Lovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
Independence offered boundless possibilities to Zimbabwean writers coming from an environment of extreme censorship and other repressive laws that stifled the creative spirit.

Although debate will always focus on the quality and orientation of the fiction published in post-liberation era compared to pre-independence publications, there is no doubt that the new dispensation unleashed world-class writers who have made names for themselves and the country.

In “An Introduction to Zimbabwe Literature” published on www.postcolonialweb.org, literary guru Dr Rino Zhuwarara believes that the birth of Zimbabwe fiction in English has been influenced by the country’s peculiar history and various crises which blacks experienced between 1890 and 1980.

Dr Zhuwarara’s contention is that Zimbabwe’s fictional narrative lost something uniquely akin to its identity when white settlers established themselves on the land between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. He contends that the abrupt and brutal intrusion of the white settlers into Zimbabwe was part of a larger imperial vision which sought to subjugate the African continent in order to exploit its economic and human resources.

Dr Zhuwarara’s reasoning is centred on the undeniable fact of the systematic dispossession of Africans of their ancestral lands to crowded and infertile areas with native culture being seen as primitive and there to be wiped out and replaced by a more civilised Christian cul- ture.

The evidence of this rapacious and wanton plunder and an attempt to physically annihilate the African is documented in Terence Ranger’s “Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896: A Study in African Resistance” in which he quotes Lord Grey from Chishawasha in January 1897 as saying: “Father Biehler is convinced of the hopelessness of regenerating the Mashonas whom he regards as the most hopeless of mankind . . .(and) that the only chance for the future of the race is to exterminate the whole people, both male and female over the age of 14.”

While Father Biehler’s prescription was never considered seriously by his peers, it nevertheless showed the extent of the resentment against African religion in particular and African culture in general.

In essence Africans were not only dispossessed of their material possessions but were also damned culturally. This explains the subsequent constant theme of identity crisis in most black literature before independence prevalent in Charles Mungoshi’s “Waiting for the Rain” and Dambudzo Marechera’s “House of Hunger”.

The cultural crisis was further worsened by the ensuing inexorable process of industrialisation and urbanisation aptly captured by Musaemura Zimunya “Country Dawns and City Lights”. There are also other texts that show the effects of the liberation struggle on individuals as illustrated by Spencer Tizora in “Crossroads”, Alexander Kanengoni’s “Echoing Silences” and Stanley Nyamupfukudza’s “Non-Believer’s Journey”.

Tizora’s “Crossroads” explores the experience associated with Zimbabwe’s struggle for independence in that unlike Edmund Chipamaunga’s “A Fighter for Freedom” or Garikai Mutasa’s “The Contact”, the book does not put emphasis on physical contact or combat. Tizora’s book is mainly concerned with the broader historical conflict in the lives of ordinary individuals. The book focuses on how ordinary people’s life trajectory was altered completely by the liberation struggle.

Priscilla, a character in Tizora’s “Crossroads” is a typical ordinary woman married to David Moyo but finds herself being the conduit of drugs to combatants. Priscilla had started off as a “non-believer who had not quite been saved from the sin of non-commitment”. She could not be a fence sitter for there was no one to erect the fence. She had no time to choose a side just like her husband who jeopardises his marriage and job as a teacher by joining the struggle.

Priscilla is eventually arrested, humiliated and tortured by Rhodesian security forces. She struggles with loneliness and falls in love with a student teacher who impregnates her but denies responsibility for the child and is not marrying her.

Thus the underlining theme of the book is how national reconciliation which was espoused at independence was to reconcile different scattered individuals whose lives had been altered by the war. How can national reconciliation be extended to deal with individuals’ coming to terms with very private and painful experiences? How can David accept a deformed Priscilla whose life was changed beyond her own control and is having an illegitimate child?

What about Betty the white woman who adopts the child? How will she embrace reconciliation when she is still weighed down by her own prejudices as evidenced by her condescending language?

There are surmountable hurdles blacks and whites have to deal with in the new dispensation. Similarly, the same issues that writers grappled with at independence have continued being dominant in today’s literature. Writers continue to explore how individual private lives are altered by the broader economic challenges as married couples are separated as spouses leave the country in search of greener pastures.

The peculiarity of the Zimbabwean story is thus captured in what Zhuwarara describes as the constant struggle for an authentic identity largely altered by the settling of the whites on the land between the Limpopo and Zambezi. Perhaps Zimbabwean literature could have been coloured differently had we not had characters like Father Biehler who attempted to exterminate the hopeless Mashonas.

 

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