from Research in African Literatures Volume 29, Number 2
The Interface of Orality and Literacy in the Zimbabwean Novel
Emmanuel Mudhiwa Chiwome
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On the importance of the novel, Musaemura Zimunya states:
In this genre the individual artist is preoccupied in bringing a people's past into sharp focus in order the more to mirror, interpret and comprehend the prevailing national, racial, or for that matter human situation. Inherent in this is the quest for heroic values, human faith, pride and dignity, and reassertion of identity with the living past. (9)This is a crucial objective, particularly during the colonial era when writers of fiction tend to focus on moral and sentimental issues to the exclusion of the history that shapes those morals. Colonial scholarship in African languages uses ahistorical methods to analyze the Shona culture. That also is significant to literary history insofar as it reflects the influence of the dominant culture on the psychology of the dominated. This paper does not intend to evaluate the contradictions in the novels but rather to show the political origins and implications of those contradictions and to contribute to the debate on internal and external constructions of the identity of Zimbabwean peoples.
The most significant conscious employer of myths and legends among the Shona writers is Solomon Mutswairo, a keen researcher in oral traditions, pioneer, and also prolific writer as well as Shona literary critic. The writer is best known for his first novel to be published in Shona, Feso (1956). The work was published under the auspices of the Southern Rhodesia Literature Bureau, a colonial government department that also was established in 1954 to make certain that colonial interests were not undermined in the nascent Shona literature. 1 The novel was published against the backdrop of the rise of African nationalism that largely took cultural and plaintive thrust during the 1950s. The influence of nationalism could not escape the mind of the writer, who, as a member of the small burgeoning African educational elite, represented the most sensitive minds of the time to problems brought about by colonialism. In the novel, the interface of the colonial and the Shona cultures is manifested.
In terms of setting, the writer focuses on precolonial Shona life, which he predicates upon a mythical "Golden Age." Here was a time of plenty: the Shona had many herds of cattle that gave them milk and meat. Forests gave people fuel, building materials, game meat and food. The soil yielded abundant harvests. In social terms, the values of the time are said to be superior to contemporary ones: men were patriotic, sturdy, and brace; they cooperated in the accomplishment of essential tasks; they were not selfish; they united to fight any form of dehumanization and oppression. The seminal myth of the Golden Age derives from the traditional concept of pasichigare, which symbolizes the ideal Shona society and which is at the center of Shona traditional education. Children were supposed to grow up emulating values that were said by their elders to derive from the world which their revered ancestors had built. The myths are therefore important in inspiring youngsters to emulate values that are the hallmark of the excellence of the old society. The values are celebrated in lyrical language that creates nostalgia for the romantic world. The mythical dimension is depicted through the hyperbolic images of abundance. The simplicity of the diction implies a yearning for intimacy with nature that is reminiscent of the "noble savage" in Western literature. The fragility of the romantic world is hinted at in the subplot of the oppressive and powerful chief Pfumojean ("white spear") who threatens the peace and stability that reigns in the adjacent kingdom. The oppressive chief wages a war that he loses. The supreme values of freedom, patriotism, and peace are thus reasserted.
The Literature Bureau read the manuscript of the novel in the context of the British colonialist-African nationalist conflict and edited out the first chapter, which was considered subversive because it alluded to land-grabbing by settlers through the Land Apportionment Act (from 1929 onwards) of the Southern Rhodesia Responsible Government. When a poem that refers to the spirit of Nehanda (a legendary figure to be discussed later in the essay) was used at some nationalist rallies, the book ceased to be a school reader, despite being one of the few publications of the time. Having lost its Ministry of African Education patronage, the work also lost its lifeline. It lived only in the minds of its readers as a politically relevant story until it resurfaced with Independence in 1980.
In the new context of Independence fervor, the work was elevated to the status of classic protest novel as well as an allegory of colonialism and nationalism. Its romantic elements were either played down as peripheral to the allegory or vigorously reinterpreted as counterpoints to the depravity of the colonial times. In African nationalist orature that was expressive of and generated by the Chimurenga War of Liberation, the writer also earned his place in the new order as a patriotic and prophetic writer. He has become a living legend for producing the first and apparently only work against colonialism during the colonial period. The romantic element in Feso links the writer to the traditional storyteller (sarungano). Some of the bold motifs deriving from folklore include the formulaic beginning of the story, regular repetition of information to maintain coherence in an oral tale, use of traditional poetic discourse side by side with prosaic narrative, use of make-believe, references to love and adventure, prevalence of overstatement as well as use of significant names. To the Shona reader of a tender age in particular, the aesthetic ingredients listed above go into the composition of a good story. The work could therefore have been told simply to delight young readers. The multiplicity of meanings only serves to show that the story is good. It can either be read as a naive romance of love, the past, and adventure, or as a complex mythopoetic response to the settler culture. No other Shona writer takes this stance during the colonial period and gets published in the country.
The interface of colonialism and Shona oral traditions is more pronounced in two works that Mutswairo wrote and published in the United States of America before Zimbabwe attained independence. These are Mapondera Soldier of Zimbabwe and Chaminuka, Prophet of Zimbabwe. Despite the fact that the writer was away from his home country that was both the source of the material and the inspiration that led to the publications, he produced fiction based on thorough research--an achievement whose importance many writers of legend-based and myth-based fiction have yet to appreciate.
Mapondera is thematically more serious in imitating history than Feso, with its Negritudinist thrust. Mapondera, the man of action, is believed to have lived between 1840 and 1907 in the Dande area in the north-eastern part of present-day Zimbabwe (Mutswairo 5). It is important to note that Zimbabwe, the nation-state, was nonexistent during the days of Mapondera and also at the time the story was written. The term "Zimbabwe" is used as the country's real name in the oral traditions of nationalist writers and politicians and other patriotic Africans who gave the plateau between the Zambesi and the Limpopo rivers the name Zimbabwe, in celebration of the impressive stone architecture that the ancestors of the present-day Shona built between 1000 and 1600. The term "Zimbabwe," which might appear anachronistic, is fictionally appropriate, as it gives the reader the context of African nationalism in Rhodesia against which it was written.
