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At the Bookstore With Elliot Ziwira
AN African leader once said that we should not think like Africans, and to borrow from Shakespeare, “he is an honourable man”, so he “is always right” as George Orwell concurs in “Animal Farm”.

Wondering how an African thinks or should think, At the Bookstore immersed in Mashingaidze Gomo’s “A Fine Madness” (2010) and a kind of madness so exhilarating, exuberant and ennobling was confirmed.

Sanity that is objectionable and premised on someone else’s ideology is not only irksome but mischievously misleading for there is no rationality without freedom and no freedom without empowered choice.

Without inhibitions, fear or dastardly disposition, Gomo takes a swipe at the West’s double standards and niche to plunder, which has plunged Africa into the dungeons of chaos, anarchy and poverty.

“A Fine Madness” is a confrontational reproof of the products of imperialism and slavery; and a remonstration on the African to tell his story in his own way. It thus befits Frantz Fanon’s rationale of a literature of combat in the “The Wretched of the Earth” (1967).

Using a combination of conventions drawn from prose and verse, Gomo captures the African dream and predicament in an intriguing way.

By fracturing sense boundaries, the author is able to explore the destructive nature of war and its incapacity to change mindsets using images drawn from nature and the war zones created by the West’s instinct to plunder under the guise of democracy.

His story is authenticated by the fact that he gives the reader an insider perspective into the experiences of a soldier during Operation Legitimacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) pitting combined African forces from DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa and Namibia against western sponsored insurgents from DRC, Rwanda and Uganda.

Like Chinodya, Gomo uses the autobiographical mode to reflect on his own biography as a soldier who finds himself on a battle-field in a war ravished territory, whose crime is merely being rich, beautiful and African.

The resultant war reduces everyone to a victim, as women and children are reduced to scavengers and vagabonds, scrounging for non-existent crumps in a war-torn country whose mineral wealth is legendary.

Women are left to fend for their families as men are drawn into belligerence either as legitimate soldiers or as soldiers of fortune.

Torn between his wife Tinyarei and his patriotism, the narrator, Muchineripi alias Changamire, combines powerful images of nature and the war zone and a sustained extended metaphor of madness, which revolves around the symbolic beauty that he so much adores.

At the literal level Tinyarei exudes beauty, patience, morality and compromise which are pre-requisites for a true African woman, who is every man’s dream.

She embodies African virtues, norms and values and remains true to her husband, the narrator even under pressure from a lot of affluent admirers who offer her paradise and upliftment if she abandons her African-ness and her husband.

The protagonist is all too aware of this scheme as he is constantly reminded that “beauty so superlative should be scattered around or shared” because “it is too good for an African.”

However, like a paragon of virtue that she is Tinyarei remains true and resolute.

At the metaphorical level Tinyarei becomes any other African woman who is only considered for commercial purposes and not love, “Who marry fortunes as if African beauty and womanhood should be relegated to mere aesthetics.”

Symbolically she stands for Africa, the beautiful, rich and valuable continent impoverished by avarice, deceit and chicanery at the centre of the hypocritical West.

By juxtaposing the hero’s love for Tinyarei, the woman and Tinyarei, the continent or his country, Zimbabwe, Gomo exposes the fallacy of democracy and rule of law whose gospel finds home in the West, whose glaring double standards are mirrored through-out African history, as illustrated in the following: “The land in which European champions of civilisation/ Christianity, human rights, rule of law and democracy, maimed and murdered /over ten million African people.”

It is not only sad but disgusting to note how Eurocentric thinking which is rather warped should be accepted as the panacea for African problems, yet it is the same barbaric thinking that reduced the continent to pauperism and desperation.

Mutilated and raped, Africa lies prostrate on the ground and the West watches, as it crouches on the continent’s horizon of hope, protecting its progeny and barring it (Africa) from aborting the unwanted “puppet progeny already restless in her womb”, as “the affluent rapists demonised and publicised the abortion to the four corners of the planet.”

Gomo lambasts the culture of silence beguiling the continent as it watches some in its ranks decide not to think like Africans.

It all boils back to the nature of knowledge that is prescribed to the African governments by the West, creating invalids because they would have “failed something absolutely irrelevant to the African experience,” reading “foreign literature that addressed foreign issues.”

Africans should consume knowledge that is relevant to their suffering, oppression and poverty. The curriculum should be designed to develop the African mindset, as espoused by Mongo Beti in “Mission to Kala” (1957).

Knowledge really, or lack of it, is what is central to the African outcome.

Thinking like an African entails questioning the inequality that exists between the rich and the poor which creates a void in national consolidation, as aptly noted by Michael Fargher, a South African; that this: “Has not arisen as the result of chance.

Instead we can identify the unjust acts under apartheid and colonisation that specifically engineered the repression and robbery of black people in our society.”

African children should be told “that the corruption and destitution that bedevils Africa today are not the responsibility of the African fool alone,” because the West with its well orchestrated machinery of machination and deceit, “created a continent of desperate destitutes and then picked on individual destitutes and offered them a dog’s place in their affluent circles in exchange for betraying the whole race,” bemoans Gomo.

Because the West thrives on anarchy, trauma, instability, morbidity and the macabre, it creates fertile conditions to sustain that. Poverty is one such condition as it reduces Africans to perpetual beggars whose voice is gagged as a result of destitution.

It defies reason therefore, how some among us behave like morons, as they are willingly used as pawns in the West’s Machiavellian game of pillage, hypocrisy and deceit disguised as democracy and rule of law.

Whose law? What law equates one white progeny to 10 million black Africans? Is it a case of some animals being more equal than others?

Mashingaidze Gomo, the people’s voice, could see through their facade; knowing the garden tool he espies, he calls it by name.

Driven by his love for Tinyarei; both literal and metaphorical, the protagonist decides to “think like an African, in Africa that is”, and with piety and bravado, inspired by his love for his people, he shamed the West in their backyard for reneging on their promises and expecting Africans to let the imbalances of colonialism persist; giving 70 percent of the land to 4 000 former white Rhodesians and a mere 30 percent to 13 million black Zimbabweans.

As an African, he “thought about democracy and how it can not exist / beyond the electoral process unless it is based on empowerment of people to give them a real voice and not just the electoral right”, because “unempowered choice is not freedom”.

Because of his stance on the land issue, and the need to empower his people, not merely by giving them an electoral voice, but through equitable distribution of the means of production, President Robert Mugabe was vilified and demonised as a madman, daring the all too powerful West; playing witness, prosecutor, attorney, judge and God, all at the same time.

But as Gomo reiterates, “a madness you believe in must be a fine madness” because if you have never been called mad, it means you have not taken anything with a serious niche for success because history is littered with great men and inventors who were considered mad, but they never gave up and in the end they had the last laugh as they realised; “that madness could feel so strangely beautiful.”