The impact of Zimbabwe’s ‘crisis’ on three transnational families situated in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United Kingdom

Abstract

This thesis examines the impact of national crisis in Zimbabwe at the start of the millennium on three families from different ethnic groups and backgrounds, exploring how they situated themselves within the broad political and historic context. The use of linked life stories offers an inter-generational perspective, which crosses gender and geographic borders and encompasses personal, family and historical time. By viewing ‘crisis’ through the prism of the extended family, I argue that individual responses are shaped by a family’s ‘culture’, in other words its history, myths and values, and by a person’s role and status within the family, which is in turn determined by gender, age and generation. This will, I hope, add a new dimension to transnational family studies while contributing to more recent work on ‘crisis migration’. It shows ‘crisis’, not as a specific set of events bounded by history and geography, but as a multi-faceted, dispersed and evolving experience with profound consequences for the lives of individuals and even, perhaps, the future of the extended family.

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