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Elliot Ziwira-At the Bookstore
As fighting rages in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion of the country, with at least 137 people, including civilians and soldiers reported dead by yesterday, and an estimated 100 000 having fled their homes, the ugly nature of war is once again put to the fore.
The gory scenes on television screens assaulting global audiences’ conscience are a reflection of humanity’s inclination to brutality. There is nothing glorious nor heroic about war; any kind of war and for whatever purposes.
War has never been known to produce winners — all are victims — losers.
Putting war into context, Thomas Sukutai Bvuma writes in his latest book, “The Chosen Generation” (2021): “This is war. Not a packet of fish and chips. Not watching soccer at a stadium. Not watching a movie at a theatre.
“It’s not a romance. War is violence. It is mass murder. War is savage, barbaric. There is nothing civilised about war. There are no ethics in war. Only maximum death and absolute destruction.”
The reminiscent, thought-provoking and enthralling book was launched on Thursday at the Museum of African Liberation, Liberation City in Warren Park, Harare.
Drawing from his experiences as a guerrilla in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle to poke at humanity’s worst foible, the desire to win through losing; euphemistically called war, Bvuma candidly exposes the hollowness of Man’s heart, his propensity for sadism and his obsession with deceit.
Departing from the limitations of a memoir, whose major weakness is self-justification, through Yababa, Bvuma goes beyond philosophising about the struggle, to capture the ideological, generational and personal conflicts leading to confrontations in the liberation movement, some of them bloody.
A reading of Bvuma’s historical novel is an engagement with the geo-political, socio-political and economic spaces in which the struggle for Zimbabwe’s independence are situated.
Individual and collective visions confront and elbow out each other as the Rhodesian killing machinery is sharpened, while ideological daggers are drawn in the movement.
Without inhibitions, Bvuma, like Alexander Kanengoni in “Echoing Silences” (1997), Freedom Nyamubaya in “That Special Place” (2003) and “On the Road Again” (1998), bares his soul, as he does in “Every stone that Turns” (1999), on his experiences in the struggle.
Bvuma adeptly captures the befuddling nature of war in his quest to expose the truth—the real truth, for the phenomenon cannot escape the artist’s censure, as he functions as “truth’s defence” (Pollard, 1970).
Using the autobiographical mode, like Kanengoni and Nyamubaya, he juxtaposes his biography with the national one and its ethos, particularly on the liberation war and its aftermaths.
The historical novel begins in medias res, as Nyika Yababa, a war veteran, watches a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, on television at his home in Chitungwiza. The targets of the attack, led by a young man, Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, include the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Oberoi Trident Hotel, Cama Hospital and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus.
The year is 2008, the country is in turmoil and the world is under siege from terrorist attacks. Yababa reflects on what distinguishes a terrorist from a freedom fighter.
Gruesome images on the screen are read in juxtaposition with the squalor and poverty surrounding Yababa, whose body is described as “old, arthritis-stricken, spent, worn out and rusty”.
Children are playing unperturbed in the sewage freely flowing in the streets of Zengeza, Chitungwiza, as the local council is “too corrupt and broke to provide services, abandoning ratepayers to wade and lament in their own piss and faeces.”
Through flashback, the reader soon learns that Yababa, born Masara Musamba of Sakubva African Township, Umtali in Rhodesia, belongs to the chosen generation that selflessly sacrificed for the liberation of black Zimbabweans from Ian Smith’s oppressive regime.
Masara, who is waiting to enrol at the University of Rhodesia, is temporarily working at a fruit canning company. He is beaten up by his white boss, John Bulloch for no apparent reason, and the young man retaliates by committing a cardinal sin in colonial Rhodesia—he clobbers him.
Realising the gravity of his transgression, Masara, who has had a romantic and glorious view of freedom fighters, crosses the border to Mozambique to join ZANLA guerrillas.
He leaves behind his beautiful girlfriend, Wadiwa, whom he has promised to marry.
Masara’s first contact with guerrillas was in Mutambara when he, along with his brother, Taurai visited their sick grandmother.
He finds himself at Chibawawa Refugee Camp in September 1976, where his bubble is blown by Comrade Killer Mabhunu, the security commander who interrogates him.
As the plot reels out, Masara, now Comrade Nyika Yababa, is shuffled from camp to camp, which somehow dampens his spirits and puts his patience to test. He soon comes face-to-face with the reality of war, the futility of life and the never-say-die spirit of expectation.
Without glossing over what guerrillas faced at the front and in the rear, Bvuma explores the debilitating nature of war.
Guerrillas, as human beings are neither infallible nor impregnable, nor was the struggle a stroll in the park, the writer insists.
In the novel, Bvuma revisits the macabre and gloomy atmosphere pervading his poetry collection, “Every Stone that Turns” (1999), especially in the poems “Private Affair”, “Mafaiti”, “Survivors”, “Petals of the Unknown” and “Peacetime Corpses”.
