adminLovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
MOST critics often make the mistake of categorising Shona literature as some kind of genre. This has a tendency of placing Shona or Ndebele literature as an offshoot of what constitutes real literature.
Rather than calling it a genre, Shona or Ndebele literature is a canon, a whole broad terrain that encompasses various traditional literary forms that include the song, dance, folktale, proverbs, idioms, riddles, games, institutions and other forms of life.
This oral history is the very bedrock of Zimbabwean people’s lives, history and experiences which have now been captured as poetry, novels, short stories and plays.
The downgrading of Shona or Ndebele literature into an offshoot of “real” literature is not an accident.
According to Kutsirayi Timothy Gondo, a lecturer at Great Zimbabwe University, the reason for this downgrading lies in methodologies applied in the evaluation and analysis of Shona literature which are derived from Western and European ways of understanding literature.
In a paper titled Understanding African literature-Towards the restating and the re-ignition of African thinking in the criticism of Zimbabwean literature, presented at a recent literature symposium, Gondo argues that the use of Western and European methodologies has had the effect of creating a rather dislocated and inappropriate understanding of Shona or Ndebele literature in Zimbabwe.
“This has helped to shape the conception of literature using properties, values and experiences which delineate the very people it seeks to serve. It is a well known fact that traditional literary forms in Zimbabwe originate from the Zimbabwean people’s everyday practical engagement with nature.
“It is not merely art for art’s sake since the utilisation for art is part of the people’s everyday survival strategies,” says Gondo’s paper.
Gondo further states that the problem with the criticism of Shona or Ndebele literature is that for a long time, indigenous African systems, knowledge, skills, philosophy, psychology, history and social experiences have been based on other people’s views, values and historical experiences.
Quoting Chinweizu et al, Gondo posits that a lot of critics have questioned, under-stated, re-interpreted and even doubted many scholars of African literature who have unreservedly used Eurocentric views and methodologies on African and Zimbabwean literature, creating a mismatch between our general understanding of African artistic and literary creations and their aesthetic values.
Gondo believes that literary values that can be said to be suitable in evaluating African literature and African literary thinking should be based on our African culture in the form of language, material and spiritual resources, which are the bedrock of our understanding of African people and their lives and historical experiences.
Indeed, as illuminated by Gondo, there is need to re-connect, re-ignite and re-claim African aesthetic values in the criticism of African literature in Zimbabwe.
According to Gondo (2011), whenever people in Zimbabwe generally talk of “literature”, they are more likely to be referring to literature in English more than other forms of literature.
Sadly, revered African scholars like Professor George Kahari see English literature as the most legitimate form of literature in Zimbabwe.
African oral art forms of literature as well as the literature that is written in indigenous languages, is rarely seen as literature that is comparable to the literature that is written in English, even when the literary work has been written by the same writer.
“Thus, it seems that all literature in indigenous languages and oral artistic forms that mostly appear in indigenous languages, are generally viewed as inferior, unequal and un deserving of serious academic literary study and analysis, as one would find out about the literature in English.
This is because literature in Zimbabwe is mostly identified by the language medium in which it is produced.”
Online Reporter