Dr Nelson Mlambo

Dr Nelson Mlambo is a literature and cultural theories researcher. He is currently an AfOx TORCH Visiting Fellow at the English Faculty, University of Oxford, as part of the Africa Oxford Visiting Fellowship Programme. 

Nelson is a leading scholar of postcolonial African literature with a specialism in Southern African writing, mainly focusing on Zimbabwe and Namibia. He has over forty peer-reviewed publications and a significant record of contribution to his field as a researcher and a teacher. His research interests are African literature and theory, Afrocentrism, Afro-triumphalism, health communication and intercultural communication studies. He is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Namibia. 

Nelson’s research explores how the literary manifestations of conflict in fiction offer creative/imaginative presentations of reality which can form the basis for negotiating restorative justice and peaceful co-existence. His work seeks to understand how narratives can help us to think of and understand the local and global ramifications of genocides. In his research nelson investigates how truth and memory survivor narratives shape dreams for peaceful and prosperous co-existence through valorising indigenous knowledge systems that characterise human-nature interdependencies and how narratives can project modalities of viewing gender and natural landscapes as sites of survival and future-making.  

While in Oxford, Nelson will work on the research project: “Literary Archives of Conflict for Peaceful and Prosperous Societies: Memory, Truth and Faction About the Herero/Nama Atrocities in Namibia.” Nelson’s project seeks to explore the often-overlooked dimensions of the Herero/Nama characteristics in the discussions about the conflict: their agency, resilience, and ability to survive. These qualities have been silenced in discourses of colonial conflict, and the project will argue that to build democratic futures of equality and humane considerations, such positive qualities of the victims need to be registered. The project will use trauma and resilience theory, postcolonial ecocriticism, and thoughts from memory studies to argue how modes of representation help reflect genocidal historiography and how global futures of peace can be imagined and conceived.  

• Kandemiri, C.M., & Mlambo, N. (2022). Mental Illness and the Spiritual-Environmental Ecology in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Alexander Kanengoni’s Echoing Silences. Journal of African Languages and Literary Studies (JoALLS), 3(2), 51-69.
• Gawas, E., Kangira, J., & Mlambo, N. (2022). #Blessed: The Disintegration of Women’s Emancipation through Transactional Sex Relationships in Selected Works of Fiction. Journal of African Languages and Literary Studies (JoALLS), 3(2), 71-87.
• Shiyoka, S.K. & Mlambo N. (2022). Crossing the Boundary: An Investigation of Transnationalism, Transculturalism and Transracial Marriages in Jane Katjavivi’s Undisciplined Heart and Trudie Amulungu’s Taming My Elephant. Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies. Routledge, Taylor and Francis. To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23277408.2022.2104510
• Krishnamurthy, S., Mlambo, N., & Vale, H. (2022) (Ed.), Writing Namibia Coming of Age – Volume Two. Basel, Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
• Krishnamurthy, S., Mlambo, N., & Vale, H. (2022). Introduction. In Krishnamurthy, S., Mlambo, N., & Vale, H. (2022) (Ed.), Writing Namibia Coming of Age – Volume Two. Pp. 1 - 11. Basel, Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
• Chiruvo-Mushonga, M., & Mlambo, N. (2022). Representations of post-independence leadership in selected Namibian poetry (1990–2020). In Krishnamurthy, S., Mlambo, N., & Vale, H. (2022) (Ed.), Writing Namibia Coming of Age – Volume Two. Pp 319 - 335. Basel, Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
• Iitula, L., & Mlambo, N. (2022). Authoring the “unspeakables”, moralising the public sphere: A literary examination of social commitment and the artistic vision in Sifiso Nyathi’s oeuvre. In Krishnamurthy, S., Mlambo, N., & Vale, H. (2022) (Ed.), Writing Namibia Coming of Age – Volume Two. Pp. 285 - 302. Basel, Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
• Simataa, A., & Mlambo, N. (2022). The conundrum of personal identity in Ndeshi Namhila’s The Price of Freedom. Forthcoming book chapter in the edited volume Narrating Africa (Expected publication date – December 2022).
• Mlambo, N. & Namhila, E.N. (2022). Identity and cultural transplantation: Reconstructing paradoxical conversations on colonial displacement and missionary complicit in Namibia. Forthcoming book chapter in the edited volume Narrating Africa (Expected publication date – December 2022).
• Mlambo, N., & Kangira, J. (2021). Fictionalising activism, voicing contested terrains and survival strategies under Mugabe’s (mis-) rule. In C. Sabao, R.R. Mahomva, & L. Mhandara (Ed.), Re/membering Robert Gabriel Mugabe: Politics, legacy, philosophy, life and death (pp. 45 – 76). Harare, Zimbabwe: LAN Readers.
• Mlambo, N. (2021). English and multilingual repertoires in healthcare: Communicative experiences of expatriate healthcare providers in Windhoek. In A. Schroeder (Ed.), The dynamics of English in Namibia: Perspectives on an emerging variant, pp. 63 – 82. [In press]. John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Kandemiri, C.M., Mlambo, N., & Pasi, J.S. (2021). Disruption of social settings in selected narratives of genocide. Journal of African Languages and Literary Studies (JoALLS),2(1), 131-155.
• Kandemiri, C.M., Mlambo, N., & Pasi, J.S. (2020). Literary reconstructions of the 1904 - 1908 Herero Nama conflict in Namibia Journal of African Languages and Literary Studies (JoALLS), 1(3), 7-32.
• Mlambo, N. & Tobias, C. (2020). Transnationality and identity formation in Ellen Ndeshi Namhila’s The Price of Freedom. Journal of African Languages and Literary Studies, 1(1), 139 – 151.
• Mlambo, N. (2020). Transnationalism, subjectivities and spatial relations in Jane Katjavivi’s Undisciplined Heart. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 56(1), 39 – 48.
• Duncan, D., & Mlambo, N. (2020). Transnational African Literatures. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 56(1), 1 – 3.