The social life of dress and identity in Korekore culture, Zimbabwe

This article examines how Korekore women in Zimbabwe negotiate identity through dress across everyday ritual and kinship contexts. Grounded in Hunhu ethical philosophy and Frantz Fanon’s account of colonial embodiment, it draws on earlier Ph.D. fieldwork with seventeen women in the Makonde District. The analysis shows that dress is not merely aesthetic. It is a social medium through which women negotiate dignity, respectability, moral responsibility and belonging. Clothing choices are shaped by gendered roles, spiritual obligations, family expectations and specific occasions, including funerals, marriage rites and ritual gatherings. Dress is further negotiated within kinship positions such as daughters, wives, mothers, in-laws and aunties, where communal ethics remain central. At the same time, clothing is a site where colonial hierarchies of respectability and modernity are reproduced, contested and reworked. Korekore women’s dress practices therefore reveal how visibility, agency and womanhood are continuously negotiated within overlapping cultural, patriarchal and postcolonial formations. The article challenges generalized interpretations of dress and offers a decolonial account of how dress, womanhood and identity are constructed and experienced in African societies.