By Gibson Ncube 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: Politics in Zimbabwe remains a man’s game, and virility is a measure of one’s ability to rule over others. 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, Zimbabwe’s former First Lady, is one such woman, I argue in a paper on the tropes used to describe women in politics in the southern African country. Grace rattled political cages in 2019 in her bid to replace her ageing husband, both as leader of the ruling Zanu PF party and also possibly as president of the country. But instead of focusing on the merits and demerits of her political interests, the recurring comment was that she was a sex-starved hure (a Shona word for whore). This sexist slandering has not been used to describe just Grace. It has been used systematically to denigrate women who aspire for any political positions. From “gold-digger” to mother figure Grace became a public figure in 1996 when she married the late former President Robert Mugabe after the death of his first wife, Sally. Grace had previously been his personal assistant. At the time of the marriage, she was defamed for having an affair while Sally was terminally ill. Moreover, Grace was labelled a gold-digger because she had married a rich and powerful man who was 40 years her senior. She was often compared to Sally, the latter characterised as womanly, motherly and homely. Sally was a saint, according to public opinion, partly because she had assumed a more ornamental role as First Lady. However, with time, Grace was embraced as the proverbial mother of the nation and the endearing appellation of Amai (mother) was bestowed on her. In 2014, she took her first steps in politics when she was elected secretary of the women’s league of the ruling Zanu PF party. She was fronted as the face of the Generation 40 (G40) faction within the ruling party. G40 was a grouping of young party members who felt there was need for a change of power from the old guard that had waged the liberation war. Grace began a series of rallies across the country. The rallying call at these events was the Shona phrase Munhu wese kunaAmai (Everyone should rally behind mother). She used the rallies to attack not just members of the opposition, but more importantly members of the competing faction which was headed by current President Emmerson Mnangagwa. Her outbreaks were far from diplomatic, they were blunt, scathing and contemptuous. From mother figure to “whore” It was around the time of the countrywide interface rallies that the name Amai was gradually replaced by the tag of hure. Academic and writer Rudo Mudiwa in the article On Grace Mugabe: coups, phalluses, and what is being defended, explains how Grace came to be called hure and shows how the name was linked to the November 2017 “coup that wa