In this essay I argue that in the fiction of three Zimbabwean writers we find evidence of new strains in gender relations, particularly in the representation of male subjectivity, during the first two decades after independence. Traditional Shona gender roles had been impacted first by over a halfcentury of colonization, followed by a relatively late and long liberation struggle (1967–80), which gave birth to a period of rapid modernization and uneven economic transformation in the context of globalization. Not surprisingly, Shona people who saw themselves as the primary subjects and who sought to be the agents of this history felt wrenched from traditional practices and plunged into circumstances that disrupted core notions of identity, including ideas about gender. Given that men assumed it was their role to direct the public life of the nation, the challenges to masculine identity were particularly intense. I sketch in some of the salient aspects of this history and then review a number of common themes and preoccupations in three collections of short fiction: Stanley Nyamfukudza's If God was a woman (1991), Charles Mungoshi's Walking Still (1997), and Shimmer Chinodya's Can We Talk? & Other Stories (1998). I conclude by focusing on two stories which offer especially subtle, anguished character studies of men coping with profound changes in and threats to their sense of their own manhood.

Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) was colonized by the British in the late nineteenth-century. In the first chimurenga, or war of resistance, in 1897-98, the Shona people were defeated.