The seriousness of the writer toward his subject is discerned in his comparativist comment in the preface to the book:
Unlike the naive stories of the Greeks whose heroes and heroines lived and fought in a mythical world, the story of Mapondera and his contemporaries, Nehanda, Kaguvi, Kamota, and Dzivaguru, is a story of true human beings of flesh and blood, whose lives ended in death at the hand of strangers who signed false treaties when they were weak and used terrible weapons and ruthless oppression when they were able to destroy the people whose lands they had invaded. (4)The African nationalist condemnation of settlers situates the fiction in history rather than in mythology. Yet even at the outset the readers observe that while Mutswairo's chosen perspective is nationalist, as was likely to be the case among writers who would have used the oral traditions at that time, he relies on written records of the same traditions that may not share his historical perspective. This is evident in his scholarly acknowledgment of written sources:
In conclusion, let me express my indebtedness to Dr. Terence O. Ranger, Dr. Stanlake J. Samkange, the late Frederick Courtney Selous and Enock Mapondera's oral history for their invaluable work from which I was able to draw much of the material for this book. (5)He further acknowledges the use of oral sources when he mentions Reverend Enock Magwasha Mapondera, the son of Mapondera, as an informant. It is no mean task for Mutswairo to syncretize Selous's colonialist-travelogue type of account of Mapondera's life and Samkange's nationalist one, Mapondera Junior's oral traditional one, and Ranger's liberal-historian perspective to his own nationalist-literary account:
I can only hope that this account of a few of our heroes and heroines will rouse other Zimbabweans to look further into the rich legacy of our other famous men and women, and the myths and legends which have sprung to make Zimbabwe even more our cherished home. (6)A number of ideological conflicts are discernible in the otherwise well-researched account of Mapondera. First is the obvious contradiction that the oral traditions are given an alternative literary form in a tongue that is foreign to the majority of the users of those traditions. In nationalist and numerical terms, English is a minority language. In ideological terms, it dominates African languages, including Shona, the source language of the story. The same can be said of Chaminuka. Colonialist and liberal researchers and writers used Shona oral sources to write about encounters of settlers and Shona people, and the colonialist nature of some of the sources necessitated the toning down of the settler-African conflict. This is clearly evident in Antony Chennels's study of the Rhodesian novel where Nehanda is taken for a witch and Chaminuka for a wizard. To the Shona people of the same period, the characters were heroes.
The sources Mutswairo uses need to be looked at from the point of view that the popular oral traditions about Mapondera and others were consciously or unconsciously edited by speakers and writers to suit their different ideologies. In Mutswairo's case, this bias is made inescapable by the academic imperative that researchers should reflect truthfully their sources of information. Thus, Mutswairo had the mammoth task of using the poetic license enshrined in creative writing to edit his material so that it reflected his social vision. Editing of the type suggested is not easy, since language carries attitudes of its users regardless of the latter's awareness of the need for objectivity. One observes the conflict in the writer's use of Shona vocabulary in English discourse to capture the uniqueness of certain concepts and experiences to the Shona people, such as names of medicines, greetings, religious personages, concepts of time,foodstuffs, domestic paraphernalia, and other items that he feels faithfully capture the mood of the time. This is recurrent in both Chaminuka and Mapondera.
In the discussion of traditional Shona religion, the writer overtly writes back against colonial Christianity, which denigrated the Shona religion. He argues that the Shona had ideals and values that they fought and died for. Despite the anti-colonialist stance he adopts in Chaminuka, in defense of the Shona religion, he uses the terms "superstitious" and "supernatural" in one breath (5). The first term is value-laden and is used to connote the perceived inferiority of the spiritual beliefs of the Africans by colonialist missionaries. The latter is more objective and descriptive and less evaluative and ethnocentric. Further on in the same novel, the writer gives the reader details that show that Shona religion reflects the Shona people's economic imperatives, and as such has a rational base. It reflects Shona social organization:
The fertility of the land and the health of the people depended, by and large, upon their relations with the spirits of their departed ancestors. The land belonged to them and to them alone and they--the living--held it in trust to them. (46)Religion reflects the communal philosophy around which the whole culture is built. Interesting to note is Mutswairo's use of biblical jargon and sentence structures to give authority to his nationalist assertions. The adaptation reflects the writer's subversive use of colonialist Christianity for nationalist purposes. Christianity of the colonial period existed in a colonial culture and in many ways reflected the colonialist ideology. In Chaminuka, the author condemns the early fundamentalist approach to spreading Christianity to Africans, especially the use of the fear of hellfire to break Africans' resistance to the new religion, and the denunciation of material wealth (70). In the same work he converts the Hebrew biblical traditions for his own use. He makes the colonized Shona God's chosen people (61). The epithet "prophet," which Mutswairo gives to Chaminuka is taken from the English-language Bible. In secular narratives, the same character is referred to as a wizard. Mutswairo's replacement of "wizard" by "prophet" elevates the character in question to the status of the loftiest figures of the Bible. In Mweya WaNahenda, the author uses the "Judas" motif to depict the betrayal of Nehanda (76), transforming a character who is depicted in colonial literature as a witch to a holy fighter for social justice and humanism.
Chaminuka's strength and achievements are in many instances matched to those of the biblical Jesus of Nazareth. Kwaramba does the same in his novel Nhoroondo DzaChaminuka, a post-Independence publication. This transposition of attributes from the Bible to Shona legends reflects how the colonial traditions that are intended for the pacification of the subordinate ethnic groups are assimilated into nationalism to subvert the donor culture. These are some of the instances in which Caliban uses the masters' language and traditions for his own purposes.
The writer's reference to the ndudzo drug to explain Mapondera's militaristic character clearly exemplifies a consciousness that both respects and looks down upon the cultural item it describes. The writer describes the result of taking the drug as follows:
Their mood had changed. Some saw visions of splendour and grandeur--Others in turn experienced dysphoria, and behaved like madmen, still others were turned into all kinds of fools. (14)While the description could easily be an accurate rendition of the effects of the psychedelic drug that was administered to soldiers, its fictional use reflects admiration of the positive effect of the drug that is supposed to invoke the fighting (Chimurenga) spirit among men who are patriotic but need to be helped to overcome their fear in order to defend their land. On the positive side, the dimension shows that the Shona heroes were normal human beings who did not enjoy fighting and killing other ethnic groups to satisfy base passions. Instead, they went to war only when it was inevitable. However, the condescending attitude reflected in the description of the drug's side effects reflects the suggested backwardness of the drug as well as the users of the drug. In the given instance, oral traditional discourse is miniaturized by the writer's Western medical-anthropological stance regarding the study of Shona cultures. A middle-of-the-road picture would have left out the side effects, since all known medicines, Western or African, have known and unknown side effects.
