This paper analyses A C Hodza's Ngano Dzechinyakare (Old Folk Tales) published in 1980. The paper argues that Hodza `borrowed' the folk tales from his Shona culture. However, it will also be suggested that despite not being the `originator' of the stories, the power of Hodza's collection resides in the author's understanding that to retell a told story is to contaminate it; "each re-telling produces different versions of the same stories that are `bound' by different contexts and meanings" (Vambe, 2006, 260). Therefore, to the extent that Hodza was able to recreate the folk tales, he too, can claim to be the `originator' of the narratives. It will, therefore, be demonstrated that Hodza uses language embodied in folk tale as a site of contestation both of what is standardized Shona, as well as the idea of a homogenous Zimbabwean nation. In doing so, Hodza's folk tales question Zimbabwe's cultural nationalism, particularly its tendency to project African nationalisms through the Zezuru dialect as the lingua franca of the Zimbabwean people.

Isidore Okpewho (1992), the doyen of African oral literature, has plotted the genres of oral narratives in terms of history, legend, myth, folk tale and fable. For him, historical texts are factual, and their veracity can be ascertained. In legend, there are elements of historical facts but the imaginative aspect of oral narratives begins to make its presence felt; mythological narratives gesture towards symbolisation. Abstract concepts are used to represent imagined reality. The element of fancy dominates the mythical narrative although some aspects of factual history can be deciphered. In the form of the folk tale, the creative imaginative dominates and cultural and political realities take on symbolical importance. Animals, and other objects in the non-linguistic world, are used to represent human behaviour, and lastly, in fables the imaginative temperament of the artist is freed from the constraints of time and space.

The emphasis on the internal elements in oral narratives, outlined above, varies according to context, and the creative temperament of the artist. However, what is central in the oral narratives is the struggle towards symbolisation that suggests certain levels of fixing the meanings in narratives. Beyond the fixation implied by symbols, oral narratives can be intepreted in different ways, and this does help yield multiple meanings. The gesture towards symbolization inherent in oral narratives such as the folk tale causes it to be easily described as metonymic; a phenomenon in which a small piece or aspect of reality is made to stand for or represent a larger whole. This is the essence of metonymic allegory as opposed to the metaphoric allegory whose propensity is to violate cultural and symbolical boundaries.

Commonwealth Literature Journal, Zimbabwean African Nationalism, Metonymic Allegory, Political Pollution, Postcolonial Expressions, African Liberation Movements, African Language Literatures, Colonial Government, Social Identities, Masculinity Myths, Collective Aspirations.