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tales featuring other folk heroes besides Tsuro and Gudo. As a storyteller, I was and I am still fond of Gudo, who is usually a fall guy and therefore not a hero in the true sense of the word. Gudo is very clumsy, gullible and does many stupid things but still remains Tsuro’s bosom buddy. The Shona value relationships very much and this is seen when Gudo was Tsuro’s uncle.
Our other folk heroes besides Tsuro and Gudo are characters like Kamba, Shumba, Pimbirimano, Chinotomba, Simbimbino, Mutongi Gava and many others. However, the majority of our folktales revolve around hunger, food shortages and the politics of the stomach. In most of the folk tales, food is often scarce and also a source of conflict.
The politics of food and the stomach tend to make our stories uninspiring and our folk heroes less colourful compared to Western folk heroes like The Gingerbread Man, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Snow White and others. But the politics of the stomach is historical though. There were leaders in Southern Africa like Shaka Zulu, Mzilikazika Matshobana and Lobengula who consolidated their power through a series of wars against neighbouring peoples. Their armies raided for cattle, grain and food and many people were victims of these raids.
These raids besides destabilising family lives, created very serious food shortages. On top of the raids, there was also the war between the people and animals, with animals eating the crops in the fields. Then, a worse thing happened. The British invaded our country in 1890, and the locals resisted the invasion, resulting in a series of wars.
The British eventually won the war because they were using guns while the locals were using spears. The aftermath of the British conquest was that cattle were seized from the locals and their land taken. The locals were prevented from tilling and sowing what was left of their land because they were subjected to tax collection (which meant they had to get formal jobs in order to get money to pay the tax with) and forced labour on white owned farms.
With such a background, three issues become a common theme in our stories – food, oppression and justice! Because the Africans felt so powerless having lost their land, having lost the war and now being forced to work for the whites when they had their own needs the storytellers became storytellers in politics and the people loved these stories because they became a way of escaping the oppression and racial segregation.
They became a way of laughing and getting back at the colonial master. They became subversive and offered audiences a sense of hope.
As a result of this history where blacks had been dispossessed of their land and other freedoms and forced to live in overcrowded areas with lots of restrictions, food insecurity became chronic. And chronic hunger is not to be classified as famine, but is similar to undernourishment and is related to poverty. This makes a lot of our stories take place in an environment of food shortages and poverty.
A good number of our stories start or open with these famous lines: “Once upon a time, there was a terrible drought in the land and there was no food . . .
“Once upon a time, it was a year of hunger . . .
“It was a year of great hunger . . .
Ignatius Mabasa is a writer, storyteller and a Friend of the Gallery and has conducted several storytelling workshops at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
Online Reporter