Onomastics is a field of sociolinguistics that is today being exploited by cultural geographers as well as historians and scholars and students of heritage studies. It is in the light of this that this research ventures to bring to the fore how naming practices among the Shona have been used to communicate and describe natural phenomena. It does this by analysing personal names, those of dogs and those of places. When used with regards to toponyms, the names bring out how people map out a place and how they relate to it. When used in naming people, the names successfully funtion as a summary...

This book argues that the Shona novel is an alternative, reliable and valid source of history. It has the advantage over other sources in that it is usually more up to date when compared to other historical documents. It does this by corroborating what is found in the studied Shona novels and what is found in published historical texts and other related documents. The major highlights of the book are the position of women in pre-colonial Zimbabwe and the life of black workers under Rhodesian settler rule both in the urban areas and on farms. It also focuses on the education that...

This book draws on the case of the Shona and other Bantu people of Africa to argue that names are not mere identity tags. Names are an important cultural symbol of the people who give and bear them. The book challenges linguists and other social scientists to pay particular attention to the significance of names in the study of language use in society. Equally, it demonstrates the importance of names as part of the distinctive repertoire of Shona cultural heritage. Each Shona sentential name is a statement about that reality of being Shona. Carried in each name are sentiments that reflect on...