Mutswairo's depiction of African interethnic relations is also worth analyzing. In Chaminuka, the author celebrates a man who chose the path of peace rather than war even though he had a large enough following to make him a military figure:
The novel revolves around the idea of prophecy and its symbolism of a visionary dream. It is not only a defence of traditionalism, but an attack on excessive greed for power.The character rises in the 18th century at the height of Shona and Ndebele wars. The man of peace draws a great deal of attention to himself through his powers of divination, healing, and miracle performance. Chingururu (Lobengula) hears about this man of miracles and attacks him as a way of remaining the most powerful king in the region. The man wards off the attacks in nonviolent ways by using his powers to manipulate natural phenomena, particularly the weather. He refuses to draw blood as a way of self-defence, even at his point of death. In defense of the man of peace, the writer makes frequent reference to the Ndebele as bloodthirsty, brutal, lazy, and grizzly. He makes frequent reference to the derogatory term madzvit "grasshoppers"; (according to the author) and "madmen" (according to Ndebele oral traditions). Without going into the historical background of the ethnic group's militaristic behavior, the writer condemns the Ndebele's culture:Chaminuka's religious philosophy transcends its time and place. Chaminuka was a humanitarian concerned with the needs of man. He observed a strict moral code and spoke about peace in order to comfort men as well as to be credible in the eyes of his contemporaries.
Chaminuka presented a Christ-like ideal to his people by inspiring in his followers a love of peace, kindheartedness, philanthropism, and a fear of ancestors at a time when Christianity--though now prevalent in Zimbabwe--was being subverted for the cause of the conqueror. (2)
The Ndebele driven northwards by the bloodthirstiness of Chaka Zulu, decimated whatever they came into contact with and repeatedly threatened Chitungwiza. (4)In contradistinction, he paints other characters like Taderera, the medium, and Gavaza the diviner, in the image of John the Baptist. In other portraits of Shona religion, value-laden terms deriving from Christian or general English vocabulary, like "infernal spirits" (9) and "witches" (96) as synonyms for diviners are used to refer to ancestors. The use of the terms "clatter," "rattle," "monotonous," and "sweating" diminish the status of the bira religious festival:
The people leaped high in ecstasy to the clatter of the jingling magavhu and the monotonous rattle of the hosho. Some dancers went into a trance as their movement climaxed. They were drinking, eating and sweating. The women's shrill voices could be heard above the din and pandemonium. (15)Terms like "din" and "pandemonium" suggest that the dance is wild and unrefined. The selected words are part of the inventory of colonial anthropological accounts of African performing arts that are regarded as primitive. The vocabulary undermines the grandeur of the pasichigare society.
The sporadic raids notwithstanding, Chaminuka's land, Mbireland, is simplistically depicted as Canaan, land of the chosen people. The same image appears in Nehanda and Mapondera. While the images derive from Shona oral traditions, the bipolar images of good and evil, peace and war, love and hate are consistent with British settler myths about the Shona and Ndebele, which depicted the Shona as cowards and the Ndebele as brave or bloodthirsty. The settler folklore contributed to the invention of tribalism by drawing the African ethnic groups further apart from each other than they were in the precolonial era. In this instance the choice of certain details from the oral traditions and their subsequent fictionalization creates division among the Ndebele and the Shona peoples as part of the divide-and-rule strategy. Thus, the tension of colonial and nationalist discourse creates tribalism, which in turn undermines nationalism.
His image of Mbireland reflects similar tension:
Chitungwiza, located on a fertile ridge between the Mupfure and Mhanyami Rivers, had grown into a land of marvels. The ridge offered the joys of a simple, rural life to its inhabitants. The people lived an honest, diligent and happy productive life on a land that was endowed with rich, red-loam tropical soil on which grew maize, rupoko (finger millet), monkeynuts and numerous other cultigens in abundance. (7)The lyrical description that derives from the pasichigare image nevertheless shows a civilization that is downgraded by the phrase "simple rural life." The simplicity suggests a tragic type of innocence that fails to defend itself from adversaries. The idyllic surroundings existed in an area that had already been earmarked as a colony. The professed people's closeness to the land is meant to argue that they are the legitimate owners of the land. In the same breath the intimacy suggests human simplicity whittled of sophistication to the extent that settlers entered the domain of the native inhabitants and saw little that would remind them of their own kind of occupation of land. In subsequent Rhodesian fiction, the country was described as vast, empty, and rolling, beautiful landscape.
Despite his reluctance to desecrate the land by shedding blood, Chaminuka prophesies that the reign of Chingururu will be terminated by "a race of men, shrewd and daring--a kneeless people, who shall subdue the land" (182). The prophecy of Chaminuka before his death at the hand of Lobengula in 1883 is the most popular part of Chaminuka's legend. Colonial documentaries, folklore, and fiction record it to find a justification of their vanquishing of the Ndebele supremacy and subsequent occupation of the land of the Ndebele and Shona peoples: they were the peacemakers. The Shona people frequently quoted it to show that the celebration of Chaminuka's death was going to be short-lived. A more vicious regime was going to occupy the same land. Mutswairo's account reflects the ambivalent nature of the prophecy in a polemicized situation. The prophecy was syncretized with colonial folklore. It is interesting to note that Nehanda's prophecy, "My bones shall rise," which she uttered before her execution for mobilizing the Shona against the settlers, was not that widely recorded in colonial literature because of its overly subversive nature. It undermined the mission statement of the settlers--bringing peace into the region. The same front of "peace" made Rhodesian writers depict Chaminuka more favorably than Nehanda.
