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Stanely Mushava Literature Today
WHEN the Ides of March robbed Zimbabwe of its most accomplished man of letters, Professor Stanelake Samkange, in 1988, former Chief Justice Enoch Dumbutshena’s graveside eulogy attacked the nation for ignoring its best writers.
Samkange was a first generation African novelist, public intellectual, journalist, nationalist, educationist, ethnographer, philosopher and historian. Ironically, the average Zimbabwean is preoccupied with stale jokes on the social networks to spare a thought for our literary legacy.
His prolific inventory, across varied genres, includes “On Trial for My Country” (1966), “Origins of Rhodesia” (1968), “The Mourned One” (1968), “African Saga” (1970), “Year of the Uprising” (1978), “Hunhuism or Ubuntuism” (1980), “Among Them Yankees” (1985) and “On Trial for That UDI” (1986).
“So far Samkange is the most prolific and versatile writer that Zimbabwe has produced,” veteran journalist and national hero Willie Dzawanda Musarurwa, wrote in an obituary for the Scribe’s Scroll column.
“His novels, most of them historical, reveal a Dickensian characterisation – highly personable and most eccentric characters. The plots and characters are ingeniously constructed, exposing an author with a fertile imagination,” Musarurwa said.
Dumbutshena was riled by the lukewarm appreciation by fellow authors and the public for Samkange’s work despite the renown it enjoyed abroad.
“It is the citizens of each country who pick up and expose the achievements of those achievers who have distinguished themselves. I sincerely believe that a nation that ignores the achievements of its people is a sick nation,” Dumbutshena charged.
That was 1988. Things have since changed, not for better but for worse! Not only are Samkange’s books largely ignored on the school curriculum, they are now out of circulation in Zimbabwe. Possibly the name Samkange only rings for the average youth bell with respect to the feminine third of the urban grooves outfit, 2BG.
The Greeks have preserved and recently digitised their Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The Romans have fortified their Virgil and Dante from the wear of centuries.
The English still have their Elizabethans, Jacobeans, Puritans, Augustans, Romantics, Victorians, Imagists and Modernists intact for ages to come.
Never mind all that, this is the 21st century digital revolt. Zimbabwe cannot account for works by its best writers from as recent as 1986 because it is hooked up on mundane sites and busy discussing the latest “celebrity” scandal.
Dumbutshena must be rolling in his grave on how low our society is sunk, buzzing over nuisance falsely called news with no one to man the fort and preserve our literary heritage.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o once said: “Literature is the honey of a nation’s soul preserved for her children to taste forever a little at a time.”
If Ngugi’s metaphor deserves the benefit of doubt, then Zimbabwe’s soul is a hollow hovel open for manipulation by offshore ideologies.
We are shunning the contributions of our best minds as archaic when those we are deigning to imitate assign the utmost worth to ideas.
Dumbutshena’s words, from 1988, are still a poignant wake-up call for us to introspect where we are headed as a nation. Key is a speed trap for our digital excitability.
Intellectual Thoroughbred
When most indigenous Zimbabweans either regarded education as the preserve of the white settler, were trained just enough to be profitable labourers, or confined to the base of the literacy pyramid by the colonial bottle-necking system, Samkange somehow fell for Alexander Pope’s homily on education.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing/Drink deep or taste not the Pierean spring/There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain/And drinking largely sobers again,” the famed couplets from Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” must have landed on a soft spot of Samkange’s heart because he was a slavish devotee of books for the greater part of his life.
By 1978, Samkange had taught African History at Harvard University and Fisk University, capping the feat with professorship in African History at Northeastern University in Boston.
Musarurwa was convinced that only a full biography could do justice to Samkange’s fascinating life and distinguished exploits. To date, no James Boswell is up for this tedious task.
“Countless words, both here and overseas, have been expended in appraising the life of the late Professor Stanlake James Thompson Samkange and the sum of his total contribution to the quality of the life and the literature of his people and his country.
“Even then only a small fraction of the action-packed life of this great son of Zimbabwe who died on March 6 has been touched,” Musarurwa wrote.
President Mugabe, said it was worrying that Samkange’s homage should be paid by foreigners not his own people whom he wrote for and about.
“In the sphere of our country’s history, Stanlake became a prodigious and dramatic writer, vividly portraying successive chapters of our history and the history of some of our tribes.
“We know that during his stay in the United States he made great contribution to the understanding of African history as he taught and lectured on this subject. His contribution to learning shall live forever after him,” President Mugabe said.
The Journey Retraced
Samkange was born in Chipata, Zvimba Tribal Trust Lands, in 1922, to a Methodist clergyman and nationalist Reverend Thompson Samkange and an evangelist Grace Mano.
The Samkange family lived in Bulawayo and moved to Mashonaland during Stanlake’s childhood. Along with his brother, Sketchley, he was educated at the missionary-run Waddilove Institution before moving to Adam’s College in South Africa.
