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Shimmer Chimodya

Stanely Mushava Literature Today
Book: Harvest of Thorns Classic
Author: Shimmer Chinodya
Publisher: Pearson Education Africa (2016)
ISBN: 978-1-7760-0140-8
Shimmer Chinodya deployed new shelf life for his highly regarded novel, “Harvest of Thorns”, when he staged it at Theatre in the Park last week. A spirited cast, featuring Chipo Bizure, Charles Matare, Sithengisiwe Sibanda, Everson Ndlovu and Derick Nziyakwi, was on point with an uproarious blend of comedy, cadence and consciousness. The drama, returning to stage for the second time after showing at the Harare International Festival of Arts (Hifa) in 2013, lived up to the ambitious pitch of the novel. This time a print edition of the play, freshly pressed by Pearson Education, was concurrently launched with the performance, and a few onstage revisions incorporated.

Although the play dispenses with several characters and scenarios from the novel, Chinodya ably straddled backstage roles as producer, writer and director to stay faithful to the original inspiration.

Chinodya’s winding reconstructions of Rhodesia and internal scans of accidental hero, Benjamin Tichafa, on the line with the transposition of prose to drama, were more than compensated for by the spirited performance.

The African literary notable’s 1989 novel deals with elusive aspects of wartime aspirations, mid-century urban culture, the contradictions of transition and the psychological toll of colonialism and the liberation struggle.

It is a moving postscript to a lost African childhood, in the order of Chenjerai Hove’s “Bones”, Louis Bernardo Honwana’s “We Killed Mangy-Dog” and Ngugi wa Thiongo’s “Weep Not, Child”.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pays “Harvest of Thorns” homage, along with Chinua Achebe’s “Girls at War”, as two of her closest influences in the making of “Half of a Yellow Sun”.

Chipo Bizure (Muwengwa’s on-screen mistress in “Studio 263”) turns out as a crush-worthy young Shamiso Mhaka in the opening scene, eliciting letter after letter from love-smitten Clopas Wandai J. Tichafa, a messenger, teaboy and queue manager at the Makonde District Commissioner’s Office.

The now classic love letters, matched only by the lyrically agile Joe in T.K. Tsodzo’s “Pafunge”, provide a comic opening to an occasionally tense drama.

Whereas the print format alternates the tragic and the comic, the excerpted performance was intended for laughter from start to finish.

The flustered letter-reading scene is performed first in the chronologically consistent stage rendition, but only appears in Act 2, Scene 6 in the print edition which retains the novel’s back-and-forth mode.

Chronology works for the economic new cast which dispenses with Chinodya’s booming backstage narration and Hope Masike’s mbira interludes in the 2013 performance.

“I will go on skripting even I buys all the ritten peds and uhm-vlops at Bright Bookstore even the postmaster ‘say’ no no no Clopas you finishing pestej stemps for others because my hart says you the woomen for me and I must not surrenda,” our fatally smitten and lyrically oozing Clopas Wandai J. Tichafa (played by Charles Matare) pours his heart out in the letter that finally melts coy Shamiso.

This third missive, complete with a P.S, a P.P.S and a “camera fotopiktcher” washes away Shamiso’s resolve, on the mature advice of her sister (Sithengisiwe Sibanda) to keep the DA’s queue-controller waiting longer than GNU negotiations, at least to keep him on the pleading end before marriage turns the tables.

The caricature of an insistently ungrammatical Rhodesian official in cross-belts may be a hard sell at a time when the average Zimbabwean drops jawbreakers offhand like mere vowels – NGO vocabulary, Pentecostal lingo, Twitter speak and all.

However, the handicap would not be particular with Clopas. In Rhodesia, many Africans had to make do with functional crumbs of “the white man’s education” just to be economically useful, the outcome of which was a cross between an automaton and a clown.

Talking of colonial bastardisation, it gets no better than Smith’s policemen, notoriously known as “mabhurakwacha”. As Shamiso puts it, in a moment of insight: “You black boys are pushed around by white men then you push around your own black brothers and sisters.”

The Rhodesian work ethic survives to this day, not just as a caste principle of race but also of class.

Clopas and Shamiso’s spiritual exploits in search of the fruit of the womb is an equally contemporary phenomenon. At least in Clopas’s case, hopping from a traditional healer’s portions into the Pentecostal fold seems to be facilitated by the need of the hour rather than conviction.

This explains his superficial mastery of the podium when he becomes Deacon Tichafa in the Church of the Holy Spirit. His public confessions, this time in proper English but a rich drift to say the least, anticipate the age of televangelism.

“The God I knew was Father Christmas and the Jesus of Easter holidays. I went to church to please those who knew me, to satisfy my lust by gazing at the lithe bodies of young women and other men’s wives,” testifies the deacon.

“I gambled at cards and if I lost, I slashed my rivals with knives and cast them into wells,” the confession, somewhat laced with exhibitionism and exaggeration, shows a trending “lights, camera, prayer” tendency.

The syncretism, involving alternation of traditional healers, prophets and hedonism, mutually exclusive references at heart, is also presently in evidence.

Chinodya’s accidental hero, Benjamin (played by Everson Ndlovu), also known by his nom-de-guerre Cde Pasi nemaSellout, grows up to face only two options, blending into a repressive cycle or all-out confrontation.

His settling for the latter is not so much an outcome of ideological deliberation but circumstances urge him wild. He is not a designing rebel but just can no longer breathe in the current space, as Frantz Fanon would say.

Emmanuel Mbirimi (Neria’s short-lived screen husband opening the text in his other life as a theatre critic) paints a varied collage of motivations behind Benjamin’s war effort, including an oppressive childhood, sense of guilt, peer abuse, resistance to family mores, expulsion from school, tyranny and, later, political indoctrination.

“The composite nature of his character and experiences is one of the main driving forces in this play. ‘Harvest of Thorns’ seeks to propound that ‘accidental’ heroes such as Benjamin are artistically real and intriguing than ‘pure’ ones,” Mbirimi notes.

Benjamin’s post-war complications come out glaringly in the play. He is not only detached from his pious Pentecostal mother but insistently adversarial.

During the war, he is haunted by the ghost of a woman whom he was instructed by Cde Baas Die to strike to death with a log before a subdued crowd. The passage rings a parallel with Alexander Kanengoni’s tortured hero, Munashe, in “Echoing Silences”.

For all the darkness of the play, the marriage of Benjamin and Nkazana, united by the war above a cultural divide, spells a progressive new direction for Zimbabwe, beautifully celebrated in Admire Kasenga’s sungura jam “Chitima Nditakure”.

Chinodya’s effortless intertextuality, often the ear for cadence as a novelist, is a positive plug-in for the play. While the 2013 performance had recurrent mbira interludes, the newly published play carries nostalgic references to Spokes Mashiyane, Miriam Makeba, Dorothy Masuka, pop, chachacha, hi-life, simanjemanje, rhumba, kwela and jiti.

Stanely Mushava can be contacted at [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> and blogs at jitknowledge.blogspot.com