Mutswairo sets out to defend traditionalism and his success is unparalleled in terms of breadth and depth of research. His invaluable sources lend him their language, in some cases betraying an ambivalent vision. The following sources probably needed reinterpretation to put them in line with his cultural nationalist social vision: Father Arthur Shearly Cripps, author of Chaminuka: The Man Whom God Taught; F. W. T. Posselt's Fact and Fiction; Frederick Courtney Selous's Travel and Adventure in South Eastern Africa; and volume 4 of NADA. The latter journal employs a pronounced evolutionist-anthropological approach to the description of African culture. Cripps infuses Christ-like qualities in his black protagonist; he writes anti-settler pastoral literature in which he likens Mashonaland to Arcadia (Chennels 7). Such a vision does not recognize that Africans need contemporary knowledge of history in order to cope with settlers. Any attempt to maintain the Arcadian setting in a broader settler culture results in overcrowded "reserves": "There are too many huts and too many cattle and gardens" in the "happy native territory," observes Cripps (qtd. in Chennels 212).
The romance motif is also shared by other novelists of the Southern Rhodesian era. William Reyner, author of The Day of Chaminuka, refers to Chaminuka to prove that "Africans can be moved only by superstition" (cited in Chennels 457). Chaminuka, Mapondera, Nehanda, and other African heroes are part of the mystification of the landscape through fiction. Their defeat is made to appear as the defeat of the forces by the more civilized settlers.
Mutswairo acknowledges the usefulness of colonialist sources and stops short of discussing how he edited the same sources to rid them of the motives of the writers:
Despite their colonial motives, we must acknowledge that these Europeans have provided us with extremely useful information about our people, whose culture and civilization they have sought until recently, to control, if not to destroy. (Preface to Chaminuka)The writer apologizes for criticizing the same settlers who provided him with accounts of his people's past. However, the settler accounts of the Shona culture were meant to justify the presence of their composers in the country. They were not for objective edification of the Shona people. The role of the settler counter-myths in the identity formation of the Shona people cannot be glossed over. Apart from making total disciples of some Africans, the counter-myths transformed others into rebels, that is, nationalists. In the middle were those who did not want to condemn wholesale the settler and also the indigenous cultures. These credited the settler culture with development that Africans received either fortuitously, or as a result of the inefficiency of the implementation of repressive policies. The writer, "faced with an intransigent white man, decries that the latter needs moral persuasion in order for him to appreciate the humanity of the black man" (Zimunya 43).
The "black liberal syndrome" (Zimunya 43) made plaintive nationalists out of those who were confident of rehabilitating settler psychology. They believed settlers could be educated about the positive aspects of the culture they despised. Ndhlala displays such efforts in Jikinya (Zimunya 43). This appears to have been another motive of Mutswairo in writing Mapondera and Chaminuka, which were published in English outside the country. In both works the writer paints many images of the African culture that nearly overshadow the heroes that the books are supposed to be about. Zimunya regards Mapondera as an anti-hero for having abandoned his people at their point of need to go and fight the Portuguese. He likens Mapondera to Okwonko for belatedly mobilizing his people against the settler government and subsequently dying a demented person in a colonial prison. It is this tragic aspect of Mapondera that might have inspired settler writers to focus on the man. The historical Mapondera won battles and lost wars.
A similar tragic dimension is reflected in the characters of Chaminuka and Nehanda. Chaminuka's tragic death in a violent world does not usher in a more peaceful era. He is misunderstood to prophesy the arrival of a superior breed of human beings who would usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. In reality, Lobengula's reign was succeeded by one that more sophisticated military hardware--an advanced type of death technology. Chaminuka's prophecy was ambivalent, like most prophecies. Colonialist writers see in the prophecy the coming of peace with the settlers. It is a celebration of the "pacification" of the Ndebele people.
The settler myth of Europeans being the pacifiers of "savages" is also reflected in Ndabaningi Sithole's Umvukela WaMaNdebele (The Ndebele Rebellion). In the novel, which reflects the first war of the British settlers and the Ndebele people, the indigenous people are portrayed as rebels against lawful settler rule. Many of them fight to death as they resist the position of subjects in the settler-dominated society. Cecil Rhodes, the man behind the colonization of the country, intervenes to stop further fighting. In Sithole's book, Rhodes earns the title "umlamlankunzi" 'arbiter of the fighting forces':
Zazithebelene inkunziThe writer's image of Rhodes ironically reflects a man who pacified two, and not one African militant side. It shows the Ndebele's appreciation of both war and peace, and more important, the role of war in shaping history. Sithole makes the Ndebele celebrate their own bravery in the suggestion that they would have fought on if the man they respected had not made a truce. The writer celebrates the end of a series of battles that meant the end of Ndebele resistance of settler domination and the former's subsequent subjugation. The Ndebele fighters did not see Rhodes as the man behind their plight because of his ambivalent identity in the arbitration. He came to them unarmed, thus appearing to be a neutral arbiter. He dissociated himself from the largely brutal Shona police force that was harassing the Ndebele. He argued that these were Shona people, not colonial forces. He also promised to deal with white people who were stealing Ndebele heads of cattle. He dismissed as superstition the ominous events, imihlolo, associated with the advent of settlers. The myth of peace is shattered in the following indirect threat:
Kwele Matopisi
Wazethula izikhali Umlamlankunzi (Sithole 60)The bulls were set to charge at each other
At Matopos
And he, Umlamlankunzi, disarmed them.
Ngifuna khatesi likwazi kamhlope lokhu: Manengi amakhiwa ezayo evela ezansi elandela thina lapa. Beza nje bonke bahlomile baphelele. (Sithole 60)He was announcing the coming of reinforcements from the south of Africa to intensify the war if the Ndebele did not stop fighting. They were persuaded to surrender and be a subject people. At that point the writer ended his historical novel with the inganekwane (folktale) ending motif:I want you to know that there are many Europeans coming the south following our tracks here. All of them are fully armed.
Kwaba yikuphela komvukela waMaNdebele uqedwa nguMlamlankunzi uRozi. (Sithole 60)The finality brought about by the inganekwane formulaic ending freezes history at an appropriate time for the settler culture giving the impression then that there could not be another war. Like Mutswairo, Sithole seems to rely on the history that was written for schools from the perspective of the dominant political power. Sithole's account ends where colonial history books and documentaries ended. Sithole's portrait of Rhodes conforms to colonial accounts of the war more than to the Ndebele accounts. Peace, rather than the actual causes of going to war by both sides, is made the goal of the war. Sithole does not go deep into the causes of war, focusing more on action than on the ultimate causes of the conflict.This is the end of the Ndebele uprising which was stopped by Rhodes.
