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Memory Chirere Correspondent
Thomas Sukutai Bvuma’s “The Chosen Generation” (2021), is a historical novel about young Masara Musamba of Sakubva, Umtali, Rhodesia, who is involved in the war of liberation that gave birth to Zimbabwe, as a ZANLA fighter.
This is his story told under his war name; Nyika Yababa, or simply Yababa.
Masara joins the war after beating up his white boss, who had beaten him for a flimsy reason at a fruit canning factory where the boy was working temporarily, while waiting to enrol at the prestigious University of Rhodesia.
It was a serious crime in Rhodesia for a black man to beat up a white man, for whatever reason. You would rather run before the police caught you.
So, Masara abandons his job, pay and beautiful girlfriend, Wadiwa, and rashly clambers up the mountains on the western side of Umtali.
He crosses the border to join guerrillas in Mozambique by first getting to Chibawawa Refugee Camp in September 1976.
Masara had met ZANLA guerrillas before in his own Mutambara communal lands, and had always had a romantic view of the war of liberation and the freedom fighters.
He had always hoped to join the liberators one day.
This historical novel is renowned Zimbabwean poet Thomas Bvuma’s first long prose offering.
But who is Thomas Sukutai Bvuma in Zimbabwean literature?
Initially, using the pen-name Carlos Chombo, Thomas Bvuma wrote the well-known poem, “Real Poetry” at the height of the war in the late 1970s.
“Real Poetry”, eventually got more “visible” publication in the Zimunya-Kadhani edited post-war collection “And Now the Poets Speak” (1981).
Musaemura Zimunya and Mudereri Kadhani set out to bring together poems which reflected on the Zimbabwe revolution then.
Bvuma’s “Real Poetry” defines struggle as people’s real poetry.
Very reminiscent in content and form to Jorge Rebelo’s poem “Poem,” “Real Poetry” quickly became a classic of sorts.
Zimunya and Kadhani could not “resist using (the poem) as a choric prelude to this selection.”
They wrote somewhere that they also “found (in this poem) the power of the intellect, control of rhythm, and style well combined and married to idea, action and reaction”, and that through it, “one recalls the more prominent Angolan war poet, Agostinho Neto himself.”
Zimunya and Kadhani used a section of the poem on the blurb of the cream coloured “And Now the Poets Speak” as the theme poem.
The poem went viral.
Bvuma, like Alexander Kanengoni and Freedom Nyamubaya, wrote poems at the war front in between battles, either as a pastime, or a means to reflect on the war he was participating in.
He is still writing and publishing poetry long after the war of liberation, and some of his key pieces constantly jog one’s mind.
More of Bvuma’s poems were later published in “Every Stone That Turns (1999)”, almost two decades later! They are arranged in a way that sets out to capture the changing times from war to independence.
But his latest work, “The Chosen Generation”, appears to give the more elaborate materials that inform the turmoil and thought that one finds in the poem “Real Poem”, and the collection of poems, “Every Stone that Turns.”
This novel fits in and tucks in real critical geographical and historical factors that have been glossed over by many writers of Zimbabwean war fiction and even those in war history.
Through this novel, places critical for training and refugees like Chimoio, including its attack by Rhodesians on November 23, 1977 are mentioned.
Chibawawa, Tembwe and others are brought to life from the point of view of a recruit and soon-to-be-a-trained cadre.
There are no sacred cows in this narrative.
As you read this novel, you are forced to compare and contrast it with such iconic works as Chinodya’s “Harvest of Thorns”, Kanengoni’s “Echoing Silences”, Mazorodze’s “Silent Journeys From the East”, Mutambara’s “The Rebel in Me” and Miles Tendi’s “The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe: Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker”.
The story is written from a rather laid back point of view of an ex-combatant now sitting in his house in post-war Chitungwiza during the economically tumultuous 2008.
He is searching for his place in all the tricky things that have happened, and sometimes he thinks that his generation is not chosen, but cursed.
But he insists that he wants to judge them fairly.
The narrative moves gradually, with ease, finding facts and fallacies, even fitting the 1970s within the context of the world’s rebellious youths of the hippies, rock music and many other things.
The story takes you to places and decisions made outside Rhodesia and the war front. The war in Rhodesia is part of world events, and that is the strongest theory propounded by this book.
From chapters 10 to 13, which are critical, the writer recreates Chimoio as it was in the context of the war against Ian Smith.
He goes for geographic space within historic and social context. You begin to read into the détente period, ZANLA conscription methods as from 1976; the rise and fall of the Vashandi ideology, love affairs, betrayals, ZIPA, ZANLA-ZIPRA relations, the battle of Mavhonde.
The book also reflects on Josiah Magama Tongogara, Herbert Chitepo, Robert Mugabe, Rex Nhongo and the attacks and counter attacks between and among people and systems.
This book is a must read for all people with a genuine interest in the emerging perspectives on Zimbabwe’s liberation war, and how much it is a prelude to what took place in Zimbabwe soon after.
Online Reporter