Turning backwards to an uneasy past

Librarians the world over will testify that the last decade has generated a broad range of literature on the Zimbabwean question. So diverse are the themes that the categories span everything from revolutionary agricultural models, to contemporary health epidemics, politics, inflation and the rule of law. Something of a boom has occurred in the area of record making about this period of life in the country that has driven texts dealing in either fiction or fact, perhaps even propaganda, to the bookshelves. Judging by literary produce, it is a country that has become all things to all people.

To add to this treasure trove is Daniel Mandishona’s ‘White God, Black Demons’, an anthology of ten short stories published under the Weaver Press stable. Its magic is that it feels startlingly familiar, whatever your politics may be. Each portrait in the 110-page collection is the product of prodigious observation and research, that resembles a return to the 16th century Every (wo)man theatrical genre.

What a reader will cherish is that there is a kind of fidelity about the stories that leaves you knowing it to be true. The characters, and their experiences cut a little too close to the bone. Where else has there been an independent candidate who promises a ‘new dawn’ ahead of a presidential contest held in March, whose results are held back to April?

Every story is preceded by a poignant quotation, a diligently considered phrase that serves as prophetic prelude for the central theme of each tale and reveals the range of the author’s literary template. Take the opening story ‘Smoke and Ashes’ as an example. Heralded by the infamous ‘you won the elections, but I won the count’, quotation of former Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza, it is set in the brackets of an election that is held in March and then again in June, in a fictitious thugocracy. It’s a ‘Final Battle for Control,’ where the show down is provided by two silent protagonists, The Man Rumoured to Have Won, and The Man Rumoured to Have Lost. It is told through the eyes of a man and woman whose reunion takes us through their mirrored lives: Same ghetto growing up, same university, and same degree. One chose to stay, the other leaves the country having won ‘papers in a visa lottery’ to live in another land of luxurious. It is an irony of disharmony, at once arcane and obvious. ‘Cities of Dust’ chronicles the horrors and double standards of a smash up operation that sees the townships razed to the ground, while the neighbourhoods of the rich go untouched. Greased palms provide political protection in a commentary about the power of race and class in a society built on failed nationalism.

A corrupt exchange with a government bureaucrat about a farm with fecund soils desired by several ‘chefs’, forms the nub of ‘Kaffir Corn’, a story that ostensibly concerns itself with the abortive hopes of a New Farmer, who having chased away the ‘inflexible Mr. Allan Bradford’, comes face to face with ‘War Vets’ who claim to be the descendents of the original owners of Pangolin Farm, their ancestral land.

An old black and white photograph captures the essence of ‘A Wasted Land’, a story of two failed patriarchs, told by a young boy who within the space of a year survives the tragedy of their double back-to-back deaths. Narrated in a methodical and tempered Richter, it reaches into the experience of a young man of great promise who goes to Britain on a rise, only to return on a fall. Preceded by Cicero’s quote, ‘Laws are silent in war’, both father figures survive the country’s war of liberation, only to die as the fruits of independence are in blossom.

‘A Time of Locusts’ is an intimate tale about young love, innocence, loss, anger and grief. With lyrical simplicity the story stands out in the collection for its internal comprehension of the complexity of human existence and choice. It is also a striking example of how taboo and shame are resolved in a family that suffers a series of disturbingly dark tragedies that can only be put right by an honour killing. It is ultimately a story about the attitude of solution, so evident in Zimbabwe over the last few years.

As a young adult, a dissatisfied man returns home to his father’s deathbed to face the demons that have tormented him in ‘A Secret Sin.’ Previously published by Weaver Press in their 2005 short story collection Writing Now, this story captures the emptiness of the diaspora experience, and the isolation of being at home. It is a nugget of feeling: Dealing with identity and belonging in stirring prose. It also digs deep in the brain of a young man in search of his true place, and never quite finding it.

