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Elliot Ziwira @the Bookstore
“This is something you will undoubtedly find hard to understand. I have decided to respond to the call of the wilderness.

“It is the biggest decision I have had to take. It is the commitment without retreat. Break the news gently to the family. Tell them I have gone out on a hot walking day. I strive to struggle alongside thousands of others to bring back liberation and freedom. Tell them it may be long before I come back. Remember we are together in the STRUGGLE,” writes Tendai in Alexander Kanengoni’s “Vicious Circle” (1983), to his brother Noel when he decides that his Economics studies at university would be void if he and his people are not free from the labyrinthine snare of their existence in a world that believes that colonialism and Christianity are the best things that ever happened to Africa.

The late anti-apartheid hero, Nelson Mandela, once said that: “When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.” In the same vein Stephen King also writes: “Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them, they somehow fly out past you,” (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A story from different seasons).

Verily, it is he that is chained that cherishes the gift of freedom, but he who is free fantasises of the thrill of being fettered. The concept of freedom usually finds base in the hearts of those whose progenies lost arms and limbs in an attempt to wade away from the sinking ships of their dreams, yet remaining ensconced in the same aspirations that shape their destiny.

One may scream for all the other freedoms, real or imagined; but the ultimate freedom is that which gives one access to a humane livelihood; the freedom to claim ownership of the means of production and all that makes it possible to live without merely existing. It is the land that can only make all our dreams tenable, for it is the essence of life and prosperity, without which all our dreams are doomed.

“The land is sacred! These words are at the core of our being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take away our land and we die,” so reasons Mary Brave Bird; and Nilene Omodele Adeoti Foxworth concurs in “Bury me in Africa” (1978): “A People without land are like cattle on naked ground with nothing to graze. They just mope around hopelessly.”

Yes, gentle citizen, friend, countryman, freedom is not worth having if it doesn’t translate to ownership of the land; and it is the issue of the land that was central to the protracted liberation struggle which gave us independence as a sovereign country.

As we celebrate Independence Day is today, let us remember that the freedom we so much cherish did not come on a silver platter. Sons and daughters of a colonised people doomed to the periphery of life to eke out an existence on crumbs from the table of the alien gang from where the sun sets, sacrificed, life, limb and mental Nirvana for the total independence of the people of colour; and one of such gallant fighters was Alexander Kanengoni, who breathed his last on April 12, 2016.

It is sad that the gallant son of the soil passed on a day after the Bookstore ran an instalment on his contribution both to the liberation struggle and Zimbabwean Literature, and just a week before Independence Day.

Kanengoni was aware that, “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).

Through his works Zanda, as he is affectionately known, for he is not dead, because artistes refuse to die lest their people call them traitors for dying on them,demonstrates that freedom and democracy are phenomenally multi-faceted.

Passionate about his country, the land and the quest for freedom in its totality, Kanengoni remains steady fast in his conviction that patriotism is loyalty to the guiding principle that all men are equal, and that the land is all that we have as a people, so anything that jeopardises its distribution is akin to betrayal.

The Bookstore is richer through his titles; “Vicious Circle” (1983), “When the Rain Bird Cries” (1989), “Effortless Tears”, “Echoing Silences” (1997) and a short story “That Ugly Reflection in the Mirror” in “Writing Still” (2003) edited by Irene Staunton.

Alexander Kanengoni, like Freedom Nyamubaya and Thomas Sukutai Bvuma , because of his experience in the liberation struggle demystifies the notion of the guerilla fighter as an untouchable genius, who could disappear from the enemy’s canons and author his own epic.

Although the three artistes exploit different genres in their depiction of the war of liberation as 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 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 like Tendai in “Vicious Circle” (1983)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”, which leaves “effortless tears” on the cheeks of the vilified, oppressed and downtrodden.

Like others of his ilk, Munashe suffers psychological breakdown during and after the war. The traumatic experiences of the war burden his psyche, which disengages his mental frame.

“Echoing Silences” highlights the profound suffering that the guerillas face 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. Like all the others, he is a victim of circumstantial consequences as he finds himself ensnared. His only vent of escape becomes hallucination through drugs which reduces his life to a mere reverie.

Throughout the gory war, “the routine killings, the unabated savagery and the dying”, he had always yearned for an opportunity to tell the Section Commander how “disillusioned he had become”.

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.

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 in hell. Sadly or may be fortunately, she succumbs to the madness of it all; thus, to her death becomes the elixir from suffering.

Bazooka 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 believes that he could slip into civilian life easily when he decides that he is “ tired of the endless killings . . .tired of everything”.

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;Tendai’s family in “Vicious Circle” suffers death, displacement and psychological breakdowns at the hands of the colonial apparatus as a consequence of his decision to join “thousands of others to bring back liberation and freedom”. But because patriotism is a principle, and patriots are principled,Kanengoni, the hero of our time, like others of his flock — the veterans of the struggle — as depicted in his literary works, remained patriotic to the last rumbling echo of silence.

Buried on the hill reminiscent of the struggle, and in the womb of his heart’s desire — the land that he fought for, Kanengoni remains one of the greatest psychological, mental and physical liberators of our time.

Go well son of the soil! The Bookstore is left poorer though so much richer, for your physical absence is atoned for by your eternal intellectual presence.