dyton mupawaenda
Elliot Ziwira-Senior Writer
United Kingdom-based Zimbabwean author, Andrew Chatora, has clinched the 2024 Anthem Awards, Silver category, in the United States for his third novel, “Harare Voices and Beyond”.
Published by Chicago-based Kharis Publishing — an imprint of Kharis Media in February 2023, the book was selected “for its contribution to the land reform discourse and race relations in post-colonial Africa.”
The 3rd annual Anthem Awards ceremony was held at a cocktail reception in New York on January 30, 2024, and acknowledged a celebrity star-studded line-up by bestowing on them special achievement awards.
According to the organisers of the awards launched in 2021, participants are selected from published works of fiction and non-fiction, history books, children’s literature, essays, and op-eds, among others, that “document or raise awareness for diversity, equity and inclusion”.
Chatora’s story portrays the troubled lives of a white commercial farming family that dramatically loses both their active father and farm in Mazowe, Zimbabwe, in the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme, aimed at correcting historical imbalances on land.
The family is caught up in a wave of misunderstandings. In the subsequent melee, the mother and one of the boys allegedly kill the younger of the siblings by accident. Out of fear, they secretly bury his body in their home, until it is eventually discovered.
Gradually, the boys are “going native” as they become involved in spaces and activities not usually associated with the well-heeled white masters of Zimbabwe since settler occupation.
They are newcomers to a world of lack, which they had only watched from a safe distance. There is always a price to pay when one falls from privilege. In colonial discourse, the term “going native” means the white man is becoming one with the “savages” or the natives, to the extent of eating what they eat, and eventually feeling as they do.
Among some of the leading luminaries honoured in this year’s Anthem Awards were Hollywood actors Matt Damon and Kevin Bacon. Other conspicuous recipients of the Special Lifetime Achievement award include Misty Copeland, Aurora James, and Leon Ford, inter alia.
These are people who have distinguished themselves in different spheres of life, and, thus honoured for their diverse roles and contribution to the arts and popular culture.
It is this elite group that Zimbabwean, Andrew Chatora, joins!
Savouring the award, Chatora modestly remarks that many Zimbabwean writers before him have looked at the land question in their literary works, hence writing “Harare Voices and Beyond” afforded him the chance to contribute to a long-standing ongoing discourse.
‘‘Much as I’ve been denigrated in some quarters as taking the side of whites, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s not about taking sides really,” he observes.
“In “Harare Voices and Beyond”, I was attempting to fill in the missing link, the constant question on how it could have felt on the other side; the landed white community during the land reform.”
He points out that during the land reform programme a lot happened to whites as well, which should also be looked at, not that he is “anti-land reform”, which some people would want to believe.
“But, to reiterate, that is the essence of the writer. I will always defend my right to write without fear or favour on any contentious issues affecting our society,’’ he says.
The resonance in Chatora’s words couldn’t be clearer without African American civil rights icon Nina Simone’s words in placing the legitimate scope and place of the artist in highlighting the less attractive aspects of society.
Simone wisely counsels: “You can’t help it. An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.”
Chatora has chosen an emotive, yet well-followed subject across the world; the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe, raising many questions.
Was the land reform, right? Was it necessary? Was the process, right? Was the late former President Robert Mugabe, right? Should the late national hero and revolutionary be bashed for correcting colonial inequities on the land?
What should white former commercial farmers have done to come out unscathed? Was there ever a reform of a similar scale in post-independent Africa? How does the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme echo the earlier process of white occupation of black land a century earlier?
Chatora lives up to that estimate dabbling into the history of the oppressed and the oppressor in the Southern African country now present-day Zimbabwe.
The book gives us a unique insight into modern Zimbabwe as well as its troubled past as Rhodesia.
As a worthy winner in the Anthem Awards, his work has been memorialised in the Anthem Winners Gallery; a befitting accolade for posterity, scholars, and literary aficionados to savour.
Chatora is the second Zimbabwean writer to win this covetous global award after Munashe Kaseke’s win in 2023 for her debut short story collection: “Send Her Back and Other Short Stories”, published by Mukana Press.
“Harare Voices and Beyond” takes on the ambitious challenge of telling a complex story about a complicated city, a confounded country, and the multiple cultures that coexist within; and ultimately falls a little short. Steeped in a grim darker underworld of Harare’s underbelly, it is not a narrative for the faint-hearted.
Andrew Chatora is an exponent of the African Diaspora novel. Candid, relentlessly engaging, and vulnerable, his novels are a polarising affair among social critics and literary enthusiasts. His forthcoming novel, “Born Here But Not in My Name”, is a long-run treatment of race relations in the United Kingdom, featuring the English classroom as a microcosm of wider society post-Brexit.
His debut novella, “Diaspora Dreams” (2021), was a well-received nominee of the National Arts Merit Awards in Zimbabwe, while his subsequent works; “Where the Heart Is”, “Harare Voices and Beyond”, and “Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Stories”, have cemented his contribution as a voice of the excluded.
Online Reporter