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Elliot Ziwira-At the Bookstore
Sometimes madness can be so exciting, boisterous and inspiring that one would consider sanity as irrational.
When sanity becomes objectionable and pivoted on detached ideologies, then it becomes not only irksome, but mischievously misleading.
There simply is no rationality without freedom, and no freedom endures where no empowered choice exists.
That is the feeling that one gets when one immerses oneself in Mashingaidze Gomo’s “A Fine Madness”.
Suspending inhibitions and fear, Gomo lambasts the West’s hypocrisy and niche to plunder, which has impoverished Africa in more than one way.
The book is a confrontational reproof of the products of imperialism and slavery; and a remonstration on the African to tell his story in his own way. Thus, the book befits Frantz Fanon’s rationale of a literature of combat highlighted in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1967).
The way Gomo captures the African’s aspirations and predicament through a combination of conventions drawn from both prose and verse, is both intriguing and refreshing.
The author is all too aware of the limiting nature of prescribed democracy. He explores the destructive capacity of war and its incapacity to change mindsets using natural symbolic elements as well as images drawn from battle zones created by the West’s instinct to plunder under the guise of democracy.
This fracturing of sense boundaries authenticates the African’s story of toil, and gives the reader an insider’s perspective into the experiences of a soldier during Operation Legitimacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
In the war, combined African forces from DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa and Namibia were pitted against Western sponsored insurgents from DRC, Rwanda and Uganda.
Like Shimmer Chinodya, Gomo uses the autobiographical mode to reflect on his own biography as a soldier who finds himself on the battlefield in a war ravished territory, whose crime is merely being rich, beautiful and African.
In the war, everyone is reduced to a victim. Women and children are the most hit, as they are reduced to scavenging vagabonds, scrounging for non-existent crumps in a war-torn country whose mineral wealth is legendary.
Women are left to fend for their families as men are drawn into belligerence, either as legitimate soldiers or as soldiers of fortune.
Torn between his wife Tinyarei and his patriotism, the narrator, Muchineripi alias Changamire, combines powerful images of nature and the war zone, and a sustained extended metaphor of madness.
The combination of both imagery and metaphor revolves around the symbolic beauty that the narrator so much adores.
At the literal level Tinyarei exudes beauty, patience, morality and compromise, pre-requisites for a true African woman, who is every man’s dream. She embodies African virtues, norms and values and remains true to her husband, the narrator, even under pressure from a lot of affluent admirers offering her paradise if only she abandons her Africanness and her husband.
The protagonist is aware of this scheme, since he is constantly reminded that “beauty so superlative should be scattered around or shared”, because “it is too good for an African.”
However, like a paragon of virtue that she is, Tinyarei remains true and resolute.
At the metaphorical level, Tinyarei becomes any other African woman who is only considered for commercial purposes and not love. She is considered as one of the women “Who marry fortunes as if African beauty and womanhood should be relegated to mere aesthetics.”
Symbolically, she stands for Africa, the beautiful and rich continent impoverished by avarice, deceit and chicanery at the centre of the hypocritical West.
By juxtaposing the hero’s love for Tinyarei, the woman and Tinyarei, the continent or his country, Zimbabwe, Gomo exposes the fallacy of democracy and rule of law whose gospel finds home in alien capitals.
However, the author is alive to the West’s glaring double standards mirrored throughout African history.
To Gomo, the African landscape is, “The land in which European champions of civilisation/ Christianity, human rights, rule of law and democracy, maimed and murdered /over 10 million African people.”
It is disgusting, for lack of a better word, to consider how Eurocentric thinking, which is rather twisted, should be accepted as the solution to the challenges that Africa faces. Yet, it is the same barbaric thinking that reduced the continent to pauperism and desperation.
Mutilated and raped, Africa lies prostrate on the ground, and the West watches, as it crouches on the continent’s horizon of hope. Protecting its descendants, the West bars Africa from aborting the unwanted “puppet progeny already restless in her womb”, while “the affluent rapists demonised and publicised the abortion to the four corners of the planet.”
Gomo is contemptuous of the culture of silence beguiling the continent as it watches some in its ranks deciding to think in any other way but not African.
It all boils down to the nature of knowledge that the West prescribes to African governments. Those that would have “failed something absolutely irrelevant to the African experience,” through the reading of “foreign literature that addressed foreign issues,” are considered invalids.
Africans should consume knowledge that is relevant to their experiences, oppression and poverty. The curriculum should be designed to develop the African mindset, as espoused by Mongo Beti in “Mission to Kala” (1957).
Knowledge, or lack of it, is what is central to the African outcome. There is forever a need to question the inequality that exists between the rich and the poor which creates a void in national consolidation.
Michael Fargher, a South African notes that inequality, “Has not arisen as the result of chance.
“Instead, we can identify the unjust acts under apartheid and colonisation that specifically engineered the repression and robbery of black people in our society.”
Hence, African children should be told “that the corruption and destitution that bedevils Africa today are not the responsibility of the African fool alone.”
The West, with its well-orchestrated machinery of scheming and deceit, Gomo decries, “created a continent of desperate destitutes and then picked on individual destitutes and offered them a dog’s place in their affluent circles in exchange for betraying the whole race.”
Since the West thrives on anarchy, chaos, trauma, instability, morbidity and the macabre, it creates fertile conditions to sustain such. Poverty is one such condition, for it reduces Africans to perpetual beggars whose voice is gagged as a result of destitution.
Some Africans are willingly used as pawns in the West’s Machiavellian game of pillage, hypocrisy and deceit disguised as democracy and rule of law.
The persistent questions remain: Whose law? What law equates one white descendant to 10 million black Africans? Is it a case of some animals being more equal than others?
Mashingaidze Gomo, the people’s voice, could see through the West’s façade. Knowing the garden tool, he sees, he calls it by name.
Spurred on by his love for Tinyarei; at the literal and metaphorical levels, the narrator decides to think like an African.
With devotion and audacity inspired by his love for his people, he shames the West in its backyard for reneging on its promises, and expecting Africans to let the imbalances of colonialism persist.
As an African, the protagonist “thought about democracy and how it cannot exist / beyond the electoral process unless it is based on empowerment of people to give them a real voice and not just the electoral right”.
He reasons that “unempowered choice is not freedom”.
Because of her stance on the land issue, and the need to empower citizens, not merely by giving them an electoral voice, but through equitable distribution of the means of production, “little” Zimbabwe was vilified and demonised as a madman, daring the all too powerful Big Brother; playing witness, prosecutor, attorney, judge and God, all at the same time.
Nonetheless, as Gomo reiterates, “a madness you believe in must be a fine madness.”
One who has never been called mad, is one who has never taken anything with a serious knack for success. History is awash with great men and inventors considered mad, but they never gave up, and in the end they had the last laugh.
They realised “that madness could feel so strangely beautiful.”
Online Reporter