adminTODAY we examine a scourge which touches mankind at one time or another. Gender-based violence is the key subject of talk in this novel but it would have been a surprise if corruption had been totally ignored. Corruption cultivates violence.
A lot of issues affecting the community are brought out through the different characters. The writer uses character exposition to tell his story and this has been done to good effect. Through the behaviour of characters like Nyati, the businessman, we get an insight of national decay. Jeremiah, Sofia’s boyfriend, talks of odours of decay when we meet him for the first time.
Jeremiah says: “The air in this little room is reeking with odours of decay. A dead dog has been rotting away by the roadside just a stone’s throw away from the house. The unfortunate dog was run over by a driver a few days ago. The drivers of this country can no longer find the patience to give way to a passing dog. In these days of Esap, everyone is too busy trying to out-deal their neighbour to find the time to waste burying a dog. So they just rot away at their own pace by the roadside.
“The sight of dead dogs and cats decaying by the roadside is no longer strange these days. Is this the sign of changing times? I wonder why there are so many dogs wandering throughout the city these days. Maybe the retrenched owners, after discovering that they can no longer afford to feed an extra mouth, simply unleash the dogs and let them wander on the streets.” These odours talked about here are significant. They signify the rot eating away the consciousness of the nation.
Jeremiah was troubled by these odours. He says another breeze of odours sails through the wide crevice that was formed on the decaying wooden door. No matter how hard he tries to brush the persistent odours aside, they still maintain their relentless attack on his consciousness. The moral fabric is wasting away. He asks: “How could a man with a heart and soul do such a thing to his own daughter? What kind of society have we become?
“The amount of decay that is floating in the air is frighteningly disturbing. We have now become worse than dogs. Dogs do not cut off the private parts of their own begotten in order to sell them at the market place.” This was in reference to the heinous crime committed by Joseph Takundwa when he raped and killed his daughter Tabitha. Nyati also forced himself on Sofia. From a point Jeremiah can read the headlines of that day’s paper which is also chilling. It reads: “Father rapes six-month-old daughter.”
Jeremiah remembers that for the past two weeks, every newspaper that he read contained an article of rape and fraud. One paper published an article about a teacher training college principal who was being tried for demanding a five thousand dollar bribe for untrained teachers who were desperately seeking vacancies to train as teachers at his college. He says even the sun too is beginning to get caught up in this process of national decay it seems. Have you ever noticed how the sun is getting darker and hotter these days? These are signs of the times.
Even nature seems to be turning upside down. The “get rich now” plague is spreading like a virulent epidemic throughout the nation. Jeremiah says he has always wondered why the national economy has not been expanding given the number of brand new BMWs and Mercedes Benz that he always sees cruising on their roads? Where are these people getting all this money from? He knows quite a number of his friends who have become rich, almost overnight. There is one particular friend of his who is now serving a 10-year prison term after being convicted of embezzling millions of dollars from government coffers.
He had been part of a briefcase company racket that defrauded the government of more than 20 million dollars in well-orchestrated overcharging schemes. After enduring a barrage of attacks concerning his poverty from his wife Matilda, Jeremiah tells her that their backgrounds are different. “Another thing, is you never know the kind of deals that some people are going into these days, wondering how on earth can someone become so rich suddenly,” he says.
Matilda informed her husband that she had been allocated the long awaited government flat. She had definitely pressed a lot of buttons in order to get the flat. Two weeks later, he caught her in bed with a senior government officer from the ministry of houses. Maybe that was the button she had pushed in order to acquire the flat. Jeremiah says the air in this little room is getting too stuffy.
Jeremiah says he is getting used to the presence of these odours of decay in his life. “Better to have some air to breathe no matter the quality of the air than to have no air to breathe at all. Is this how the winds of decay encroach our consciousness? It is better to have a flat to live in no matter how you get it, than to have flat at all. It’s better to have a million dollars in the bank; no matter how you get it, than to have no money at all. This is the new kind of wind that is now blowing throughout the nation.
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