Strife
by Shimmer Chinodya
(Weaver Press)
As tantalising as titles and book covers go, I can’t remember one that comes close to Shimmer Chinodya’s Strife. When I saw the cover of silhouetted people, arms flailing in the air, and a yellow flame, I thought of the oppressed getting fed up with a dictatorship and rising up in anger.
But it turns out the novel, Chinodya’s seventh, has nothing to do with the meltdown in ZimbabÂwe at all. Strife is about a family, the Gwanangaras, and goes back in time to the mid-1800s, around the time that Mzilikazi — fleeing Shaka’s wrath — arrived in what is now ZimbabÂwe with thousands of his Ndebele subjects.
The Gwanangara family has an aggrieved ancestor in its midst: Mhokoshi. “He was a hunter; he had no wife and hunting was everyÂthing to him. He lived in a cave alone in the forest, away from relatives.” He dies and his corpse festers unburied on the savannah plains. His roaming spirit, failing to find rest in the netherworld, comes back to haunt his living relatives. Rindai, the first-born in the narrator’s family, is struck by fits of epilepsy on his wedding night, yet another sibling by schizophrenia and the extended family is riven by internal rivalries.
The narrator, Godfrey (“My name is Godi, short for Godfrey … I don’t know why I was given my first name, but it definitely has no allusions to God or to freedom.”), divides his tale in two, telling the sad story of the family over many decades and the more recent story of his immediate family. It feels like two stories initially, but he manages to merge them into a single tale, especially as time progresses.
Godfrey relives the tragedies of the past in the moment, the unease in the 19th century mirroring the family’s present sense of helplessness and fatalistic desperation, coming through quite effusively. This technique works, especially at the beginning, when the settings are distinctly disparate — in the 19th century and the recent past. But, as the events and people narrated become more and more recent and recognisable, it feels somewhat like two disjointed stories.
Strife could be encapsulated as a struggle between modernity and the past. The soul of the story is how an upwardly mobile family — who all go to university — negotiate an aggrieved past. Their predicament is that they believe traditional modes of atonement are not becoming for people of their station.
The family is helpless and at a loss about what to do about the schizophrenia affecting Kelvin, the family outcast. Should they go to the psychiatrist or the inyanga/sangoma? Or should the mysterious deaths, the suicides, the divorces and the chronic illnesses bedevilling them be seen as mere happenstance, not occurrences that can be fixed only by Pentecostal Christianity, the traditional healer’s bones or herbalists?
The novel ends on a preachy note, the narrator, in a way, summing up what he has been telling us over the 200 or so pages. He encounters, on stage, in this order, tradition, patriarchy, fatalism, modernity, education and medicine. In this dialogue with medicine he is told, “there are some cases that medicine can’t cure”.
The book, for better or worse, chooses to be oblivious of the larger strife that has rocked the country. The arrival of Mzilikazi and the destabilisation of local tribes, Cecil Rhodes and his Pioneer Column, the war against Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, the killings of Gukurahundi and the present crisis receive the most cursory of allusions; “… this is the time of dissidents” is all the author says about Gukurahundi.
This reminded me of Chinua Achebe’s argument that “an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant — like the absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames”.
Perhaps anticipating this, early enough in the story the narrator puts out a disclaimer: “but this is not a story about that war. The story of that bitter conflict has been told elsewhere, many times before.”
It is a compelling and disturbing read nevertheless, in which the horrors of the past are lived in the moment.