Heroes, heroines in Zim fiction

Tanaka Chidora Literature Today
Seven years ago, I was invited to give a presentation on the topic of heroes and heroines in Zimbabwean fiction at what was then a literary rendezvous for artists – singers, poets and novelists.

The topic was closely circumscribed to make me speak aboutparticular heroes and heroines. Below is a summary of what I was supposed to present on.

“Whether contemporary or historical, a lot of world literature is constructed around mythical heroes. The revolutionary heroes in the heyday of Soviet literature (“How the Steel was Tempered” by Nicolai Ostrovsky) right through to all sorts of detective characters, a Sherlock Holmes in England (still popular over a century later) or Henry Mankell’s contemporary Swedish detective series (a dark and tortured anti-hero, but a hero all the same). In Kenya we have “Matigari” by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In Angola, Pepetela’s “Mayombe” is about honesty as a value. In American Literature one might think of the extraordinary character of Huckleberry Finn. One thing links all the heroes and heroines – they represent the revered values in any particular society. Do we have our mythical heroes and heroines, guardians of our values?”

From that guiding summary, it became obvious to me that the kind of heroes and heroines the conveners of the discussion wanted to focus on were larger-than-life. In order to save my own skin and give my audience something to tear at, I came up with a separate taxonomy from what the audience expected. While squeezing my way through a shelf of books on the day of the presentation (I had no yet jotted down even a single word) I said to myself, “Stop! This is not a test. It is a literary discussion. In a literary discussion, you do not say the obvious. You give the audience something to tear except your skin.”So I assumed a position which I outline briefly below.

I said to myself, I must not give a lecture to where I preach to the converted. I must not look for a “correct ideology” because the correct ideology game ends before it begins because there is no such thing. Whatever concept of hero or heroine has been put forward has some falsity in it because it is just a theory, highly falsifiable by empiricism. I could even start by telling my audience what limitations I already perceive in the already prescribed notions and why I would not call such and such a character a hero in my own right beginning with those I already worship such as Pepetela. I must avoid dogma. Learning to question as pedagogy of liberation has always been at the heart of Paulo Freire’s teachings. I must not oppress myself before my audience does.

I have a very good friend of mine, Enock Machanja, who complained to me during our heated debates, made even more heated by the usual scalding tea. He thought that African literature, or rather Zimbabwean literature, must have its own unique heroes and heroines instead of the usual helpless victims of colonialism and its effects. He said to me (and I vehemently disagreed), “Tanaka, don’t we have our own values as a society which we need to show in a fictitious manner through a hero who can represent our consciousness? We have been crying about colonialism for a long time. Why don’t we come back to ourselves and talk about our world through our own heroes and heroines just as the Americans do with their cowboy stories?” I then realised that his understanding of what a hero/heroine is and what a hero/heroine does was based on a framework totally different from the one I had intended to use in the discussion.

He saw heroes as people who do something. For him, many of the characters we have hitherto used in Zimbabwean fiction are people who do not represent any values but are just victims of a condition which they do not like. For instance, following the American example of the cowboy, Lucifer (in Charles Mungoshi’s “Waiting for the Rain”) was supposed to get a gun and shoot the bloody whites to hell and set his country free.

So given the fact that Lucifer does not do anything, does he cease to be a hero? If characters represent the things we hate about ourselves, do they cease being heroes and heroines? If characters are used by a writer to show us the dearth of our own revered values, should we criticise that character and his/her author for failing to write something positive about ourselves? So instead of focusing on the heroes who did something, the kinds you find, for instance in Samupindi’s “Death Throes”, I chose, instead, to focus on those who, in the context of the topic that was created for me, were non-heroes. I decided to talk about Sam in Nyamufukudza’s“The Non-Believer’s Journey”. In fact, I lined him up together with theMarecherean Inhabitant of “The House of Hunger”, Lucifer in “Waiting for the Rain”, Mazvita in Vera’s “Without a Name,” Martha Mupengo in Gappah’s “An Elegy for Easterly”, Chirere’s Keresenzia in “Somewhere in this Country”, the highway queen in Virginia Phiri’s gripping narrative, Chipo in Bulawayo’s “We Need New Names”, Danny in Musiyiwa’s “Danfo Driver” and a lot of other loafers and villains that do not cut the grade in the correct ideology game.

If you ask me why I chose the heroes/heroines who feature in the inventory I have given above, my answer will be a very simple one. The concept of hero/heroine is a game of definitions. The question is whose hero and why? This is a game of definitions and competing gazes. My gaze is on these ‘unexemplary’ characters whose contribution to the shaping of ‘revered values’ is peripheral or non-existent because what you see is what you get. In a way, they bluntly show us who we really are, or who we have become. They jolt us out of soporific hypocrisy in order to show us what’s really wrong with us. Sometimes we need non-heroes to show us the way. Like what Macheso said, ‘Vamwe vakaudzwa hondo nemurwere wepfungwa vakamushora hanzi anorwara.”