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Shimmer Chinodya

Elliot Ziwira @ the Book Store
FREEDOM is a mere word that easily fades into oblivion if it is not premised on ideology. As some pundits have posited, ideology is the driving force that drives a will. It is only reasonable that one should be wary of blindly following luminous vapours that may lead one into the mire. Suffice to say that ideologically inspired insights into the problems besetting Africa today will always manifest in the issue of the land.
Since time immemorial land had always been a thorny issue. There had been hideous blood baths because of the burning desire to control the land, because of its significance in Man’s survival matrix. Land is an inheritance whose value is equitable to life and thus cannot be measured in monetary terms.

He who controls the land, controls all that is worthy of life; mineral wealth, rivers and all that wriggles in their bellies, birds and all. Because land does not diminish in value with the passage of time, it can be pawned for anything. What may appear a rocky and sandy piece of land today which many would consider barren may turn into a diamond or gold mine tomorrow, so it should always be guarded jealously. Colonisation and imperialism, the terrible twins of subjugation could never have found space in our lexicon had it not been for the land. The liberation struggle was spurred on by the promise of repossession and ownership of the resource.

Zimbabwean literature is awash with compelling, touching, deplorable and beguiling stories emanating from the land. Nothing really beats the land in this rat race that we euphemistically call life. The quest for its control is always whetted by the multiplicity of disputes that always come to the fore in our daily tribulations with life.

Shimmer Chinodya in “Queues” (2003) bemoans the selective nature of democracy as enshrined in the West, which dictates how African governments should deal with the historical imbalances in the land. Though he lambasts the redistribution which put Zimbabwe at odds with the erstwhile coloniser, he highlights the benefits that can be accrued from the equitable redistribution of the resource, like Memory Chirere in “Maize” (2006), and Kanengoni in “That Ugly Reflection in the Mirror” (2003).

Alexander Kanengoni does not only explore the beneficial nature of the Government’s initiative to bequeath the majority with their ancestral inheritance, but he also examines the stereotyping of the black man as a labourer and not a farmer. He skilfully does this by pitting two farmers- the narrator and beneficiary of the land redistribution programme and his white neighbour who is mesmerised and yet bewildered by the former’s farming acumen.

Mashingaidze Gomo’s “A Fine Madness” (2010) takes a swipe at the West’s hypocritical inclinations as regards to democracy and the melting pot called the land, using the metaphor of madness. 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.

Gomo takes a swipe at the West’s double standards and niche to plunder which has plunged Africa into the dungeons of chaos, anarchy and poverty. “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.

By fracturing sense boundaries the author is able to explore the destructive nature of war and its incapacity to change mindsets using 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 Sovereign Legitimacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) pitting combined African forces from the DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa and Namibia against western sponsored insurgents from DRC, Rwanda and Uganda.

The writer uses the autobiographical mode to reflect on his own biography as a soldier who finds himself on the battle field in a war ravished territory whose crime is merely being rich, beautiful and African. Women and children are reduced to scavengers and vagabonds as they scrounge for non-existent crumbs 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 as 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 that 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.

At the metaphorical level Tinyarei becomes any other African woman who is only considered for commercial purposes and not love. Symbolically she stands for Africa, the beautiful, 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, whose glaring double standards are mirrored throughout African history, as illustrated in the following: “The land in which European champions of civilisation/Christianity, human rights, rule of law and democracy, maimed and murdered/over 10 million African people.”

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 raps the culture of silence bedevilling the continent as it watches some in its ranks decide not to think like Africans because of the nature of knowledge prescribed to them by the West. Africans should consume knowledge that is relevant to their suffering, oppression and poverty. The curriculum should be designed to develop the African mindset in a positive way, which will enable him to question the glaring inequality that exists between the rich and the poor, as aptly noted by Michael Fargher, a South African that this disparity “has not arisen as the result of chance”, but robbery of the black people.

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,” bemoans Gomo.

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. The revolutionary Robert Mugabe, however, saw through their facade; knowing the garden tool he espied, he called it by name.