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Tanaka Chidora Literature Today
Brian Chikwava’s “Harare North” (2009) is about a Zimbabwean youth who flees from Harare to London (“Harare North”, as it is popularly called) because he is wanted by the police for alleged acts of violence that he committed back home. In “Harare North”, he intends to find the US$5 000 that is wanted by the police to clear all charges against him.

After staying with Paul and Sekai (his relatives) for some days, the narrator realises that even one’s relatives “re-invent complete” (p. 128) in “Harare North”. So he decides to go and stay at a squatter camp with his friend, Shingi, and other Zimbabweans who included a prayerful young man, Farai, a 17-year-old single mother, Tsitsi, and the “administrator”, Aleck, who is reputed to be having a very good job.

Later, it is revealed that he is a “BBC”, that is, he works at an old people’s home as a “British Buttocks Cleaner”. It is also revealed later that Aleck is not the “administrator” of the house as he professes to be. He is just an opportunist who had the house left under his care by foreign friends who had no hope of coming back. This means all along, Aleck has been charging the narrator and fellow Zimbabweans exorbitant rent in order to better his life and even acquire a stand or two in Harare, thus justifying the narrator‘s claim that in “Harare North” Zimbabweans “re-invent complete”.

The narrator later hits Aleck with the truth. When the narrator hits you with truth, he likens it to a snake that is being waved above the heads of bad people. Aleck moves out of the house and the narrator, Shingi and Tsitsi stay behind. The narrator is a smooth operator who cannot hold down a steady job and fails to meet his deadline of raising US$5 000 as soon as possible and catch the next flight back home. He sometimes cheats and blackmails Sekai because she is not faithful to Paul; he shatters Shingi’s dream of getting Tsitsi by bringing a Polish prostitute for Shingi in the presence of Tsitsi. All of these are forms of re-invention that the narrator performs even as he ridicules such performances in others.

He sinks deeper and deeper into “Harare North” until all hope of getting out is gone. Of course, it later turns out that all the talk about US$5 000 needed by his commander, Comrade Mhiripiri, is just a “jazz number” the comrade played in order to fatten his pockets. One begins to wonder if the re-invention that happens in foreign spaces is the same re-invention that happens back home in Zimbabwe. The story ends with him moving out of the house and trying to defraud Shingi’s relatives of US$5 000, a scheme which does not succeed. In fact, when the story ends the narrator is more of a psychiatric case. The pressures of “Harare North” seem to have had their toll on him.

“Harare North” communicates the adjustments and re-inventions that Zimbabweans undergo in order to survive in London. Many Zimbabweans invent many ways of surviving in the host country. In fact, the hunger of home and the necessity of survival in a foreign country have become “good discipline”. Thus, Paul becomes a totally more disagreeable character than his letters back home had suggested to the narrator. His wife, Sekai, lacks completely in Zimbabwean hospitalities so that the narrator complains: “We have our first difficult moment when we get to the train station and she expect me to buy my own ticket. That’s when it sink into my head that she have turn into lapsed African, Sekai. Me I am a guest and there she is, expecting me to buy my own ticket on the first day?” (p. 5).

Likewise, the old man from Tulse Hill Estate “have re-invent complete; you will never think he is Zimbabwean if you don’t know him” (p. 128). He is popularly known as MFH, a name which has no connection with his Zimbabwean-ness. According to the narrator, he is that kind of “homeboy that can visit Germany for one week and come back to his native country putting on big funny American accent and spinning clouds of jazz numbers playing out the I don’t understand his native language.”
Thus, there is a lot of “unbecoming” that happens in “Harare North”. The narrator himself does not hold on to these cultural contrivances for long: “Time is everything in Harare North, you don’t just call someone like you is back home and just talk talk talk without purpose. Get to the point” (p. 218).

The re-invention is, however, not a characteristic of foreign spaces. It’s human nature. I still remember how, after a 25-day August holiday stint in Harare, my Masvingo friends would come back with this “nice” accent that you can only find in Harare. Instead of “kugwara” vanenge vava “kurwara”.

Do you also remember that village mafia boy who swam across the Limpopo to Jozi soon after Christmas and came back two Christmases later with this knack for “neh” when speaking? All of those are re-inventions. But without criminalising these people, I also have played my own shows of re-invention.

I am thinking of a time when I thought that asking a girl out required perfect English and a perfect British accent for effect. The vocal adjustments that would take place to pull this off were short of metamorphic. In Magamba Hostels where I grew up, I even came back after a semester at college with tall stories of having been in Canada. Many of my gullible neighbours bought it, and for a couple of weeks I swam in the sea of the glory that the re-invention gave me.

We are criminals of pretence. The world is a stage and each one of us is part of the cast. Some are good; some are bad. Some can convince with a smile; others cannot even sell a smile. Some can construct a permanent scowl by drawing on the face, while for others “hips can lie”.