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HAVING emerged on the Zimbabwean literary landscape after Independence in 1980, Tafataona Mahoso, Thomas Sukutai Bvuma and Freedom T Nyamubaya draw inspiration from the liberation struggle and its aftermaths, though they write from different perches.
Bvuma and Nyamubaya’s poetry is poignant in its depiction of the struggle in which they directly participated, making it an authentic historical recollection of the protracted war of liberation. Mahoso’s poetry, on the other hand, is a rhapsodic repertoire of stitched up episodes of dismay, disgust and ire mirrored through a philosopher observer’s hourglass, which is neither disguised, nor pretentious.
However, in the trio’s poetry collections, “Footprints About the Bantustan” (1989), “Every Stone That Turns” (1999), “On the Road Again” (1986), and “Dusk of Dawn” (1995), respectively, the thematic concerns the poets purvey converge in their reflection of black people’s toils, before, during and after the struggle for Independence.
Mahoso’s poetry in his anthology “Footprints About the Bantustan”, candidly speaks truth to power, as he lambasts the Westerner’s view of Africa as a dark continent requiring the benevolence of the erstwhile coloniser for it to be illuminated.
As Chirere (2004) puts it, Mahoso “has dedicated his life to pursuing the project of demystifying myths, especially Western myths on Africa and Africans”.
Indeed, the poet seems to be talking to the likes of Emmanuel Macron, the French president, who, in his warped wisdom or lack thereof, thinks that Africa’s problems are “civilisational”.
This damned civilisation, as Chenjerai Hove puts it, is responsible for the creation of “philosopher killers” in “Keeping the Faith of Philosopher Killers” (1982), who hypocritically use religion and capitalistic tenets of colonialism, disguised as civilisation, to plunder Africa’s resources, milk the African’s sweat dry, “choke” him “to death”, and leave him to the vultures.
This is all driven by the westerner’s dollarised motto: “In God we Trust”.
In “Zimbabwe”, Mahoso explores the cultural, social and political logjam that comes as a result of colonial prevarication of the African as a quintessence of evil, as Franz Fanon reasons in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1967).
In the poem “To the Guardian Angel of Consciousness”, the poet highlights the “rusty cage” the Rhodesian youth finds himself in, as education and religion; elements of subjugation, are used to hoodwink and stupefy him.
Mahoso laments:
Dear Guardian Angel of Truth,
did you ever spend the prime of your youth
in a rusty cage of “the Free World” called Rhodesia?
When I asked my teacher
for facts about the situation
I had to face, she sent me a preacher
who gave me tracts galore and promised to order more from World Vision.
The preacher, therefore, becomes an embodiment of the colonial apparatus of oppression that calls on the oppressed to suffer painlessly, imploring them to be satisfied with their lot, instead of questioning the status quo brought about by “a dying imitation of ‘civilisation’ called Rhodesia”.
Undeniably, “the Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master of the oppressor” (Fanon, 1967). The native, on the other hand, must be content, because his suffering is made less painful through what Malcolm X calls “Novocaine” (a painkiller used by dentists) in reference to religion.
Nyamubaya also takes a swipe at this bastardised religion in “The Church” (“On the Road Again”) and “Confusion” (“Dusk of Dawn”).
Mahoso’s poetry transcends geographical landscapes and narrow ideological dogmas as he perches on the summit of the world’s powerbrokers’ abodes, calling upon them to take responsibility for the emasculation of blacks.
To the poet, the Bantustan has come a long way in his search for soulful hope, as is symbolised by the footprints on the cover of “Footprints About the Bantustan”, which, when read closely, reflects the map of Africa (Chirere, 2004).
The struggle that Zimbabwe has won, the poet affirms, remains meaningless if its neighbours are not free politically, and the Motherland is still hooked up to the empire’s swaddle, through nefarious means as well as feel-good rhetoric of oppression.
In the title poem “Footprints About the Bantustan”, Mahoso, like Bvuma in “The Real Poetry”, and Nyamubaya in “Poetry” (“On the Road Again”), and “Real Story” in “Dusk of Dawn”, is contemptuous of the trivialisation of the African’s story to mere nomenclature and stereotypical formalism.
Knowledge of both the subject matter and the audience’s standpoint is the competent poet’s forte. And, it is this that shapes the aspirations of the downtrodden, the marginalised and vulnerable. It is this ability of discernment that Mahoso, Bvuma and Nyamubaya have in abundance.
The title of poem “Footprints About the Bantustans” retraces the travails of the Bantustans, who are displaced, dislocated and relegated to the periphery of existence in the Motherland. Using historical snippets, Mahoso takes his audience on a whirlwind voyage of intrigue into the world of yore, where footprints of toil remain visible after the events of “the Great Apportionment of Nineteen Thirteen and Nineteen Thirty”. The metaphors of “dust”, “hunger” and “rage” converge in a “drizzle” called “Zimbabwe, Nineteen Sixty-Nine at Muroti”, where “nothing grows but dreams and memory”.
