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Panashe Chigumadzi . . . Her interest with the female condition rather than the Zimbabwean narrative, belies a finely detailed canvas of the country’s urban diaries

Stanely Mushava Literature Today
Book: Sweet Medicine
Author: Panashe Chigumadzi
Publisher: BlackBird Books (2015)
ISBN: 978-1-928337-12-7
During the launch of her book in South Africa last year, Panashe Chigumadzi stressed that her coming-of-age novel “Sweet Medicine” happens in Zimbabwe but is not about Zimbabwe. But the disclaimer, an apparent reference to Chigumadzi’s interest with the female condition rather than the Zimbabwean narrative, belies a finely detailed canvas of the country’s urban diaries.

If “Sweet Medicine” is not the Zimbabwean narrative’s op-ed centrefold, then it is its social scene, a collage of desperate circumstances interlaced with sturdy narrative ability. Chigumadzi cuts away from her other life as a militant essayist in black feminist trenches to present a moving, intelligent and poetically textured story of a young woman struggling to find herself in an austere economy.

The 25-year-old founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a womanist platform for South African millennials, says she conceived “Sweet Medicine” five years ago before plunging into her current politics hence its relatively mild drift.

Speaking at the Cape Town launch, Chigumadzi said she found long-form journalism a better fit for political stances than fiction: “I think I respect the audience enough not to make this (novel) a thinly veiled critical essay.”

The resounding debut follows the spiritual and economic strivings of Tsitsi, a young woman thrust into Harare’s fast lane by the economics of survival during the hungry days of 2008.

Chigumadzi narrates from a position of moral detachment her lead character’s harrowing shift from innocence to experience as each stair closer to economic security turns out spiritually and emotionally to be a downward plunge.

Tsitsi increasingly cedes her formative values and aspirations and blends into the nether zones of illicit sex, witchcraft, charismatic cults and political conspiracy. An economics graduate rudely alerted by circumstances to the rift between academic laws and street dynamics, Tsitsi deploys situational ethics to secure her place in high society.

But she finds herself vulnerable to her own designs, and depravity becomes an inexorable web and spiritual equivocation a constant. In the end, it seems as if Tsitsi’s painstakingly designed empire is all a façade. Having displaced out a big oga’s wife by manipulating professional proximity, she finds progressively elusive her dream to be the arbiter of her own destiny.

Her new role as an ornament involves looking good for the big man, agreeing with him to a fine point and generally acquitting herself as an automaton in a cold, bureaucratic household. Tsitsi’s conquest from subordinate to small house to the lady of the main house is not ultimately rewarding as she finds herself being upstaged according to her own script.

Ironically, her whole life has to revolve around tying down a previously married man to sign wedding papers for her financial security, a feat that involves getting another woman divorced, another potentially fired from her job, and herself trapped in a Chitungwiza n’anga’s home, scraped with a random object and confronted with human-looking concoctions.

The moral echoes “Mhandu Yemukadzi”, an inward-looking poem where the female persona laments intra-gender atrocities in “Tipeiwo Dariro.” Chigumadzi’s characters do not come across as didactic accessories but wholesome apart, bringing aboard contrasting sensibilities which push the story ahead.

In Chiedza (the feminist), Mrs Zvobgo (the cynic) and Mai Tsitsi (the Catholic saint) shows that women are complex characters who cannot be generically bundled.

Chiedza, Tsitsi’s unlikely friend, comes across as a feminist variant, third wave firebrand at that, and torches every patriarchal convention just to get her way. Whatever route she goes, UZ, microwave prosperity pentecostal mega-church or affair with a US intelligence operative, the rules seem to be her own.

Ever feisty and attention-hungry, she is the one who caricatures an economic professor on the first day at university, telling her would-be students that some might to graduation day, ripped apart by Limpopo crocodiles while trying to fix poverty quicker, others might be the dubious guys who never go beyond part one while yet others might contemplate an easier university.

“Eh, excuse me, ‘Professor Nhingi’… it is said that ‘marriage is often the surest way out of poverty for many poorer.’ Indeed, the best chance they have is good grooming! Saka inzwaika sistran, you can just carry on nezvemamake-up nemagogo. Leave the graphs to some of us who can understand and put them to good use,” a rude boy’s retort to Chiedza’s mock speech typifies the patriarchal undercurrent of the novel.

Chiedza and Tsitsi defiantly stand up to the bullying and finish their degrees among the top crop. Unfortunately, the world outside seems to shun meritocracy. Tsitsi goes down a path where her highest assignment is maintaining the Nollywood royalty, Rita Dominic or Genevievie Naji, to keep her big oga involved.

The other distinctively Zimbabwean feature of the novel is a Leonard Zhakata soundtrack, “Mugove”, which recurs in Sekuru Dickson’s covers and Tsitsi’s internal monologues. The track, where the persona feels his poverty bitterly and pleads for better days in his own lifetime, gels well with a narrative of economic disenfranchisement.

Chigumadzi ably code-switches to Shona but her command sounds dubious when she assigns WhatsApp lingo like “ndakuenda” and “mhepo wakaipa” to a cultured Catholic Mbuya Anna. Explaining her decision to steer clear of “weightier” political matters, Chigumadzi said it would be not be easy writing on themes like race without “being guilty of lecturing or being boxed into a certain category”.

“Setting the book in Zimbabwe allowed the story to develop without consideration for things like whiteness and race in the way you necessarily have to when looking at South Africa, where it is very visible.

“There is something freeing about writing in a different context, where I write about black people without having to consider if there’s a boss if it’s a white boss or a black boss,” she said.

Highly regarded critic Ranka Primorac primes Chigumadzi for the female royalty of African literature, among notables Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “Sweet Medicine” is a daring debut which will go down among Zimbabwean literature’s finest millennial strivings, no mean feat coming from a 24-year-old.

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