Zimbabwe has an extensive censorship infrastructure that operates both formally, through the board of censors, and informally, through intimidation by the police and other state and civil players. The use and misuse of censorship legislation in the country has made for a chaotic situation in which misinterpretations of the law have been widely used to justify police crackdowns, arrests and destruction of art, literature and other cultural forms. This article reads censorship as a multiple and sometimes inconsistent phenomenon that shapes the strategies of cultural producers in manifold ways in Zimbabwe. Different literary and cultural forms constitute varying degrees of threat to the state, the police or individuals, depending on the audiences they address. I wish to explore how literary and cultural forms adapt to very localised practices of censorship. Interpreting the shifting forms, genres and modalities that literature and culture take as part of their strategy to avoid censorship provides new understandings of how literature and culture records social change.

津巴布韦拥有广泛的审查基础设施，通过审查委员会正式运作，并通过警察和其他国家和民间参与者的恐吓非正式运作。该国审查制度的使用和滥用造成了混乱局面，对法律的误解被广泛用于为警察镇压、逮捕和破坏艺术、文学和其他文化形式的行为辩护。本文将审查视为一种多重且有时不一致的现象，它以多种方式塑造了津巴布韦文化生产者的策略。不同的文学和文化形式对国家、警察或个人构成不同程度的威胁，这取决于它们所针对的受众。我想探索文学和文化形式如何适应非常本土化的审查实践。解读文学和文化作为其避免审查的策略的一部分所采取的不断变化的形式、体裁和方式，提供了对文学和文化如何记录社会变革的新理解。