The poverty, anguish, and hopelessness that pervade the poem “Footprints About the Bantustan”, through adept use of symbolical elements and metaphors in their glaringly heart-rending manner, leave the reader looking in askance at the idea of reconciliation without reciprocity.
Displaced and elbowed out of the fertile lands of his ancestors, the Bantustan finds solace in the metaphysical, through nomenclature and spirituality.
Mahoso seems to be echoing Nyamubaya’s probing in “Poetry”, and calling out to Bvuma and Dambudzo Marechera in the poems “The Real Poetry” and “In Jail the Only Telephone is the Washbasin Hole: Blow and we Will Hear”, respectively.
Nyamubaya wonders:
One person said,
you are not a poet, but forget that,
poetry is an art and –
Art is meaningful rhythm . . .
Now what is rhythm
If I may ask?
Some say its marching syllables
Others say its marching sounds,
But tell me how you marry the two?
Bvuma answers:
The real poetry
Was carved across centuries
Of chains and whips
It was written in the red streams
Resisting the violence of ‘Effective Occupation’. . . Its beat was bones in Bissau
Its metaphors massacres in Mozambique
Its alliteration agony in Angola
Its form and zenith/
Fighting in Zimbabwe (“The Real Poetry” in “Every Stone That Turns”).
It is “the pain and pleasure/Of a people in struggle”. Hence, to reduce that to contrived formalism, as Formalists like Fish, Robert Frost (1930) and Jacobson (1916) advocate, is rather atrocious. The history of displacement cannot be articulated through “classroom lectures”, or “from the rhyme & reason of England/Nor the Israeli chant that stutters bullets against Palestinians” (Marechera).
The people’s poet, therefore, should write “about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out” (Cesaire, 1994:21).
Bvuma and Nyamubaya share a camaraderie that goes back to the trenches of the liberation struggle, which makes a reading of their poetry a reliving of the dying, the disillusionment, and brutality of the phenomenon of war; and its dehumanising and loser-take-all nature.
Unlike Mahoso, they go beyond philosophising to capture the gory violence of the liberation struggle as a lived experience. The macabre and gloomy atmosphere in Bvuma’s “Every Stone that Turns” (1999), especially in the poems “Private Affair”, “Mafaiti”, “Survivors”, “Petals of the Unknown” and “Peacetime Corpses”, is reflected in Nyamubaya’s “The Dog and the Hunter”, “Tribal Wars”, “Combatant”, “Journey and Half” “A Mysterious Marriage” and “Archives”.
Bvuma’s “Private Affair” mirrors Nyamubaya’s “Journey and Half” (“Dusk of Dawn”) in that they both question the reasons for war in the first place if it creates only victims and no victors.
Nyamubaya asks: “Have you ever been asked to strip/In front of a thousand shouting eyes/Forced to lie on your back/With your feet astride/Allowing your v****a to be inspected/By somebody whom you have never seen before?”
Picking the profound hollowness in it all, the war-torn personae in Bvuma’s “Private Affair” echo: “We squatted there at dusk/a metre apart among the bushes/emptying our bowels of the precious/food savoured the previous night”.
The level of disorientation during the war deplored by Bvuma and Nyamubaya reaches a crescendo when the combatants fail to decipher their dreams from reality.
In Alexander Kanengoni’s “Echoing Silences” (1997), Munashe moves about in the rain “opening his palms to try to hold the downpour, behaving as if he were insane”; and Bvuma’s Mafaiti “loved to pick lice from a comrade’s hair”.
This presentation of seemingly trivial actions, explores the psychological effects of the war at the deeper sense of the bizarre. It is this that the trio frowns at.
Sadly, after the war there seems to be “no sod of soil” for them. The “Survivors” in Bvuma’s poetry ask if, indeed, they are heroes for outsmarting enemy shells, or the real heroes are those left behind on the battlefield.
“Peacetime Corpses”, “We Surrendered our Balls” (Bvuma), “Combatant”, and “A Mysterious Marriage” (Nyamubaya) explore the nature of freedom and independence in the face of neocolonialism.
In response to the stifled call of hope, therefore, Mahoso, Bvuma and Nyamubaya use their articulate poetic voices to trudge on “The Road Again” in their quest to retrace the “Footprints About the Bantustan” under “Every Stone that Turns” in the “Dusk of Dawn” permeating the African’s jungle of toil, as the erstwhile coloniser reincarnate in new demigods, taking civilisation a notch higher, and giving novel meaning to the African’s existence.
Online Reporter