Yababa impregnates Cde Ndodini, whom he falls in love with, notwithstanding the starvation, betrayal, savagery, disease and death surrounding them. But was sex even possible in such conditions?
Although his manhood “had sunk and did not stir anymore”, after his single sexual encounter with Ndodini, Yababa insists, “It was clear, however, that sexual deprivation or dysfunction was not universal.
“It only happened to the miserable killer man. To those who lived a more relaxed life, sex was possible.”
Like Kanengoni in “Echoing Silences” and Nyamubaya in “That Special Place”, Bvuma highlights the sexual predatory inclinations prevalent in war, pertinently in the liberation war.
Female combatants like Ndodini and Tizai 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 think in carnal terms.
Bvuma also recreates the zenith of sacrifice, where the fish and the water suffered the same fate on November 23, 1977, when the settler regime led by the racial bigot, Ian Douglas Smith, attacked Chimoio Camp, the ZANLA military headquarters in Mozambique.
The air raid, which persisted for two days, sought to thwart the liberation movement’s claim, on behalf of Zimbabweans, to their heritage, the land, and correction of colonial imbalances in Rhodesia.
The massacre at Chimoio was devastating and caused the deaths of thousands, not only military personnel, but also women and children. Chindunduma, for example, was a school camp, and Mbuya Nehanda was a base for pregnant and lactating women and girls.
Of the heinous act, Bvuma reasons: “For Selous Scouts, it was sweet and proper. It was sweet to slaughter thousands of unarmed boys and girls. It was decorous to massacre black ‘terrorists’. But it was not sweet to be massacred and maimed by the thousand. There is no desecration in massacre and mass graves.”
The operation, whose intent was to demoralise the guerrillas, exploited the concentration of forces during the morning parade. As part of a deception plan to disperse the guerrillas assuming it to be a false air raid signal, a Douglas DC-8 airliner was flown over the Chimoio camps 10 minutes before the air-strike.
Consequently, when the participating aircraft approached the freedom fighters, their charges were caught unawares.
Bvuma laments that Rhodesian commandos transformed “Chimoio Camp into a theatre of the macabre”, leaving “thousands of grotesque corpses of babies, girls, boys and women,” strewn all over the bases making up the site, which were razed to the ground.
It is at Chimoio, where he was training to be a commando, that Yababa loses Ndodini and her baby, whom he later learns was fathered by Killer Mabhunu, the security commander at Chibawawa, and his 15-year-old younger brother, Comrade Watoto (Taurai), who followed him to Mozambique.
The scene between Yababa and the naked girl, Comrade Dadirai, whose belly is slit open, yet she holds on to him in their hideout, reminds one of Kudzai in “Echoing Silences”, who yearns for death as Munashe—who is in love with her—wilts inside.
Although Yababa helps Dadirai to limp to Chimoio Town and carries her on his back when she can no longer walk, he never sees her again. Such is the nature of war and the travesty of social justice.
He wonders why “people have such brief but intimate encounters, never to meet again? What was the purpose? The entertainment of the Creator shuffling minute pawns on a giant chessboard?”
He finally deployed to the front where he distinguished himself as an efficient killing machine and commander.
The historical fiction offers more than a window into the liberation struggle, but also offers vents for academic interrogation. It is a kind of mirror into both the rear and the front, inside and outside Rhodesia.
It adds to the pool of information on the fall of the Marxist/Leninist ideology favoured by the Vashandi group, the reasons behind the Nhari Rebellion of 1974, the ouster of Ndabaningi Sithole and the rise of Robert Mugabe, ZANU-ZAPU relations before and after ZIPA, and the attempted coup of 1978 led by former Vashandi commanders.
Interestingly, Bvuma, through Yababa, his wife Wadiwa and son, Masara Junior, leaves the reader to ponder on the essence of the chosen generation, not only in bringing freedom to the people of Zimbabwe, but in taking the nation to the Promised Land.
One is left wondering: Who really wins a war and at whose expense? If one really wins, then what may be the reason for truces and peace treaties? The general who triumphantly brings home a fraction of his soldiers, in what way is he better than the said loser who also sacrificed battalions?
Who really are the heroes, those who fell at the front or the survivors? Considering that they come home traumatised as they relive the vicious circle of war in their daily tribulations with life, as the ideologies they may have fought for become a ghastly travesty of the original, would ex-combatants consider themselves victors?
The reading of Thomas Sukutai Bvuma’s “The Lost Generation” (2021), may answer such questions and more; or it may create more questions as the reader’s experiences interact and merge with the author’s to create a national fabric of consciousness.
It may be the catharsis required for healing the wounds and soothe the deeper scars within.
The must-read book is an authentic recollection of liberation struggle memory, reflecting on the major characters around it, like Robert Mugabe, Josiah Tongogara, Herbert Chitepo, and Rex Nhongo, and the role the masses played in making Zimbabwe’s Independence in 1980 a reality.
Online Reporter