Like Sithole, Mutswairo does not raise the literary account of the death of Nehanda beyond the finality of death and the prophecy. The faithful adherence to settler accounts reflected in the documentary style makes Nehanda and her lieutenant, Kaguvi, more tragic figures than heroes for being abandoned by their followers before their hanging, and in the case of Kaguvi, even being baptized by a colonial prison chaplain. The conquerors are given a crusader status by the writer, who includes in his novel the doggerel that was published in the colonial daily in celebration of the death of Kaguvi:
How are the mighty fallenThe writer does not raise the tragic historical episode to an epic height as is done in Shona oral traditions. This would have lent more flesh to the thin characters, who overdepend for their stature on familiar oral traditions or recorded literary accounts. There is apparent creative tension between character portrayal and writing romances of the Shona culture.
Go look at him in his cell
Stripped of bracelets and doctors' charms
Stripped of his rank as well. (Mapondera 88; Zimunya 14)
Chaminuka's prophecy elicits conflicting interpretations from divergent literary and oral sources. Lawrence Vambe renders it as follows:
There will be a great starvation in your [Lobengula] land and there will always be a shortage of rain, while your people and mine are the subjects without knees. (Vambe 70; Zimunya 69)Mutswairo links Chaminuka's prophecy to the 1980 Independence under the ZANU PF government with the restoration of the Mbire kingdom. At this juncture the writer's work becomes partisan in the propagandistic sense. It is commendable for the author to use poetic license to advance his Mbire theory to explain the common origins of the Zimbabwean people. When he goes beyond that to foretell what was never foretold as a way of justifying the existing political order, then literature becomes propagandistic and also trivializes the prophecy to support a neocolonial order. The lasting truth about Chaminuka's prophecy is that the drought that the epic hero foretold has now spread to cover the whole country, especially after Independence. The drought has become a motif for historical and psychological fiction produced in the country. It features particularly in Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera, and Geoffrey Ndlala's works.
Apart from the literal appropriateness of drought to a society that was disoriented by the drive for money away from agricultural practices that focused on self-sufficiency and toward cash-cropping, the drought is a symbol of societal disintegration. In the oral culture drought signified punishment from the ancestors for desecration of the land. Writers use this motif as a myth to argue that the undermining of a humanistic culture and its replacement by an impersonal and individualistic one has led to the loss of the Shona cultural vitality. Those who choose to stick to their own culture are culturally, economically, spiritually, and politically marginalized by the mainstream modern culture.
Such people are represented by Garabha in Mungoshi's Waiting for the Rain. Garabha holds on to the drum to give his otherwise insipid life in the contemporary society some meaning. He cannot meet the goals that contemporary society sets for youngsters like him. He is not literate like his UK-bound brother, Lucifer. The drum takes him back into the past, giving him temporary reprieve from contemporary misery:
He prefers the drum to crying. Crying leaves him weak and unprotected. Now with the drum, there is a sense of quiet strength, the strength of a mountain and a hard and clear morning vision, and when he cries with the drum, it's because he suddenly sees--sees what? It's not quite seeing as feeling-seeing-living-being the whole at the same time. (85)Garabha uses the drum to insulate his mind from the threats posed to his being by challenges in the contemporary society. Tragically, the tradition symbolized by the drum cannot sustain him beyond the performance. It is interesting to contrast Mungoshi's view of dancing with Mutswairo's perspective.
In the case of the writings of Mutswairo and related writers, it becomes clear that the use of colonial literature entails the internalization of some of the values carried in the language. Language carries the national culture. The English discourse by writers of European origin is necessarily Eurocentric. An African liberal writer who tries to turn Eurocentric discourse into Afrocentric discourse ends up betraying a double perspective on one historical experience. Even if the writer is aware of the cultural bias in his sources, he cannot be intimate with the other culture's expression to the extent of manipulating it at will. As part of Zimbabwean identity construction, it is important to deconstruct imperial images of the colonized.
Mutswairo is an ambassador to the West of the culture that the insiders may feel he is distorting. This contradiction points to the fact that there is hardly any literary activity that is free from the colonialist-nationalist dialectic during the colonial era. The dialectic reflects the worldview of the writers. To some extent it cannot be divorced from the strategy of controlling the conquered. However, the encoding of the oral traditions in Shona and English affords the critic a comparison of two different ways of looking at the same historical experience. This reflects the bicultural character of the writer and his split loyalties. The writer produces meaning out of a system of differences. His work confirms Catherine Besley's assertion:
Neither literature nor criticism are pure objects of study or practice that can be separated from life. Since pure objectivity is a myth, critics must examine their own assumptions, recognizing that even this effort at understanding will itself be shaped by their own involvements--by gender, class, race, history (including imperialism) and language. (45; qtd. In Brydon and Tiffin 26)The author, who writes back against repressive discourse and uses it, at the same time tries to decolonize settler accounts of African legends. Edward Said warns of the dangers of "employing this formidable structure upon [the formerly colonized] themselves or upon others" (54).
The given limitations notwithstanding, Mutswairo shows the link between history, politics, and literature that the majority of the colonial writers in Shona do not display. Post-Independence writers who are inspired by cultural nationalist fervor excitedly and rightly welcome one attempt to depict one dimension of the Zimbabwean culture in a favorable manner:
Igugu LikaMthwakazi: Imbali YaMaNdebele, 1820-1893, is the first serious attempt at representing the history of the Ndebele people by themselves in their own language. For too long the Ndebele have had their history told to them by foreigners who either did not understand it themselves or deliberately falsified it. And now the people have asked, For how long will something remain what it is not? (Nyathi blurb)The approach to the writing suggested in the blurb just cited seems to be internalistic rather than externalistic. The acknowledgments, however, reveal that 14 oral and 6 literary sources were consulted. The blurb does not acknowledge the possible ideological bias that lies in both literary and oral sources that derive from a dialectical historical situation. The internalist approach is in danger of overglorifying the past, thus positively simplifying it, while the externalist (colonialist) view denigrates it and distorts it. The two extremes cannot be sources of absolute truth. In an attempt to create authentic literature that counters settler myths, there is a danger of reinventing the past along Negritudinist lines. According to George Kahari:
18% of the total number of authors have written narratives that concern themselves with life before the arrival of the white man in 1890 and their stories are plotted as romances. (75)Kahari and other critics classify works that focus on the precolonial era as "Old World" novels. He describes their mood as sentimental and their vision as naive and atavistic. Their plots are based on love and adventure. He attributes the plainness of the plots and the simple-mindedness of the vision to ngano, their oral antecedents that were told to delight and teach the young.
