The African Literature Association (ALA) will open its 2026 Lecture Series with a timely and thought-provoking talk by Gibson Ncube, focusing on the intersections of gender diversity, ecology, and Indigenous cosmologies in Zimbabwean literary texts.
The virtual lecture, scheduled for Saturday, January 24, 2026, will be streamed live on the African Literature Association YouTube channel, making it accessible to a global audience across multiple time zones, including London, Lagos, Johannesburg, and Nairobi.
Titled “Hydrocosmologies and the Rethinking of the Intersection of Gender Diversity and Ecology in Selected Zimbabwean Literary Texts,” the lecture examines how Zimbabwean writers Chido Muchemwa and T. L. Huchu draw on the mythology of the njuzu—a Shona water spirit—to reimagine dominant ideas about gender, embodiment, and the natural world.
At the heart of Ncube’s analysis is the njuzu as a figure of fluidity, transformation, and transgression. Through close readings of Muchemwa’s “Finding Mermaids” and Huchu’s “Njuzu,” Ncube argues that these texts challenge rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman, physical and metaphysical, self and environment. In doing so, they unsettle colonial, heteronormative, and anthropocentric frameworks that have long shaped understandings of gender and personhood.
Drawing on philosopher Isabel Hofmeyr’s concept of “going below the waterline,” the lecture positions hydrocosmology as a decolonial mode of thought—one that recenters relationality, reciprocity, and multiplicity. Rather than treating water merely as metaphor, the texts Ncube examines frame it as a critical medium through which gender diversity and ecological consciousness emerge together.
The lecture also foregrounds queer and decolonial theoretical frameworks, suggesting that African literary imaginaries offer alternative ways of thinking about ecology and identity beyond Western paradigms. In Ncube’s reading, water becomes both a site of resistance and a generative space for rethinking what it means to live, relate, and belong in a shared world.
Introduced by Carli Coetzee and Megan E. Fourqurean, and sponsored by the Queer African Studies Caucus of the African Literature Association (QASALA), the lecture sets an intellectually ambitious tone for the 2025–26 ALA Lecture Series.
With its focus on African epistemologies, environmental thought, and gender diversity, the event promises to resonate with scholars, students, and readers interested in literature’s capacity to imagine more just and sustainable ways of being in the world.
