In 2004, Zimbabwe nationalist historian Terence Ranger argued that since the farm invasions in 2000 there have been attempts by Robert Mugabe’s government to ”propagate what is called a patriotic history”. Ranger contended that this history is intended to proclaim the continuity of the Zimbabwean revolutionary tradition. It is an attempt to reach out to ”youth over the heads of their parents and teachers, all of whom are said to have forgotten or betrayed revolutionary values”.
Mugabe’s version of history has, of course, been contested by both black and white writers who, since the crisis began in earnest, have put out counter-narratives — both fictional and non-fictional — that contest what Ranger called ”nationalist historiography”. For a country about which cynics used to say ”the only thing that was not in short supply was short supply itself”, Zimbabwe has had many books written about it. As a result, libraries and bookshop shelves creak under the weight of tomes that attempt to make sense of the country’s issues.
Of the non-fiction I have read this year, Geoff Hill’s What Happens After Mugabe? (Zebra Press) stands out. Unlike many books I’ve read about Zimbabwe, Hill goes beyond painting the president as a monster and looks at the post-Mugabe scenario, when the country will have to attract its millions of exiles to return and rebuild the stone walls that lie in ruin. It ranks highly with British journalist Christina Lamb’s House of Stone (Harper Press), which is a biographical account of a white farmer, his family and their black domestic worker. Lamb’s book is written in free-flowing prose and tries, with remarkable success, to show real people and how they are caught up in the country’s implosion.
Owen Sheers’s The Dust Diaries (Faber and Faber) is by far the best semi-fictional book about Zimbabwe I read this year. It is an intense and poetic meditation that eulogises Sheers’s distant, great-uncle — a maverick missionary called Arthur Cripps, a spartan poet and independent cleric who thumbed his nose at the Rhodesian establishment in ways that won him friends among Africans. Written by a foreigner, it has the feel of a witness and is drained of the bitterness that seeps through most Zimbabwean books. One such bitter reflection is decorated journalist Geoff Nyarota’s Against the Grain (Zebra Press), which, despite factual errors, petty idiosyncrasies and all, remains an important book by a significant actor on Zimbabwe’s journalistic stage.
As an Arsenal fan I also had the pleasure of reading Jasper Rees’s Wenger: The Making of a Legend (Short Books), about Gunners’ coach Arsene Wenger. A readable tome (published in 2003), it tries to unmask the man behind the intense exterior of football. Some critics believe Wenger was able to cover his tracks so that, in the end, we have the football man and nothing more.
Perhaps the biggest event on the African literary calendar was the publication of The Wizard of the Crow (Pantheon) by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. This is a mature Ngugi, seemingly weaned from his fire-and-brimstone Marxist zeal, but having the good sense to be optimistic in a book he meant ”to sum up Africa of the 20th century in the context of global forces of world history”. A very long book, sometimes shocking, often ludicrous, it is a testimony to Ngugi’s cultural zeal and storytelling prowess.
Tsitsi Dangarembga decided that a novel every two decades is not a bad idea by releasing a sequel to her celebrated feminist manifesto Nervous Conditions. The Book of Not (Ayebia) takes Tambu’s story further, grandly sets the stage for the final book in the trilogy and is certainly one of the important books to come out of Africa this year. Given the abundance of material in post-independence Zimbabwe, we await the rebirth of Tambu that is fleetingly intimated in The Book of Not. But please Tsitsi, we don’t want to wait decades for the final book.
As I was drawing up my hit list for 2006, I received a copy of Wole Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn (Random House). So far I have read a couple of chapters and find it is accessible as well as demonstrating his passion for words, people and their well-being.
This has been a busy year: Dangarembga coming back from her hibernation (from prose), Soyinka and Ngugi still around and still working. It becomes all the more remarkable when we realise that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — whose Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate) came out this year — was not yet born when the works of these ancestors of African literature first came out in the 1960s. This happily confirms that, although these forefathers set forth at dawn, they still have the energy to continue even as their evening approaches.