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Elliot Ziwira @ The Bookstore
SOUTH Africa’s anti-apartheid hero, Nelson Mandela, once said: “When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.” In the same vein Stephen King also writes: “Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them, they somehow fly out past you,” (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A story from different seasons).
Verily, it is said he that is chained cherishes the gift of freedom, but he who is free fantasises of the thrill of being fettered. The concept of freedom usually finds base in the hearts of those whose progenies lost arms and limbs in an attempt to wade away from the sinking ships of their dreams, yet remaining ensconced in the same aspirations that shape their destiny.
One may scream for all the other freedoms, real or imagined; but the ultimate freedom is that which gives one access to a humane existence; the freedom to claim ownership of the means of production and all that makes it possible to live without merely existing. It is the land that can only make all our dreams tenable, for it is the essence of life and prosperity, without which all our dreams are doomed.
“The land is sacred! These words are at the core of our being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take away our land and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies. We’d become just the sun-tanned white men, the jetsam and flotsam of your great melting point,” so reasons Mary Brave Bird; and Nilene Omodele Adeoti Foxworth concurs in “Bury me in Africa” (1978): “A People without land are like cattle on naked ground with nothing to graze. They just mope around hopelessly.”
Yes, gentle citizen, friend, countryman, freedom is not worth having if doesn’t translate to ownership of the land; and it is the issue of the land that was central to the protracted liberation struggle which gave us independence as a sovereign country; it is this same thorny issue that has led to the demonisation and vilification of one of Africa’s greatest sons, Robert Mugabe, whose aspirations are embedded in total independence of the people of colour.
Independence Day is upon us once again as we celebrate the coming of age, of an African ideology and sensibility; an ideology that is steeped in our nationhood, regardless of political or religious affiliation. Zimbabwe is our Motherland, notwithstanding our current domicile and challenges. “A man’s country is not a certain piece of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle,” (George William Curtis).
For the 35th time, our nation takes to the podium to caper to the African tune, imbibe from the African calabash to the dregs, and respond to the heartbeat of the Motherland’s dream, as we espy that glow in the Independence Flame; FREEDOM.
However, as we celebrate as a nation, we should take time to reflect on the fact that the freedom we enjoy did not come on a silver platter. There are sons and daughters of an impoverished peasantry who sacrificed limbs, eyes and mental well-being for this beauty of a country formerly known as Rhodesia.
Zimbabwean literature is a battlefield where individual biographies are pitted against the national discourse, especially when it comes to the liberation struggle and its aftermaths. A perusal through our literary cache will expose the different ways in which the revolutionary zeal and ideology is depicted.
Writers in Generation Two, as categorised by Viet –Wild (1993), like Alexander Kanengoni, Freedom Nyamubaya and Thomas Sukutai Bvuma , because of their experience in the liberation struggle demystify the notion of the guerilla fighter as an untouchable genius, who could disappear from the enemy’s canons and author his own epic.
Although the three artists exploit different genres, in their depiction of the war of liberation as dehumanising, disillusioning; psychologically and morally degrading, the way they vividly bring the horrendous nuances of the phenomenon to the fore, evokes sadness, ire and disgust.
Kanengoni in “Echoing Silences” (1988), like Nyamubaya in “That special Place” (2003), and Bvuma in “Every Stone That Turns” (1999), uses characters drawn from the war-time and post war-time zones. But unlike Bvuma, he employs the metaphor of madness and the symbol of ghosts to express his disgust at the phenomenon known as war. Using the protagonist, Munashe, who abandons his university studies for the higher calling, the writer depicts war as dehumanising and deplorable. In his eyes, war in any context; be it for liberation or otherwise, can never produce victors. Instead only victims are strewn in its wake for it “is the greatest scourge of mankind”.
Like others of his ilk, Munashe suffers psychological breakdown during and after the war. The traumatic experiences of the war burden his psyche, which disengages his mental frame.
“Echoing Silences” highlights the profound suffering that the guerillas face at the architect of both the enemy’s and their own ranks. The sense of hopelessness pervading the novel is explored through Munashe, Sly, Kudzai, Bazooka and the section commander who was once a teacher. All the other characters save for Munashe, could not survive the torture, hunger, killings and brutalities. Munashe survives probably because he “had died at Chimanda. What survived through the war was (his) ghost”.
Like all the others, he is a victim of circumstantial consequences as he finds himself embedded in a labyrinthine snare which he cannot undo. His only vent of escape becomes hallucination through drugs which reduces his life to a mere reverie.
Through-out the gory war, “the routine killings, the unabated savagery and the dying”, he had always yearned for an opportunity to tell the Section Commander how “disillusioned he had become”
Female combatants like Kudzai, as is also evident in Nyamubaya’s “That Special Place”, 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 who are supposed to protect them, decide to think in carnal terms; repeatedly raping them willy-nilly until what is left of them are fragmented souls and empty shells. Hopelessly reduced to a sex machine by the sex perverts in their midst, Kudzai laments: “Three abortions in one year. My life in the war. What sort of credentials are these? I don’t want to be considered anything. I am nobody. I am nothing . . . I no longer menstruate and I am not pregnant. Menopause at twenty”. Because of the travesty that has become her life, Kudzai yearns for death, and Munashe who is in love with her wilts inside, as brothers rise against each other in a rat race that seems to be fashioned in hell. Sadly or may be fortunately, she succumbs to the madness of it all; thus, to her death becomes the elixir from suffering.
Bazooka is followed by “phantom witches that possessed his mind”, which culminates in his demise as he vainly attempts to escape from them. His level of disorientation is only equal to Sly’s, who believes that he could slip into civilian life easily when he decides that he is “ tired of the endless killings . . . tired of everything”, and that he is “not a hero . . . (but) just a poor ordinary person who wants to live”.
This dark side of the war is also depicted in Bvuma’s “Every Stone That Turns”, especially in the poems “Survivors”, “Private Affair” and “Mafaiti-He loved to pluck a plump louse”. Whereas Kanengoni examines the brutalities of the war which manifests in psychological chaos and frustration, using the metaphor of madness and the motif of ghosts, Bvuma uses crude vulgarity and comic rhetoric to lay bare the dehumanising effect of war.
Bvuma, like Kanengoni, debunks the notion of war as a vehicle that hoists the honey bird to a rich bee-hive by exposing how it creates victims, not only in the combatants, but the families left behind.
Munashe’s family suffers when he brings the ghosts of war to their doorsteps and subsequently dies; and Mafaiti “fell somewhere at the front” leaving behind a young family that he so much adored.
Online Reporter