Elliot Ziwira At the Bookstore
Independence Day is upon us once again as we celebrate the coming of age of an African ideology and sensibility; an ideology that is steeped in our nationhood, regardless of political or religious affiliation. Zimbabwe is our Motherland, notwithstanding our current domicile and challenges. “A man’s country is not a certain piece of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle,” (George William Curtis).

Freedom, oh sweet freedom!

For the 36th time, our nation takes to the podium to bogey to the African tune, imbibe from the African calabash and respond to the heartbeat of the Motherland’s dream.

For more than three decades, the fruits of independence have been too tasty for some among us, to remember that our freedom from the clutches of imperialism is not at all an outcome of grandiose and hoity-toity parlance, where one momentarily recovers from a drunken stupor and announce his “grand” arrival on the political, social or political scene, with pomp and funfair; neither is it a culmination of personal aggrandisement and pomposity coupled with a penchant for the bizarre where one cries foul when he becomes a target of his own salvoes and keeps mum if the ill-gotten millions are pouring into his coffers, nor is it a result of trumpeteering.

There are sons and daughters of an impoverished peasantry who sacrificed limps, eyes and mental well-being for this beauty of a country formerly known as Rhodesia, but who are still wallowing in abject poverty, because some among our flock, decided to line their pockets at the expense of their blood and limbs.

And if they cry out loud for a fair share of the national cake, the tongued ones in our midst label them mercenaries. That they sacrificed willingly and therefore, should not ask for monetary compensation is neither here nor there, as it smacks of callousness and insensitivity.

Zimbabwean literature is a battlefield where individual biographies are patted against the national one and to its ethos, especially when it comes to the liberation struggle and its aftermaths. A perusal through our literary cache will expose the different ways in which the revolutionary zeal and ideology is portrayed.

Writers in Generation Two as categorised by Viet-Wild (1993), like Alexander Kanengoni, Freedom Nyamubaya and Thomas Sukutai Bvuma, who because of their experience in the liberation struggle, demystify the notion of the guerilla fighter as an untouchable genius, who could disappear from the enemy’s canons and author his own epic. Using the autobiographical mode, the writers capture their own experiences at the front as it happened and do not attempt to glorify the war which brought independence to our doorsteps.

Although the three writers employ different genres, in their depiction of the war of liberation as not only futile but dehumanising, disillusioning; psychologically and morally degrading, the way they vividly bring the horrendous nuances of the phenomenon to the fore, evokes sadness, ire and disgust. Kanengoni and Nyamubaya use prose —the novel and the short story respectively, and Bvuma uses verse.

Kanengoni in “Echoing Silences” (1997), like Nyamubaya in “That special Place” (2003), and Bvuma in “Every Stone That Turns” (1999), uses characters drawn from the war-time and post war-time zones. But unlike Bvuma, he employs the metaphor of madness and the symbol of ghosts to express his disgust at the phenomenon known as war. Using the protagonist, Munashe, who abandons his university studies for the higher calling, the writer depicts war as dehumanising and deplorable. In his eyes, war in any context; be it for liberation or otherwise, can never produce victors. Instead only victims are strewn in its wake for it “is the greatest scourge of mankind”.

Munashe embodies all that is vain as regards the war. Like others of his ilk, he suffers psychological damage during and after the war. The traumatic experience of the war because of its brutal nature burdens his psyche, which disengages his mental frame as “the walls of (his) mind had already fallen in”.

“Echoing Silences” highlights the profound suffering that the guerillas faced at the architect of both the enemy’s and their own ranks. The sense of hopelessness pervading the novel is explored through Munashe, Sly, Kudzai, Bazooka and the section commander who was once a teacher. All the other characters save for Munashe, could not survive the torture, hunger, killings and brutalities. Munashe survives probably because he “had died at Chimanda. What survived through the war was (his) ghost”. Like all the others, he is a victim of circumstantial consequences as he finds himself embedded in a labyrinthine snare which he cannot undo. His only vent of escape becomes hallucination through drugs which reduces his life to a mere reverie.

Female combatants like Kudzai, as is also evident in Nyamubaya’s “That Special Place”, are at the mercy of the vagaries of war and the sadistic nature of Man. Their desires and dreams are set ablaze as their fellow comrades, who are supposed to protect them decide to think in carnal terms; repeatedly raping them willy-nilly until what is left of them are fragmented souls and empty shells. Hopelessly reduced to a sex machine by the sex perverts in their midst, Kudzai laments: “Three abortions in one year. My life in the war. What sort of credentials are these? I don’t want to be considered anything. I am nobody.”

Because of the travesty that has become her life, Kudzai yearns for death, and Munashe who is in love with her wilts inside as brothers rise against each other in a rat race that seems to be fashioned from hell.

Sadly or may be fortunately, she succumbs to the madness of it all; finding solace in death. The first person narrator in “That Special Place” (2003) is deflowered by the sadistic detachment commander Nyati, who continues to molest her as she hopes against hope that the war abruptly ends. There is really nothing to be glorified in war as it is not a “means to an end, but an end in itself”.

Bazooka in “Echoing Silences” is followed by “phantom witches that possessed his mind”, which culminates in his demise as he vainly attempts to escape from them. His level of disorientation is only equal to Sly’s, who thinks that he could slip into civilian life easily when he decides that he is “ tired of the endless killings . . . tired of everything”.

This dark side of the war is also depicted in Bvuma’s “Every Stone That Turns”, especially in the poems “Survivors”, “Private Affair” and “Mafaiti-He loved to pluck a plump louse”. Whereas Kanengoni examines the brutalities of the war which manifests in psychological chaos and frustration, using the metaphor of madness and the motif of ghosts, Bvuma uses crude vulgarity and comic rhetoric to lay bare the dehumanising effects of war. In the poem “Private Affair”, he explores how moral values are thrown to the wind as humanity is robbed of privacy as “shitting” becomes a communal affair.

The poet, like Kanengoni, also examines how the liberation struggle reduced the freedom fighters from normal human beings to beggars of their own waste as hunger and thirst kick them painfully in the nether regions. The fighters deliriously fight over their urine and engage in combat with phantom soldiers.

The level of disorientation during the war deplored by Kanengoni, Bvuma and Nyamubaya reaches a crescendo when the combatants fail to separate their dreams from reality.

As a result therefore, their deeds put to the test their mental nirvana.

In “Echoing Silences”, Munashe moves about in the rain “opening his palms to try to hold the downpour, behaving as if he were insane”; and Bvuma’s Mafaiti “loved to pick lice from a comrade’s hair”.

This presentation of seemingly trivial actions, explores the psychological effects of the war at the deeper sense of the bizarre. Mafaiti cherishes his family and equates his passion for his wife and son to his other passion for plucking lice. The plucking of lice as a pastime also obtains in “Echoing Silences” as Kudzai and her fellow female combatants are seen “washing their clothes and searching for lice in their wild unkempt hair”.

Bvuma, like Kanengoni, debunks the notion of war as a vehicle that hoists the honey bird to a rich bee-hive by exposing how it creates victims not only in the combatants, but the families left behind. Munashe’s family suffers when he brings the ghosts of war to their doorsteps and subsequently dies; and Mafaiti “fell somewhere at the front” leaving behind a young family that he so much adored.

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