Film by Leeds-based British Academy Global Professor explores experiences of single women in Zimbabwe

St Monica’s Guild of Single Mothers: A Struggle for Inclusion centres the voices of Catholic single mothers to exemplify what it means to be single within Zimbabwean Christian communities

A new film by a professor based at the University of Leeds’ School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science explores the experiences of a group of single women in Zimbabwe.

Professor Tendai Mangena, a British Academy Global Professor, has been conducting research at the University of Leeds since early 2023 as part of a four-year project titled ‘Uncoupling Heteropatriarchy in African Feminism: Unmarried Women and Indigenous Knowledges of Gender and Sexuality among the Shona of Zimbabwe’.

In this short documentary film on ‘St Monica’s Guild of Single Mothers: A Struggle for Inclusion’, I centre the voices and activities of Catholic single mothers to exemplify what it means to be single, to be marginalised and to resist exclusion within Zimbabwean Christian communities.

Funded by the British Academy, the project uses the experiences of unmarried Shona women of Zimbabwe, as represented in indigenous knowledges and in their biographies, to explore the decolonial implications of such representations for African feminism. In particular, it problematises the concern with heterosexual marriage which, although deeply embedded in indigenous cultures, can be seen as a legacy of the colonial, Euro-Christian influence in African societies.

The project’s broader questions revolve around the voices and experiences of unmarried Shona women, and how these complicate, challenge or disrupt dominant ideas regarding the norms of gender, marriage, and family life in contemporary Africa.

Now, ahead of the scheduled completion of the project in 2027, Professor Mangena has produced a documentary about a group of single women whom she interviewed as part of the project.

Watch the film below.

‘Uncoupling Heteropatriarchy in African Feminism’ establishes the nascent field of singles studies as an important sub-field of inquiry that deepens an understanding of major questions in African and gender studies, such as about gender and modernity, socio-cultural change, and decolonisation.