Reading the runes of Zimbabwe

PERCY ZVOMUYA JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - Dec 04 2009 11:10

Percy Zvomuya explores how narratives about the country attempt to undermine the idea of a single nationalist paradigm.

The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera (Heinemann)

Dancing with life by Christopher Mlalazi (‘amaBooks)

Long time coming edited by Jane Morris (‘amaBooks)

Becoming Zimbabwe edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo (Jacana)

White gods black demons by Daniel Mandishona (Weaver Press)

In Dambudzo Marechera's classic The House of Hunger there's a brief, intriguing episode involving a "star cut out of toilet paper". The narrator tries to reach out for the star as it wafts away. "It flew upwards ... It floundered. It sailed straight for the window. On its underside was written the legend ZIMBABWE."

I revisited the passage because recently I received a copy of a new, re-edited edition of the novel from Heinemann. It comes with an interview Marechera had with himself and several short stories not in the 1978 edition, some of them previously unpublished.

The paper episode suggested to me an elusive, jelly-like state of nationhood and seems to evoke what, Becoming Zimbabwe is attempting to do. This text was edited by scholars Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo and contains essays by Zimbabwean historians. This immensely readable but rather small book (260 pages) sketches the history of Zimbabwe from 850AD to the present.

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It examines concepts that are now taken for granted. Some Zimbabweans remark that during initial encounters with foreigners, they are invariably asked whether they are from Shona or Ndebele decent. In the average non-Zimbabwean's imagination no other tribes live in Zimbabwe except these two. In fact, Kalanga, Venda, Shangaan, Nambya, Ndau, Tonga, Sotho, Chewa and other tribes live in Zimbabwe. But what would surprise most people -- including Zimbabweans -- is how the word Shona was not in use before the 19th century: "And even then it was seen as an insult, a term used by one's enemies; no one thought of themselves as 'Shona'." The term universally used then by early hunters and missionaries to denote the space we now know as Zimbabwe was Banyailand.

Sabelo Gatsheni-Ndlovu -- one of the most exciting of Zimbabwe's new generation of historians -- calls for the re-examination of the notion of Chimurenga (Shona for struggle), easily the most important word in the nationalist lexicon. Its origins are in the name Murenga, a spirit medium who promised immunity to the combatants of the war of 1896 to 1897.

Gatsheni-Ndlovu argues that Terence Ranger's celebratory, nationalist chronicling of Zimbabwe "sowed the seeds of what he [Ranger] later criticised as state-supported ascendancy of 'patriotic history' ".

Drawing on the works of scholar David Beach, Gatsheni-Ndlovu calls to dispel the myth of one simultaneous uprising. So instead of the one fiery Chimurenga that exercises the nationalist imagination, Gatsheni-Ndlovu invites us to review what happened between 1896 and 1897. What took place, he argues, were zvimurenga, a series of disconnected and multiple struggles aimed at the settlers (in Shona, the prefix chi denotes the singular and zvi the plural).

This, of course, is an inconvenient fact in nationalist historiography that imagines one struggle neatly segueing into another from the First Chimurenga to the Second Chimurenga of the 1970s, right up to the fast-track land reform of the 2000s, dubbed the Third Chimurenga.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been at the forefront of opposition politics in the past decade. But, more crucially, the party has been key in the shift of struggle politics back to the urban space. Former unionists, such as prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai and deputy president of the MDC Gibson Sibanda, are a reincarnation of people like unionists Charles Mzingeli, Grey Bango and other vibrant activists of the 1950s. Mlambo situates Mzingeli, who has since disappeared from the struggle encyclopaedia, in the fights for equal rights. Furthermore, he questions the nationalist dictum that says: "The urban population did not fight for the liberation of the country and that the rural people were the only real fighters for independence."

The urban space is important in Dancing with Life (’amaBooks), Christopher Mlalazi's rather enervating collection of short stories. Apparently the book received an honourable mention at the 2009 Noma Awards. Much of my disillusionment with this collection is because of its sometimes fragmented feel. Fragmentedness itself can be beautiful if it's done well, but the disparate pieces should be placed side by side; in this way the fragments become part of an uneasy whole.

Some of the stories are marred by convoluted plotlines and unlikely happenstances as in the story Fragments (a story about a chance meeting between daughter and father). In another story, When the Fish Caught Him, there are what I will hazard to call attempts at magic realism. It's about a man who catches a fish that turns out to be a lion-fish; the lion-fish takes him on a river tour of all the ghosts of the fish that have been killed by men throughout the ages. Not since British authors really messed up magical realism has an offering from this genre been this disagreeable.

The stories are not all bad, to be sure; several of them are quite readable, but you always feel they could have been better. Most of them are set in the township and feature protagonists leading miserable existences. The story, Election Day, is a satirical take on a president who, at 90 years old, still believes he has something to offer the country.

The travails of the Zimbabwean are now part of popular lore. Long Time Coming is a collection of short stories and poetry featuring an inter-generational range of writers; most of its more than 30 contributors are from Zimbabwe. The collection includes novelist John Eppel, Welsh poet and novelist Owen Sheers; historian Pathisa Nyathi, Wits University PhD student Thabisani Ndlovu, Swiss-based writer Petina Gappah, and UK-based writer Brian Chikwava.

Arrested Development by Sandisile Tshuma, Bus Fare by veteran poet Julius Chin'ono and The Chicken Bus by Linda Msebele are desperate, morose tales depicting the transport woes faced by the impoverished majority. The overarching theme of these tales is encapsulated in a dialogue in which someone in Msebele's story notes: "... the bottom line is we are all being roasted."

White Gods Black Demons is a collection of 10 short stories by Zimbabwean architect Daniel Mandishona. The best story is A Wasted Land, originally published in Heinemann's Contemporary African Short Stories, which came out in 1992 and was edited by Chinua Achebe and CL Innes.

A Wasted Land is ambivalent about the nationalist struggle, scathing even, and will find space on a shelf occupied by similarly despondent books that came out around that time. About the nationalists, the narrator says: "They were men of many promises but few deeds, each pulling in his own direction, each vying to impose his own will." The future they dangled before the oppressed is described as a "tainted utopia, a paradise of emptiness". This story is set in the early 1980s and these kinds of sentiments at the time would have been treasonous; the passage of time has crystallised the view that perhaps the pessimists were right.

I found the majority of the stories disappointing in terms of structure and style. It could be their verbosity, tautology and needless digressions that make them meander aimlessly without adding much to the plot.

In their various ways the narratives I have looked at are tired of a single nationalist paradigm, for long the staple of the Zimbabwean populace. What they suggest is a kind of a compromise, a government of national unity of sorts, as the politically savvy would say. With varying degrees of success these narratives attempt to complicate elusive Zimbabwean identities in the way Marechera's narrator suggested.

Yet nothing I have come across as yet in the post-2000 generation of fiction writers has the literary ebullience that Marechera possessed. Of course, Marechera has become something of a hackneyed nostalgic refrain.

Some writers are working and experimenting, indeed in one or two writers you see the indistinct outlines of a refreshing engagement -- Chikwava comes to mind. The majority, however, don’t seem to know how to tell the stories of the motherland. A few even use material in the way an information attaché from an embassy of a beleaguered country would issue communiqués. Sadly, for this reader with an evident bias for fiction, it's the historians who are at the forefront of disrupting the norm, questioning the narratives of the past as they have been given to us -- and intimating another version of events.

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