The predominant moralistic vision may derive from the ngano, but the content derives from the settler culture, as confirmed by several writers. Patrick Chakaipa, who wrote Karikoga Gumiremiseve and Pfumo Reropa during the colonial period, uses his otherwise entertaining lyrical stories to condemn aspects of the African culture that prevailed in the old order, such as polygamy, power politics, autocracy, and dictatorship, backward transport technology, and even the physical appearance of the Shona people compared with the Portuguese. To a lesser extent he celebrates Shona values like bravery, determination, and sense of justice. Ignatius Zvarevashe in his Gonawapotera and Kurauone belabors alcohol abuse, polygamy, and feuds. The overall picture is one of a savage society that badly needs redeeming. Preachers like Chakaipa and Zvarevashe often cut such images of their people during the colonial period. In that era, Christianity was part of the settler culture. Alcoholism as a social problem is made to belong to an earlier era in which beer was an acceptable part of ritual. In the precolonial egalitarian and communalistic setting doro/hwahwa/mhamba was shared as an expression of social solidarity. Its abuse was minimal, to the extent that its functions were never outweighed by its side effects.
Giles Kuimba, in his Gehena Harina Moto and Tambaoga Mwanangu, produces two gripping stories based on the destructiveness of the jealousy of a jilted woman in a polygamous setting, Marumbeni, and the near anarchical situation born of Mombeshora's power hunger. In what appears to be an attempt to distance the story from contemporary life in keeping with the make-believe dimension of ngano, the writer sets his story in the precolonial era. The resultant story makes the precolonial Shona world conform to settler images of the African past. Because of the close relationship of myths to ngano and the latter to reality, the author unintentionally ends up writing a colonialist myth against the very readers whom he sets out to instruct and entertain.
Norbert Matusa's Mapatya was published during the colonial period. His work is a condemnation of the Shona custom of killing twins. The same custom is crusaded against by Stanlake Samkange in The Mourned One. In Mutasa's work, the society transforms itself when one of the elders of the dare (council of elders) suddenly sees the light and supports the saving of twins who had been brought up in secrecy. This is a laudable myth about how the practice of killing twins might have been terminated. Mutasa's story is a myth-type of ngano. It explains how things came to be. One can only guess that the author, like most authors of the period, invented this myth in order to show the backwardness of the Shona people at a given stage in history. At this juncture, his myth conforms to settler myths about the African past. Nevertheless, the myth cannot explain the mentality behind the practice that in the absence of any social-anthropological explanation seems to be a barbaric custom.
Authors of the period were not encouraged by their Literature Bureau editors and their teachers of creative writing to research the subject matter of their fiction to bring it closer to reality. After Independence, Mutasa's better researched work Nhume Yamanmbo teaches the reader much about the close relationship between religion and chieftainship in the precolonial era. The research concerning the Shona-Ndebele shrine at Mabweadziva makes the work sentimental and sensational. The celebration of the shrine is belated particularly as it is not linked with contemporary issues. Mutasa's use of oral traditional material in his labored theme of a power struggle in the pasichigare setting creates a double perspective that reflects the tension between looking at the Shona precolonial setting, also organized around religion, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, viewing the past era as dominated by superstition and greed.
The same ambivalence is reflected in Jekanyika, a novel in which a son perishes at the hands of his bellicose father who relinquishes his chieftainship in order to wage meaningless wars against other ethnic groups. The tale is given a melodramatic dimension by Jekanyika's search for his garwe (crocodile) identity. It shows the importance of mutupo (the totem) and chidao (the clan praise name). In the patrilineal Shona society, these values are enshrined in the father. They symbolize those social values that are most supportive of collaborative existence. They also create a certain intimacy between the birds and animals that are chosen as totems. A person may not eat his or her totem. It is the most traditional Shona way of conserving natural resources, including game. Jekanyika derives its inspiration from totemic practice.
The supposed romances were produced under the supervision of colonial white civil servants of the 1950s and 1960s. The civil servants believed that their rural and semi-rural authors, who were assumed to be close to their culture, were best suited for the production of authentic Shona literature because they were minimally influenced by the West. Ironically, their supposed strength explains the weakness of the resultant works. The lightly educated writers could not really spearhead such innovation since they had little knowledge of their culture as a result of spending extended periods away from their home. They also had little knowledge of settler culture. Because of their shaky foundation in either culture, they were overdependent on the guidance of their white mentors whenever they were confronted with literary or ideological problems. The fact that the writers wrote at a time when the country was isolated from other countries by economic sanctions that were invited by the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence did not help the situation. The writers could not boldly experiment with new forms because of limited exposure to alternative ways of telling stories. They had to abide by the tastes of their promoters. As they were not encouraged to adopt a historical approach in their storytelling, they tended to adopt the ethnographic approach that produced exotic genres about exotic cultures, such as Canisius Zharare's phantasmagoric story Unei Nazvo?. The romances produced in Shona were not as well researched as Samkange's, Mutswairo's, and Katiyo's works. It is therefore a half-truth to clain that
[t]he Shona romance itself evolved out of an existing oral traditional culture and it was not created simply as a replica of English fiction. (Kahari 75)Neither was it a product of oral traditions. Nor was it solely a product of the authors' imagination. It was a product of conflicting ideologies working on poorly researched or unresearched material. The Shona romance vacillates between settler and Shona myths. The Shona perspective links the readers with their proud past. The past is a symbol of positive values. Karikoga in Karikoga Gumiremiseve, Jekanyika in Jekanyika, Tambaoga in Tambaoga Mwanangu, Pasipanodya in Gehena Harina Moto, Feso in Feso, and Tanganeropa in Pfumoreropa are all men of action. They fight the challenges arising from the hostile natural and social environments in order to win their different goals. Their energy is creative insofar as it sustains life. It is applied to the sustenance of social justice and social morality. Without creative energy, mankind is in danger of being oppressed by nature and by fellow human beings. The authors ironically create interesting thrillers from this vital energy. They generally do not seem to see the relevance of that energy to the history of their period. Their robust heroes are figures of the past or of the world of fantasy. They also fail to see the actual Shona people who existed before the advent of the white people. All they have is a concrete setting into which they put imaginary characters. The lack of appreciation is itself a result of the writers' acquisition of other new kinds of knowledge at the expense of intimate self-knowledge. Schools did not thoroughly teach students the role of their past in self-definition, an exercise that was imperative in a fast-changing cultural environment.
