Gibson Ncube, Associate Professor of French, University of Zimbabwe The political arena in Zimbabwe is a de facto male space in which women play very peripheral and insignificant roles. Author and scholar Panashe Chigumadzi sums the situation up in an op-ed article, writing that It is not the place of women to rule, especially over men. Women who dare to aspire to rule are considered to be wild and unruly. Grace Mugabe, the former first lady of Zimbabwe, is one such woman, I argue in a paper on the tropes used to describe women in politics in the southern African…