Online Reporter
Memory Chirere
Correspondent
The death of poet and diplomat, Thomas Sukutai Bvuma earlier this week is an unimaginable loss for Zimbabwean literature.
Having read his iconic poem titled “Real Poetry” in the early 1980s, I always thought he was a brisk guerrilla. I never thought I would meet him.
But one day in 2004, just before he was posted to Brazil, he walked into our office at the University of Zimbabwe.
He said he wanted to see somebody else in the building, and remembered I had reviewed his poems in “Every Stone that Turns”; and that I was in the vicinity.
He was a soft-spoken man, and I struggled to pair him up with his pulsating poem, “Real Poetry”. I felt cheated. Meeting an artist can be an anti-climax.
Bvuma sagged in one of the easy chairs and kept quiet for a while. I felt: here was a man who had travelled distances and probed life’s depths. He eased up the tension between us by talking about his time in Oslo with Webster Muwonwa and Ignatius Mabasa, friends to both of us.
Using the pen-name Carlos Chombo, Thomas Bvuma wrote the poem “Real Poetry” at the height of the war in the late 1970s. It eventually got a more “visible” publication in the Zimunya-Kadhani edited collection, “And Now the Poets Speak” (1981).
Musaemura Zimunya and Mudereri Kadhani had 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,” “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 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 also used a section of the poem on the blurb of the cream coloured “And Now the Poets Speak.
“Real Poetry” reads:
The Real Poetry
Was carved by centuries
Of Chains and whips.
It was written in the red streams
Resisting the violence of
“Effective Occupation.”
It was engraved in killings in Katanga,
In the betrayals of Mau-Mau,
In the countless anti-people coups
Its beat was the bones in Bissau
Its metaphors massacres in Mozambique
Its alliterations agony in Angola
Its form and zenith
Fighting in Zimbabwe.
The Real Poetry
Is sweat scouring
The baked valley of the peasant’s back
Down to the starved gorge of his buttocks
It bubbles and boils
In the blisters of the farm labourer
It glides in the greased hands
Of the factory worker
Not a private paradise
Nor an individual inferno
But the pain and pleasure
Of People in Struggle.
Viva O Povo!
This is a fighting poem. It insists, through both content and form, that good poetry should be revolutionary and popular. Poetry must spring from life’s struggles and not from back-sitting imagination and fantasies.
Life is a struggle and as you fight upwards, you come across your reality, which needs working on, and that is your indisputable poem!
Walking with Bvuma towards Churchill Road, the other side of UZ, in order to catch a lift to the city centre, I enquired what he was doing and he said he was soon going to Brazil as Zimbabwe’s Ambassador!
I was stunned and we walked and talked about books and got a lift into town. His humility gave me an out of body experience. He walked away into the city crowd, ambling like a nonentity.
More of Thomas Bvuma’s poems were later published in “Every Stone That Turns” (1999). They are arranged in a way that sets out to capture the changing times from the liberation war to Independence.
Of course you still find the emotion of the founding poem, “Real Poetry.” Brought together under one cover, these are Bvuma’s poems of his life. They have benefited from writing and rewriting and one cannot easily single out the core poems of this collection, which were written between 1979 and 1981.
The first section “The Snake Never Stirs” explains what it meant to be in the war of liberation. The guerilla war had both its serious and light sides, which, however, dovetail.
In the poem “Private Affair” the shell-shocked guerillas huddle together to relieve themselves, finding comfort in a performance that is supposed to be private.
The persona recalls:
Tafirenyika
Remember the moment of mirth
We snatched and shared in gloom
We squatted there at dusk
A metre among the bushes
Emptying our bowels…
Bvuma’s writings would dwell on the light side of the serious, making you want to laugh and cry at the same time.
As “Private Affair” ends, the persona expresses a wish: “the revolution would not socialise shitting.” That is a wholly well-packed idiom.
The hope is that independence would give citizens the decency and freedom to pursue individual ambitions. Self-rule wouldn’t end up with people collectively making their social environment foul and uninhabitable.
Bvuma worked with a genre of nationalist poetry, rigorous, questioning and always confirming the basic truth that humanity is always in motion. And there is no tradition that should imagine itself as “the end of history.”
More exciting is his ability to see the challenge to open up the economy to the formally marginalised as a stage in the war of liberation, sweet but full of contradictions as well.
As the title “Every Stone That Turns” suggests, every nation has its own challenges, because under every stone that one may overturn, there are new and different scorpions to be dealt with.
Years later, in 2021, Bvuma came back to the UZ; this time to ask me to help him arrange the launch of his novel, “The Chosen Generation”. My colleague Aaron Mupondi, who has taught Bvuma’s poems, recited whole chunks from his poetic oeuvre and Bvuma was startled.
He appeared dazed that he was being studied and that his lines could have made such a lasting impression. He brought out a handkerchief because he was now sweating! The two men made an appointment, which would bring Bvuma to Mupondi’s literature class.
In “The Chosen Generation”, a historical novel, young Masara Musamba of Sakubva, Umtali, Rhodesia, joins 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 at a fruit canning factory where the boy is working temporarily while waiting to enrol at the prestigious University of Rhodesia.
It is 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 catch you. So, Masara abandons his job, his pay and his very beautiful girlfriend, Wadiwa, and rashly clambers up the mountains on the western side of Umtali, crossing the border to join the guerrillas in Mozambique by first getting to Chibawawa refugee camp in September 1976.
This novel is Bvuma’s one and only first long prose offering.
“The Chosen Generation”, appears to give the more elaborate materials that inform the turmoil and thought that one finds in “Real Poetry” 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, 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 Shimmer Chinodya’s “Harvest of Thorns”, Alexander Kanengoni’s “Echoing Silences”, Isheunesu Valentine Mazorodze’s “Silent Journey from the East”, Agrippah 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 township of 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 warfront. The war in Rhodesia is part of world events. That is the strongest theory propounded by this book.
In 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, 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 difficult war of Independence and how much it is a prelude to what took place within Zimbabwe soon after.
Thomas Sukutai Bvuma was a reserved man, who tended to open up like a beautiful flower and laughed easily too, when he was sure that you understood him. His poems are tough like a vice grip and you felt that there were two men in Bvuma—the social man and the tough man-of letters.
May his spirit continue to inspire us!
• For an immersive reading experience, visit the Typocrafters (DigiHub) retail shop at Herald House, corner George Silundika Avenue and Sam Nujoma Street in Harare
