Zimpapers Logo

Elliot Ziwira @ the Bookstore
In a world where ignorance is tragic and knowledge is in vogue, it is quite dangerous to parade one’s lack of information. Nothing really beats knowledge in this rat race that we euphemistically call life, but one needs to know where exactly one stands pertaining to knowledge; for little of it is equally perilous and lack of it is certain death. The quest for knowledge is always whetted by the multiplicity of questions that always come to the fore in our daily tribulations with life.

As pointed out by Socrates, the best way to answer is to ask questions because “the important thing is not to stop questioning”, as complemented by Albert Einstein.

Gentle reader, what really constitutes knowledge? Does it come from years of schooling or from experience?
If somebody presumed to have no knowledge at all opens his mouth and something worthwhile comes out to the deafening applause of his audience, whose knowledge would he be using?

And if somebody whom we consider a luminary, stammers and stutters if challenged or dared to respond pertinently to a subject much to the chagrin of his audience, would we say that person is an ignoramus or may simply not have knowledge on that particular subject?

Is knowledge not just a miasmic smokescreen used by those presumed to have it, to hoodwink the docile and the gullible into submission?

Who really should evaluate someone else’s knowledge? If an African is forced to imbibe from the Western chalice, how much would he sip from the African calabash? Would he really be able to get to the dregs of the African brew?

Wondering how an African thinks or should think, as determined by his or her cache of knowledge, I immersed myself in Mashingaidze Gomo’s “A Fine Madness” (2010) and my madness was confirmed and it felt so exhilarating, exuberant and ennobling that I made up my mind never to be sane again.

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.

“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.

He adeptly uses 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 Shimmer Chinodya, Gomo uses the autobiographical mode to reflect on his own biography as a soldier who finds himself on a battlefield 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 as they scrounge for none 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 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 whom 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 Africanness 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 and rich 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, who ironically has glaring double standards mirrored throughout African history.

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 chastises 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.”

The African 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 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.”

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.

In the Zimbabwean story, President Mugabe is vilified and demonised for daring the all too powerful West.
The West plays witness, prosecutor, attorney, judge and God, all at the same time, because of his stance on the ownership of the means of production — the land.

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.”

Therefore, unless Africans unshackle themselves from the labyrinthine web that is designed by the West to entangle them in, forever, they will remain impoverished, imprisoned and condemned to the periphery of history as their dreams remain a mirage etched on the horizon.