The same writers change their characterization in the novels that focus on life in the colonial period. They produce characters whose heroism lies in upholding whatever the rulers of their period pronounce to be positive social change. This is best exemplified by Bernard Chidzero, a member of the African educated elite of the new era. He uses Shona proverbs and respectable traditional personages to conscript young men in the newly set up reserves to work on commercial farms. Davis's farm, which stands for the settler commercial enterprise that is the alternative to gold-seeking, could only thrive if labor was cheap. The Shona aphorism Kuwanda huuya "Many people are rekoned as an asset" is a communalistic saying that underscores mutual interdependence in an agrarian and egalitarian society. The philosophy of mutual interdependence is an economic necessity. The aphorism is used by the author with his people to polish up the new master- servant relationship in farms and many other new enterprises so that it looks like partnership. This is an example of a proverb working against its producers.
Kahari observes the prevalence of proverbs as titles of works of Shona fiction that looks at the "New World." He criticizes most of the works for being overly moralistic. Oral traditions are discredited for their impact on the quality of the modern story. The critic does not examine the motive of the patron of the Shona oral traditions in trying to preserve this aspect of the oral culture. A critical look at the social vision of the writer reveals an artist who uses his oral traditions to help readers to conform to the dictates of the new order much more than to help himself to grapple with a new reality so as to master it. Little does the "New World" artist writing against the background of his or her rich culture realize that the wisdom enshrined in the proverb does not represent absolute or static truth. Rather it is a reflection of flashes of truth at given moments in a continuous social process. Simple imposition of a proverb on an unprecedented experience results in a social vision that confuses values of an agrarian society with those of a colonial capitalist society. It reduces characters to passive individuals who have given themselves up to conforming to a powerful and puzzling historical process whose values are idealized.
The revolution that swept through present-day Zimbabwe from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s had a profound effect on the social vision of the masses who were often caught between the fighting forces. Many songs were composed and performed at all-night political seminars (popularly known as pungwes). These songs were sung by freedom fighters and the rural peasants at guerilla bases and made the rural people more aware of the need to support those who lived among them fighting for freedom. They were also meant to urge the masses to persevere at a time when the war claimed many of them. There was no written record of this combat literature for public consumption, since there was no publishing outlet.
After the attainment of political independence in 1980, many writers focused on the war, since the event had a great impact on their way of looking at life. By 1985, many works of fiction had been published. These reflected particular ways of looking at the war of independence. Because most of the works had been composed during the celebratory period, they reflected a remarkable resemblance to oral celebratory literature. Most of them eulogized the freedom fighters, their weapons as well as their achievements. Works like Vitalis Nyawaranda's Mutunhu Une Mago, Aaron Moyo's Yaive Hondo, Munashe Pesanai's Gukurahundi, and Raymond Choto's Vavariro make legends out of ordinary people who fought for the displacement of colonialism. The war and its heroes are idealized. In the stories, in many case battles are planned and executed with clinical precision. Unlike the history that is well known, casualties are suffered most on the side of the Rhodesian soldiers.
The given accounts closely reflect the rhetoric of ndyaringo/nyambo, the highly dramatized narratives of events in the Shona oral culture. These accounts were often told at the dare, as a pastime or as serious news. They were dramatized and exaggerated to make them significant, entertaining, and memorable to the audience. This technique, which is a living part of Shona orature today, was used extensively by both sides during the war to transmit war propaganda to the masses. The partisan nature of the accounts is captured and reflected in the published fiction under discussion. It is one of the hallmarks of Zimbabwean nationalist fiction in African languages. The war rhetoric acquires its character from orature. When it is rendered in novels, it appears rather superficial and naive because of the way it frequently dispenses with realism. Because of its relatively idealistic and uncritical nature, it gives rise to what Lewis Nkosi calls "the cult of the gun" (161).
The critical consciousness of the writers seems to overlook the fact that the gun that liberates has elsewhere in the region, in the post-independence era, been used to oppress the same people it was once used to free. Literature that seriously participates in nation building should not just celebrate the joys of the moment. It should critically review the past clearly bringing out the pains that constitute the sacrifices made by people to acquire to independence. The destructive side of the war cannot be left out where writers are taking account of the gains and losses made in that particular historical process.The ending of most of the stories resembles the Shona folktale, for the novels often end with the winning of battles or the declaration of ceasefire. Wtih the exception of Vavariro, the rural people are happy that the war has come to an end. The battles won on the warfront are credited to the fighters who are then canonized. Like the legend, history has one hero. The accounts give the glory that the fighters and the rural people won together to the fighters on the warfront and their leaders in the rear. The roles of the rural boys (mujibhas) and girls (chimbwidos) as well as mothers and fathers are seriously played down, thus simplifying and consequently distorting the war to the advantage of the emergent Zimbabwean elite.
The overall social vision has limited use in national reconstruction. It confuses the end of the war with the fulfillment of people's aspirations, thus desensitizing people to the task of nation building that lies ahead of them. The folkloric ending makes the war an event rather than a process. It has a very weak link with the past. It provides no link with the future. The self-congratulatory ending also creates a false sense of reality that independence marks an entry into paradise. There can be no enduring stage in the history of a people that can be equated with the myth of paradise.
The myth, which is quite often celebrated literally through independence, becomes an ingredient in the disillusionment that greets the same society when stringent economic measures come into play a decade after independence.