The lethality of state power is at the heart of ‘Blunt Force Trauma,’ a story that unfolds around a death of a seemingly ordinary man living an ordinary life. As his body lies in the morgue of a crumbling public hospital – a ghost of its former glorious self – awaiting an autopsy, the details of his not so ordinary life come to light in bits and pieces that suggest an assassination. It is a deft account that weaves in side-characters that belong to the criminal underworld and general hoodlum that serve as a smokescreen for a society dealing with gangsterism on a gigantic scale. The interplay between an assault in police custody and an apparent armed robbery where nothing is stolen is in no way febrile. A pedantic, narratorial logic provided by the mechanical notes of a pathology report betray a society dealing with a culture of careless bludgeoning for whom no one is brought to account, ironically by the same cops.

‘Butternut Soup’ is commentary on addictions; TV and religion but also to a failed relationship in a loveless and childless couple. Bound together by a fear of aloneness, they are each other’s hated opium. This is a collection so politically acute and sensitive, that a reader cannot avoid recalling the clear influence of both Chinua Achebe and Dambudzo Marechera in the author’s seamless craft. The stories have a trans-generational appeal. The present can only be understood by turning backwards, to an uneasy past, and imagining the possibilities of a future for the cast of characters that have been frustrated in their dreams. They have flaws, indeed, and live by hope.

But it is the tenderness with which the author deals with each character, relating to his diverse tapestry of protagonists as if they were part of his own, that makes the work a fluent portrait of troubled people in a troubled place. The collection feels as much a product of duty as of imagination. And it has the authority of independence, of one who writes because he wants to and cannot keep it bottled up anymore. It wrestles fiercely with issues of inheritance, identity, class, race and gender.

A complex network of slippery narrators provide all the coda: From a flag planted on a kopje in honour of a distant monarch in 1890 to Independence in 1980. The signifiers that Zimbabwe is the country where, in the main, all the intrigue unfolds, are all there. A cursory reference to Victoria Falls, to Lake Kariba, to POSA (Public Order and Security Act), to a militant women’s rights’ groups in battle with riot police chanting the revolutionary chorus, ‘Zimbabwe ndeyeropa, baba’. Or a porous border leading to a country in the south that is a pot of gold for some, or a site of intolerance for others, who quickly learn that black immigrants can’t ride a rainbow, poor billionaires. And yet readers will be left wondering why an author so capable of dealing deftly with detail has left Zimbabwe unnamed? It is a believability that is at once cruel and comic. Healthy doses of candour give breadth and wisdom, to what is a collection of comic tragedy told with tenderness.

Born in January 1959, Mandishona, an award-winning architect, spent his childhood in Mbare. Raised in the home of his maternal grandparents, his early literary diet included Alfred Hitchcock movies, James Hadley Chase paperbacks and a feast of popular magazines where the short story was a veritable form. Black and white western ‘bioscopes’ also influenced his imagination. Ghetto heroes are the canvas of his work. In his youth he wrote about athletes, crooks and nationalists under the name Daniel Gurajena, in short stories that are among his first body of work, now held at the National Archives in magazines that are out of print.

‘White Gods Black Demons’ is as much a celebration of this first half-century of his life as it is the vast canvass of his personal experience. ‘I am an architect and I enjoy writing’, says Mandishona of his new collection. Expelled from school for habitual acts of truancy, there is something of him in every story, be it the young boy looking for an explanation to a confusing situation in the family, or an adult robbed of his ballot.

And yet, as the lascivious Pastor Johannes Dollar is whisked away in the back of a black Mercedes, leaving his bride to be in tears, a reader will wonder at the possibility of more. Another collection of very Zimbabwean tales soon, or, with the poise and elegance that comes through in this first offering, perhaps the author will have the courage to tackle a first novel.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Daniel Mandishona's White Gods, Black Demons is published by Weaver Press 2009, Harare, Zimbabwe (ISBN: 978 1 77922 087 5).
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.