedom, they succeeded and regained their land and put up the name “Zimbabwe” which gave them their own country.
Throughout the stories and lessons in the book, Zenzele's mother shares her personal life and struggles to stress the importance to all of the lessons she shares with her daughter. Personally, I enjoyed reading the section in which Amai wrote of her cousin that was sent to England on a scholarship awarded by the village people, to study medicine. After several years of isolation, he came back to the village without a degree. If wasting the faith put in him by the village wasn’t enough to be successful in his studies, he chose to be