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Lovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
Encounters with the affable Alexander Kanengoni have always had the effect of indelibly leaving a feeling of having met a “ghost” from the past, safely guarding the holy grail of my fractured past as a son of two combatants born at a refugee camp in neighbouring Mozambique. Each time I have met Kanengoni, he always speaks with a certain convincing spring as if he is speaking through me and beyond my generation. He speaks in a hurried, urgent mood of one consciously aware of the fragility of his own finite time; always wanting to put everything in perspective. He speaks with a certain reassuring gusto. I have always felt the urge to know about his personal experiences of the war. And each time I have always felt unsettled in digging out fresh mounds of that gory period.

Now after reading “Echoing Silences” (1997) published by Baobab Books and reprinted in 2001 and 2012, my quest for knowing more about the man’s war experiences seems to have been answered.

“Echoing Silences” is as much a historical novel as it also traces the personal psychological torment of a former war combatant, Munashe Mungate, harrowingly haunted by his experiences in the violent and bloody liberation struggle.

While the novel’s focus is on Munashe, there is no doubt that his individual experiences broadly reflect the experiences of thousands of former combatants whose mental faculties were fractured and maimed by a war that finally delivered independence to Zimbabwe.

The narrative is powerfully woven from start to finish, which any reader will find hard to resist; the temptation being enmeshed in the text. The narrator effortlessly employs constant flashbacks, a technique aptly suited in the construction of a character like Munashe who is always in a flux, frequently slipping and existing in a surreal and real world. He is neither there nor here, as even ghosts from the past intrude his reality including giving him instructions of where and how to get a job in Mutare.

Munashe is shocked to realise that the same black Rhodesian soldier who had spared his life as the last surviving combatant in his group, the same Rhodesian soldier who had given him directions of a less dangerous route to the rear, happened to be the same individual to direct him to his uncle’s homestead in Musana. The same individual happened to know that his uncle was not present at his homestead and it is the same individual who was to refer him to someone at Mutare Border Timbers who could offer him a job. Much to his horror, when he recounts his story to the individual who was a relative of his God-sent saviour, he was told that the individual had been brutally murdered by guerillas during the war and his body publicly displayed as a deterrent for would be sell-outs.

“Yes. He was my cousin. Most of us advised him to quit the Rhodesian army, but he wouldn’t listen. Poor fellow. The war was almost over when he came home for the weekend, just a few months before the ceasefire. He had never done so before. Little wonder that our elders say that death lures us on. In any case it was stupid of him. The guerillas got wind of his presence from the mujibhas and they shot him. He was left in the sun in the middle of the village for nearly a week. You could smell his decomposing body from a kilometre away,” recounts the man who claimed to be the cousin of the slain Rhodesian soldier.

Former journalist and now Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town Dr Wallace Chuma describes “Echoing Silences” as arguably the most engaging and brutally frank account of Zimbabwe’s guerilla war to be narrated quasi-fictionally.

Dr Chuma is indeed accurate in saying that the book “unravels the war’s ugly underbelly: regular torture and killing orgies sanctioned by kangaroo courts, raging male sexual predators targeting junior female combatants, indiscipline and betrayal among fighters.”

As a former liberation fighter, Kanengoni’s account though fictionalised is a candid representation of the internal contradictions that sometimes got out of control among cadres who all joined the war with a certain naïveté of coming back to independent Zimbabwe as heroes.

His account is not sanitised.

The war was horrendous, justice or injustice instantly meted without clear recourse to the authenticity of allegations levelled against individuals.

In other words, “Echoing Silences” calls for a national acknowledgement of the misdeeds of the past from both sides of the then political divide. The silences nestled within individuals is killing them, has rendered them nothing, but tormented souls in urgent need or restitution and healing.

“Echoing Silences”, echoes “Mayombe” by Pepetela with the difference being that the former is a fictionalised narrative of the post-war environment while the later focuses on the internal contradictions within the guerilla movement of MPLA in Angola.

However, both texts are important in that they surgically examine the goings on within the liberation movements including the fact that mundane differences could lead to fatal outcomes that left survivors equally traumatised and haunted.

Kanengoni describes the ceasefire period as not a wholly ecstatic era. The eerie and uncertainty of that period is captured through Munashe’s musings at an assembly point at Dzapasi when the narrator says:

“But soon, (Munashe’s) indifference was overshadowed by parents who thronged the assembly point looking for their children. They arrived throughout the day: in the morning, afternoon and evening. . . They came by bus, by car and on foot. And it was not long before (he) noticed that beneath their outward happiness, behind their inebriated singing as the buses and lorries rolled into the assembly point, beneath their wild embraces as fighters met their people, they all looked the same: anxious, uncertain, afraid.

It showed in the way their eyes searched through the guerrilla ranks. It showed in their voices as they talked to the guerrillas about what a burden the war was now that it was over and they would soon be free. They did not ask directly about the whereabouts of their own sons and daughters. . . Instead they asked whether the guerrillas at Dzapasi were the only ones left after the long war. Even as they asked the question, one could detect the panic in their eyes. To them, it was clear that victory and independence would be meaningless if their own children did not return home. . . ”

In summary, “Echoing Silences” is a narrative that uses history not only to debunk the narrow interpretations of the past but also to facilitate reconciliation and closure. In the absence of a national restitution and healing framework, the narrator points to the African spiritual recourse system as a way of appeasing the demons or ngozi that torments survivors of a war whose real impact on individuals is yet to be unravelled.