The recurrent block type of characterization represents the two fighting forces. The tendency to portray those who sacrificed their lives to fight for independence as infallible is not only a distortion of reality that creates misconceptions about the true nature of any war at all; it could easily be used by capricious leaders of the future to pose as single-handed liberators of the people who were actively involved in the same war. The characterization could be an active ingredient in the creation of dictatorships as it mythicizes human beings into demigods. It makes individuals more important than the community with which they work. Slogans and other catch phrases were used by fighters to mobilize rural dwellers to support their side of the war. Nationalist politicians and freedom fighters used the language that the ordinary people understood. It was the basis of the solidarity of the two groups who often fought on the same side, albeit not always for the same reason.
After the war the Shona novelists adopted the Chimurenga oral traditions in their war fiction. Their retrospective use of these traditions shows little departure from the diction and the quality of ideas it carried during the war. Since they wrote their historical accounts after the war, they would be expected to creatively portray their experience. This would help readers to understand the use of oral rhetoric during the period in question and the potential use of rhetoric during critical times. The writers largely fail to show the discrepancy between war rhetoric and the reality of the war as well as of the time at which they were writing. Writers fail to use rhetoric to comment on contemporary issues. Like their counterparts of the colonial period, they see a potentially tragic period as a source of telling light-hearted patriotic stories for entertainment purposes. The episodic nature of their tales reveals social visions that fail to delve into the depths of the historical experience they are celebrating. The pastoral, simplistic idealization of patriotism causes the readers miss the fundamentals about the war.
The war was largely set in the country with the ordinary people as the subject of the historical process. However, the writers miss a historical opportunity to bring the rural dwellers into the mainstream of the history of nation building. They leave the setting at a purely physical and temporal level, thus missing its socio-economic significance. The Chimurenga War themes were embedded in the myths, legends, and songs of the people. War orature was activity. Instead of using the orature to transform fiction into a truly Zimbabwean idiom, artists tend to reduce orature to the level of propaganda. The narrow approach adopted to grapple with a wide and profound historical process reduces the war into isolated conflicts between small groups of individuals who hate each other. It misses the macrocosmis systemic conflict between two disparate developmental prescriptions for two races that find themselves living within the same geopolitical boundaries. Escapist stories are thus woven out of a tragic historical situation.
The same narrowness and superficiality of perception is detected in the analysis of post-independence ethnic conflicts and socioeconomic problems. A case in point is Edmund Masundire's Mhandu Dzorusununguko, which revolves around the conflict between the two major political parties, namely, ZANU PF and ZAPU. Instead of looking at the problems of ethnic-based politics in the context of the so-called modern state in post-independence Zimbabwe, the writer reduces the experience to the conflict between a contingent of policement and what were then officially termed "dissidents" because they engaged in politically subversive activities. The novel ends with the arrest of a small contingent of policement who are immediately promoted to mashefu (chiefs).2 The irony of the folkloric and also thriller-type of happy ending is that crime arising from the quest for one type of power is rewarded with another version of quest for power, namely professional success. Promotion and power are the password to scarce economic and political resources in post-independence Zimbabwe.
The naive type of betrayal of Zimbabwean independence is also the theme of Charles Makari's Zvaida Kushinga. The traitor of the popularly won independence in name VaMawaya, which is a traditional Shona euphemistic epithet for a mentally unstable or unpredictable person. The character reminisces about the naive mischief of bveni/gudo, the baboon, in the folktale. The baboon often tries to cheat human beings and other animals, but always ends up regretting after suffering the repercussions of his actions. Traitors are presented as simple-minded people whose success is short-lived. The naive betrayal of the goals of the majority of the people matches the naive celebration of independence.
The only two novels that unravel the complexity of the process of betrayal are Herbert Chimhundu's Chakwesha and Raymond Choto's Vavariro. These two writers show that the most dangerous traitors are also the least detectable and powerful members of the society. Quite often they are part of the popular new African elite. When the elite plunder the country and engage in other corrupt activities, the same folkloric approach is used to show how the fraudulent and lustful elite are apprehended and brought to book. The end of such stories is happy. A case in point is Vitalis Nyawaranda's Barika Ramashefu, which shows how the new African elite mashefu (chiefs) are ironically and incredulously punished through the same laws that they created to entrench themselves in comfort. The motif accounts for the dearth of literature of disillusionment with independence. Disillusionment with the new status quo would be expected as a reflection of the mood of many urban people who become frustrated by experiences in the first five years of independence. The happy ending probably reflects the optimism in the preliterate society. From the viewpoint of the philosophy of the time, there is no problem that is too big to solve. However grim the atmosphere may become, Shona peasants do not give up the fight to improve themselves through legitimate means. The ending is a reaffirmation of values that have been subverted by cultural instability. The naivety of the reaffirmation lies in the failure of the vision in question to come to grips with the source of the problems dealt with in the themes. It also lies in the failure to distinguish the contemporary communal setting, which is a satellite of the city and commercial farm, from its pre-industrial counterpart, which is a relatively stable self-sufficient social order. The former, which is a reserve for commercial and industrial labor, is made the status quo in fiction.
The artists generally fail to give oral art a convincing new form. This misleads critics into blaming oral art for the poor quality of modern fiction. Oral art is in fact a different and parallel form of self-expression whose maturity is not found in literacy. History has proved that such literature cannot sustain readers for long. It thrives on its patrons in the Literature Bureau and Government who work tirelessly to get it prescribed for consumption in schools.
NOTES1. The Southern Rhodesia Government set up the Literature Bureau to cultivate and help market literature in indigenous languages. Themes were often suggested to writers in the early years. Controversial political themes were not to be themes of good work. Organs of Government and racial issues could only be portrayed positively. Until the late 1980s, all publications were vetted by the Literature Bureau.
2. Mashefu is adapted from the Portuguese word chefs, which would loosely translate as "chiefs." It is one of those terms that were adopted into Shona by freedom fighters who were trained in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony. This term was adopted to denote the political elite at the helm of the war to liberate Zimbabwe from the British settlers. The hierarchy in the guerilla social world was as follows:
chefs (elite)--nationalist political leaders
camarada (comrades-soldiers)
povo (masses in the villages)
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