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David Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts
Last week I complained about top-heavy approaches to the problems besetting our continent’s reading culture.
Among the worst of these problems is the condescending and somewhat cavalier attitude with which writers are often treated by all and sundry except in a few notable cases.
In some parts of Africa, writers are regarded as being only of nuisance value and are to be humoured only when their singular skills are required.
Regrettably, the many drunken would-be-writers with their sling bags, creaky laptops, famished looks, unkempt locks and angry visages do not always help the cause.
Publishers and others along the book chain often ride slipshod over these pseudo combatants with imagined grudges against society.
We all could do with some focus and some clarity about issues. We need to know that it’s not always about us as individuals or upward-climbers. The world is populated by all of us together and we are bound up together in the fate of the use.
Writers do end up being intensely involved in the affairs of humanity both as guardians of its annals and as creators of imaginative possibilities.
Pepetela of “Mayombe” fame was a freedom fighter in Angola and was in the ranks of the MPLA.
Alexander Kanengoni in Zimbabwe and several other people such as Freedom Nyamubaya, that delectable woman guerrilla who liked smoking pipes, had their creativity forged and sharpened on the anvil of the armed struggle.
We can say the same about several other cultural workers: Solomon Skhuza, Albert Nyathi, Comrade Chinx, Max Mapfumo, Simon Chimbetu and others.
They all came to the party when it mattered, and they became the emotional and artistic expression of a people’s consciousness.
John Milton’s iconic line, “They also serve who only stand and wait” summarises the work done by writers and artistes at home who played a role in the unfolding dramas and stood and waited until they could cheer the land armies home with everyone else.
Bra Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Jonas Gwangwa, Letta Mbulu and Caiphus Semenya as well as Ray Phiri were the street fighters of the freedom train South Africa as were Zexie Manatsa, Tineyi Chikupo, Oliver Mtukudzi and Thomas Mapfumo in Zimbabwe. These occurrences have duplicates everywhere around Africa.
Singers, musicians, lyricists, poets and writers of prose and drama, are all writers when it comes down to brass tacks.
They are governed by story, theme, style and content and are all capable of being moved by great works of art and creating similarly great works of art to move others.
Often dismissed as mere romantics and parasites, writers and thinkers throughout history have been seen on the battle fields of some of the great conflicts of the human race around the globe: Wilfred Owen, Ernest Hemingway and others.
Still others became soldiers, politicians, diplomats and statesmen, in actual fact and through the pen. Among these we can count Samora Machel, Agostino Neto, Edison Zvobgo, Charles Mungoshi and Wilson Katiyo.
In Nigeria renowned poet Christopher Okigbo laid down his life during the separatist and ill-fated war in Biafra. Faced with multinational callousness and duplicity, Ken Saro Wiwa was later to say there comes a time when a writer may have to lay down his pen and be more closely involved in the struggles of his people.
Ogoniland, forever cursed by the black gold in its bowels, was slowly but surely dying. There was a sense in which walking through Ogoniland was like walking over tracts of land devastated by scorched earth policies.
The soils were dying as were the rivers and streams, poisoned by the notoriously regular oil spills.
My argument here is that writers and artistes in general are profound thinkers rather than frivolous unengaged beings.
It is therefore self-destructive for any society to side-line any members of the creative industries.
Accordingly, because writers in Africa can be so easily forgotten and because if they should be so lucky as to have people point them out as writers, they can sometimes have moments of prominence. But all this can come to naught if the book is not rescued, if the book does not become a consumer article easily included in the consumer baskets of families.
Writers must become more visible and less retired, more outgoing and less of hermits; they must become more actively involved in the things that concern them, in production and editing as well as sales and marketing. Those of us who have gone the self-publishing route are quite familiar with that side of the book chain.
Writers need to take themselves more seriously in order to be taken more seriously by others, and in order to heighten interest in book-reading through being role models.
We must be successful and be seen to be successful. The late Stephen Alumenda found his niche in children’s books. His plots were deceptively simple, but endearing, the kind of material to attract the empathy of child readers around the characters he portrayed.
In the apparent simplicity of his stories lay their enduring beauty and appeal. No child would need a dictionary to Alumenda’s books. He was often to be seen at a table in the “Dutch Oven”, a Gweru restaurant, his truck parked outside. In the late eighties to early nineties, Alumenda was probably among the few black people in Gweru with a forex-based Visa card.
Alumenda’s books were read in Uganda and the Caribbean, where they were on the school curriculum. Zimbabwean children too enjoyed his books.
It wasn’t long before he left his job in the Ministry of Public Construction and National Housing in order to pursue his dream of being a full time writer.
I remember reading on the wall of probably his very first office where people took their stuff to be typed, a sentence in German which said matter-of-factly. “Literature ist mien leben” (Literature is my life). With time, Alumenda became a familiar figure around Gweru and his house in Gweru’s Lundi Park low-density suburb became a veritable meeting place for children.
In fact his house became an informal library. Children would gather around to hear him read his creations or to read for themselves.
This must have elevated the numbers in the sales of his books. Those who had previously looked at Alumenda as if he was some kind of trash now held him in awe. We need more Alumendas around the continent, and particularly in Zimbabwe in particular and Southern Africa in general. While Alumenda lived, he did not rest on his laurels, but became actively involved in advocacy issues.
In particular, he took a great interest in the lives and challenges of people living with albinism. The result of his interest was the book called “Anani the Albino Boy” published in 2002.
Earlier on and in a similar vein Alumenda had written “Kuda’s Rainbow Ball”, approved for Ugandan schools in 2001. Thereafter UNICEF used the book in campaigns against landmines in places of conflict.
In addition, “Stephanie’s Pumpkin” made it into Caribbean schools.
In the end, Alumenda became a real force to reckon with in all sorts of ways, and needed no charity.
This is what must happen to all writers while they live. But for that to happen, certain drastic changes must take place on the ground. That could start with a little respect by bureaucrats and others.
Let us take the example of the movie that was supposed to have told the story of Zimbabwe as a way of luring tourists into the country, heightening interest in us and generating foreign currency during the dismal days of Zimbabwe’s hyperinflationary era from roughly around 2005-2008.
Someone had come up with the theme, “The Zimbabwe I know” and at least three seasoned Zimbabwean writers were involved in the creation of what would most certainly have been an engaging movie with beautiful scenes shot on location.
The script had a gripping storyline, and wasn’t just propaganda. Mr Achebe would have approved of it.
It satisfied his criterion on all art being propaganda, and not all propaganda being art. But, as things went, the original script had a stillbirth – jettisoned by clueless bureaucrats in the tourism agency and a well-meaning, but ill-advised Nigerian businessman. When the “correct” movie was launched, it died a natural death. Nobody wanted to see it and nobody talks about it ever. And the writers who had done their all to produce a more than credible script came off worst from the encounter.
All their sweat and creativity had been for “mahala” – for nothing!
In this instalment, I spoke about reading culture as a product of a combination of eclectic forces whose driver and genesis is the writer.
My point is that while all stakeholders are important, everyone else is especially beholden to the writer.
Next week I go into the substance of the recent Pan-African Writers Conference in Accra and discuss its outcomes.
David Mungoshi is a writer and editor as well as a social commentator.
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