Chronicle EditorBeaven Tapureta Bookshelf
New author Samuel KG Makawa’s Shona anthology “Mukufunga” (2017, Forteworx Press, Harare) is but too experimental a piece of art that it may disappoint readers craving for dramatic action generally characteristic of any fiction. However, this truth does not devalue the curious experimentation in the short stories. Edited by another young writer Tinashe Chimuriwo, the Shona seven stories subverts standard systems of fiction as they draw heavily on futurism and psychoanalysis. Here the author explores different thought processes of viewpoint characters caught in certain situations.
The drama, minimally offered, happens in the characters’ minds and/or is based on the workings of the characters’ psyches. Makawa is a theologian, currently studying Theology at a local university. And this collection is his first. How his studies have influenced his creative writing clearly shows in his deliberate playing around with moralistic subject-matter at too much expense of some of the major elements of fiction such as point of view, characters, plot, and setting. The first story, “Mukufunga”, is a statement about being bold in life, a motivational and not fictional piece. There is no drama in it from which to deduce on one’s own the strategies of boldness.
“Ndichazovei” comes second with some characters and events and an extension of the theme of ‘thinking’, in this case, about marriage. Psychological worlds are introduced, that is, Tafuratirwa’s thoughts as “the story”. Interesting how the story shifts point of view nearly five times! As the story begins, you have the colloquial third person narrator telling us about Tafuratirwa the main character. Some paragraphs afterwards Tafuratirwa himself carries the story forward, in first person narration. The dialogue with his friend Donie reveals the idea that “it is time for him to act and stop thinking only”. Later, the third person narrator comes back, occupies two paragraphs before Tafuratirwa appears again in first person. The story ends in third person narration as the mother appears in front of Tafuratirwa, awakening him from his dreamlike state. The next stories “Zvikopetsuro”, “Chazezesa Mutunhu Une Mago”, “Pasi Peshamhu” “Kupenga Hakuti Ndouya” and “Zuva Rekufa Kwangu”, have more interesting features which one way or the other maintain the “what-happens-in-the-mind” focus.
“Pasi Peshamhu” beat the others in its dramatic humor and theme. To save his Bongoza Ministries Church from apparently turning into Sodom and Gomorrah, a church leader Prophet Murape decides to shame the wolves in sheep’s skin in front of the congregation. The hook of the story is that it is told as a surprise, the Prophet acts out his secret plan while the culprits are obviously in their psychological comfort zones! The comic scenes as the Prophet calls them one by one are described in such a moving theatrical build-up until Paradise (the Prophet’s beloved congregant) chips in as first-person narrator to tell the reader how the Prophet is also using him to conceal his own imperfections. One of the short stories Samuel Makawa has used to show his deep interest in experimenting with the human mind is the futuristic “Zuva Rekufa Kwangu”. Again, one can tell that the effects of using various viewpoint shifts in a single story are being tested. Futurists normally believe that the meaning of life should be sought in the future. The future is then written as an idea somehow rooted in our beliefs, cultures, religions, philosophies, etc.
“Zuva Rekufa Kwangu”, starts as Rugare, a well-known village grave-digger, is craving for the knowledge about his “death-day”. Paragraphs later the story is carried forward by a third person narrator. Rugare is taking a nap under a tree after attending his best friend’s funeral. In his dreamlike state, his mind replays scenes at the funeral which exposed how much his late friend had left undone or unpaid in life. Rugare then tells the story before it shifts back to third person narration and it is from here that events in Rugare’s mind take over.
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