In 1948, he became a native graduate after earning a BA (Honours) in History
“On his return, he took up a teaching post at Epworth Mission where he teamed up with Willie Dzawanda Musarurwa, another political giant from Zvimba, and became active in journalism and in politics. For many years, like his father, he was general secretary of the African National Congress,” Professor George Kahari told delegates at the occasion of Nyatsime College Golden Jubilee celebrations last year.
“In 1950 he successfully launched, as a self-help venture, a scheme for Africans to build and direct Nya-tsime College, which was to provide academic, technical and commercial education.
“The college was originally to be sited on a farm in the European area, belonging to Mr Thorncroft. This was unacceptable to the white regime but was finally approved to be where it is today, in the Seke Tribal Trust Land,” Kahari said.
Samkange dabbled in liberal politics during the 1950s and 1960s, and opted out on realising that the white minority was not up for majority rule in Rhodesia.
He moved to the United States where he read for a PhD from the Indiana University at Bloomington. He then worked as a journalist and set up his own public relations firm, aside teaching posts at Fisk, Harvard and Northeastern.
Controversy and Obscurity
Phillip Brooks once said biography is the meeting of three characters of whom the most interesting is the subject, the most privileged is the reader and the least regarded is the author.
One wonders whether this was not the case with Samkange, who after endowing the book sector with the most proficient contributions and helping thrust Zimbabwe on the academic map, withdrew into obscurity and oblivion.
Musaemura Zimunya mentions in “Those Years of Drought and Hunger” that the history of Zimbabwean literature is incomplete without the pioneer work on the historical novel.
Zimbabwe’s first historical novel “On Trial for My Country” appeared in the African Writers Series in 1965 and, according to the publisher, stood for a long time as the only Rhodesian contribution to the series.
“Origins of Rhodesia” won the 1970 Herskovits Award of the African-American Studies Association as the best book for the year.
Not much has been done to preserve this charted legacy, possibly because Zimbabwe’s reading culture is currently less pronounced than a toddler’s appetite for solids.
Samkange had a taste for nobility and was frequently profiled in the Press for his exploits in a predominantly settler’s world.
When he returned from England he bought a massive property called the King’s Castle and moved in with his newly married American beauty Tomy-Marie.
They were soon joined by two sons, Stanelake, currently the director of the World Food Programme and Harry, who inherited his father’s creative mantle and has a historical novel “The Chevalier d’Argentolle” (2012) to his credit.
Samkange also loved a good fight, wrote rambling debates in newspaper columns.
He was difficult to agree with and conscious of his accomplishments to a fault.
In 1983, he, rather smugly, turned down an invitation to the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. “I felt insulted. I didn’t think that with nine titles under my belt I should go to listen to some people who have not written a single book.”
When everyone was debating on whether Zimbabwe should have a one-party state or a multi-party-state during the late 80s, Samkange had other ideas. “How about having a no-party state?” he wrote in The Sunday Mail.
That was the nutty professor, Zimbabwean literature’s carbon copy of Dr Samuel Johnson, that English lexicographer who had no use for modesty.
Dumbutshena’s attack was particularly levelled against younger writers whom he accused of ostracising Samkange from his due share of eminence in the book sector.
Zimunya, then secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Writers Union, leapt to the defence: “If one wished to look for any sickness in our society at this juncture, I would hardly point at our younger writers.”
Taking the subsequent lapse of years into account, one is compelled to agree with Zimunya. The abscess is festering in older writers who are not anything to preserve the sluggish but sure exodus of key texts that helped define Zimbabwean literature.
Nationalism and Faith
Samkange is remarkable in that faith and nationalism are not incompatible in his work as in other African authors, notably Okot p Bitek, Taban lo Liyong and Ngugi wa Thiongo.
“For the Samkange clan, nationalist politics was an expression of Christian religious spirituality, and for Stanlake, writing fiction was a function of his religious and political beliefs,” says the Literary Encyclopaedia.
African authors have indiscriminately attacked Christianity as a residue of colonialism. Samkange acknowledges historical problems associated with the coming of the faith to Africa but is wary of throwing the babe away with the bath water.
Samkange incriminates the wayward missionaries, some of whom where embedded in the system, but acknowledges the authenticity of Christianity itself, which, after all, is not a European religion.
“They created the impression, in the African mind that the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man were only spiritual and unreal and preserved for the life after death,” Samkange’s protagonist in “The Mourned One” bemoans the conduct of the missionaries who professed fraternity on the pulpit but maintained disparity between races in daily social intercourse.
Samkange remained a devout Christian to the end of his life and, according to author Arthur Jim-Patsanza, never missed an opportunity to sing Charles Wesley’s “All for a Thousand Tongues to Sing the Redeemer’s Praise”.
Zimbabwean literature needs more men and women of accomplishment like Professor Samkange. Budding writers step up to be counted.
Online Reporter