Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
In the manner of a surgeon, the artist cuts deep into the sinews of society to expose its ailments, particularly those malignant growths festering under the surface of communal life.
With scalpel-like precision, the artist dissects social injustice, avarice, corruption and alienation in a bid to cauterise wounds and prescribe remedies before gangrene sets in.
Armed with experience as a stethoscope, the pen as a surgical knife, and language as both anaesthetic and cure, the artist does not merely entertain; he heals, prophesies and diagnoses.
Some function as general practitioners, engaging broadly with socio-political and economic maladies – as seen in the work of Chirikure Chirikure – while others serve as specialists, targeting precise dysfunctions, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Frank Chipasula, or Freedom Nyamubaya.
Using surgical satire in the poems “Hakurarwi” and “Marangwanda” in the collection “Hakurarwi”, Chirikure takes on the role of a general practitioner of Zimbabwean society.
He probes issues of intolerance, selfishness and cultural erosion. He urges agency over complacency, contending that patience, though noble, can be weaponised to silence dissent.
Problems, he suggests, should be treated early; excised before they metastasise.
In “Marangwanda”, political bigotry is diagnosed as a terminal illness unless treated with traditional values, such as humility, community solidarity and mutual respect.
Chirikure’s poetic theatre becomes an operating room where societal tissue is opened up for scrutiny, decay is identified, and spiritual sutures are recommended to restore communal health.
To him, nation-building is not a one-man game, instead, it calls for unity of purpose to avert destruction, which can only lead to death as depicted through the metaphor of dry bones.
Thus, because of his experiences as one of humanity’s own, the poet is able to examine problems that beset society in its quest for prosperity.
When all is said, no contemporary artist embodies the surgeon’s dual role of diagnosis and resistance more vividly than Ngugi wa Thiong’o in “Devil on the Cross” (1980).
Written in exile and originally composed in his native Kikuyu, “Devil on the Cross” is a searing allegory of neo-colonial Kenya, where global capitalism and local corruption dine at the same table.
The novel’s central metaphor – the “Devil’s Feast” or “Competition in Theft and Robbery” – is a grotesque surgical table upon which societal moral degradation is laid bare.
Here, Ngugi strips the facade of post-colonial independence to expose the betrayal of liberation principles for personal gain.
His protagonist, Jacinta Wariinga, transitions from victimhood to consciousness, gradually recognising that freedom must be reclaimed, not gifted, through systemic reordering.
In the narrative, Wariinga’s personal body becomes a metaphor for the body politic. Exploited, violated, and humiliated, she eventually reclaims her agency.
In doing so, Ngugi performs cultural surgery. He expunges colonial languages, ideologies and aesthetics from his narrative body and stitches in indigenous knowledge, language, and struggle.
In Ngugi’s eyes, healing requires pain. It requires naming the disease, owning the wound, and sometimes amputating limbs to save the body.
Like Ngugi, Wole Soyinka tackles the question of African liberation with unflinching realism.
In “Steel Usurps the Forests; Silence Dethrones Dialogue”, which was inspired by Samora Machel’s declaration of war against white ruled Rhodesia, he invokes Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron and war, as both a liberating and destructive force. When dialogue fails and the imperialist refuses to yield, Soyinka argues, armed resistance becomes the only path.
Ogun, though embraced in Nigerian myth, is symbolic of the Pan-African experience or “cause”, which is the African dream. If dialogue can work in other instances, it will find it taxing in the African context, as the continent’s sons and daughters have been subjected to untold suffering and insults for centuries.
But unlike many revolutionary writers, Soyinka neither glorifies violence nor romanticises war. Instead, he acknowledges its psychological and spiritual cost. The same Ogun, who forges tools of liberation, also leaves trails of blood and silence in his wake.
Soyinka’s Robben Island poem, “No! He said”, further extends this metaphor.
Here, Nelson Mandela’s resolute “No” becomes the surgical incision that exposes the rot of apartheid. His silence, strength, and refusal to capitulate offer a model of psychological resistance as effective as physical revolt.
In Soyinka’s scalpel-sharp imagery, the artist not only documents trauma, but immunises the next generation against it. Using seemingly far-fetched images of nature, the poet implores the African to stay resolute and stand for his own, even in difficult situations.
On the challenges bedevilling the post-colonial nation-state in Africa, the exiled Malawian poet Frank Chipasula, discards veils of metaphor in favour of blunt force confrontation, unlike his peers Jack Mapanje and Steve Chimombo. His poems are not diagnostic whispers; they are surgical alarms.
In “Manifesto on Ars Poetica”, he dismantles the severe posturing of Kamuzu Banda, the late Malawi former president, revealing how the collective promise mutated into individualism. His poetic scalpel does not cut cleanly; it tears and rends, drawing blood.
In “Talking of Sharp Things”, his refusal to mythologise oppressive inclinations aligns him with Ngugi. Both artists believe that a deceitful surgery, performed with myth and euphemism, only spreads the disease.
Chipasula’s language is raw, the wounds he exposes are fresh, and his poetry insists that silence echoes in connivance.
In “A Mysterious Wedding”, Freedom Nyamubaya performs an autopsy on the African liberation project. The wedding between Independence and Freedom, symbolic lovers born of the liberation struggle, becomes a metaphor for a union betrayed owing to the forces of imperialism and neo-colonialism, which remain alive.
Independence, the bridegroom, shows up to the ceremony. Freedom, the bride, however, does not.
Metaphorically, the names Independence and Freedom, predominantly economic freedom, epitomise those values, which Africans hold dear, and feel are infringed on by neocolonial forces and their proxies. The marriage of these values suggests their significance to the welfare of Africans as they seek to shape their own destinies for the greater good.
The bride’s conspicuous absence, becomes a symbol of mistrust, betrayal, and snobbishness at both explicit and implicit levels. Through this haunting absence, Nyamubaya reveals the disenchantment that shadows many post-colonial nation-states.
The people, once celebrants, become grievers; confused, hopeful, yet gradually apprehensive.
Only an old woman, the keeper of ancestral wisdom, glimpses Freedom’s fleeting shadow slipping through the crowd. Her insight captures what many cannot see: that real freedom is not possible without control of the means of production, including land and capital. Without that, it becomes elusive, whispered only in shadows, betrayed in boardrooms, and abandoned at the gates of global power.
Yet Nyamubaya, like Ngugi and Chirikure insists that hope remains.
Therefore, the artist is not just a recorder of events or a passive commentator. He is a surgeon – meticulous, clinical, and impassioned. He cuts into the thick layers of history, religion, culture, and politics to expose buried truths. He sutures memory with struggle, prescribing collective healing through individual reckoning.
In times of political upheaval and social transformation, when nations face betrayal from within or domination from without, it is the artist who steps into the emergency theatre. With unflinching honesty and spiritual insight, he speaks truth to power, not merely for catharsis, but to cure.
Whether it is Chirikure decrying selfishness, Soyinka invoking Ogun, Chipasula breaking poetic silence, or Ngugi turning the novel into a surgical manifesto against neo-colonialism, the message remains the same – the scalpel of truth is mightier than the sword of subjugation.
In the end, the artist, like a surgeon, must hurt to heal, for that is precisely the point.
For an immersive reading experience, visit Typocrafters Book Shop at Herald House, corner George Silundika Avenue and Sam Nujoma Street in Harare. Contact: Leon on 0733100191.
