KwaChirere reads Zagamo by Ray Mawerera

 

Title: Zagamo: The war within

Author: Ray Mawerera

Published in Harare by Royalty Books, 2023,109 pages

Isbn: 987-11779330819

 

A book review by Memory Chirere

 

Ray Mawerera will surely be in deep trouble for his pacey debut novella, Zagamo: The War Within. Some stunned readers may constantly turn over the book to look at the picture of the author himself with excitement and return to the story. Yet, some other readers may really want to take out the sjambok and ask why this writer plays hide and seek with them as if he pays them money!

 

About three full times, you appear to control this story, as a reader, but it springs up and races in all unusual directions. Yes, there is something weirdly called reader control. It is a state in which a reader of a novel is aware of what may definitely come next, and the reader feels like he also wrote the story himself. Ray Mawerera does not allow you that.

 

In the Creative Writing class, it is often said; suspense is a valuable tool for keeping a reader’s attention and interest. Suspense involves withholding information and raising key questions that pique readers’ curiosity. With suspense, you’re playing with your readers’ expectations of time. They know information is coming, but they just don’t know when.  Mawerera does that. He dribbles you and you fall then he asks you to stand up and come get the ball. He dribbles you with yet more suspense and an unpredictable plot.

 

That boy, Zagamo, just appears from nowhere.

 

From the beginning, the narrator does not know that Zagamo is not the real name of his new school mate. He does not know that soon, he will discover that he is related to Zagamo. He will always be crying for Zagamo. It is the late 1970’s in the Salisbury township of Highfield and out there, a bush war is raging between the Rhodesians and the guerrillas.

 

Unkwon to his new city classmates, Zagamo is coming from the back of beyond, where he has seen his family slaughtered by the Rhodesian military. He only survived because he had been sent to fetch sugar, or is it salt, from the next hut.

 

A war is raging within Zagamo.

 

Although Zagamo is the fastest runner on the school track, he is already dead. His nights are full of ghosts. He is not a boy. He is not yet a man. Deep within he is searching for what he does not know to be revenge. The arrest of his one and only surviving relative, an uncle, becomes the straw that breaks the back of the camel…and that of big Zagamo.

 

One Friday after dinner when Zagamo and Uncle Dobola had visited, Zagamo asked Father: “Baba, where were the African leaders when the Europeans sat down to share African countries amongst themselves?”

 

The two elderly men looked at each other. Father said, slowly, thoughtfully: “They were not invited. It was a meeting of Europeans only. Why do you ask?”

 

“I thought maybe they did not know about this meeting, or they did not have ships to go where the meeting was?” Zagamo says, more to himself than the shocked audience. Why is this child speaking like an oracle?

 

And one day… Zagamo disappears from home and country!

 

You want him to return alive. But when he returns, he tests your notion of justice to the limits. Ray Mawerera’s novel is a testament that the literature about the Zimbabwe war of liberation continues to grow in many clear directions and modes. There is the story written about contact by combatants like Alexander Kanengoni and Thomas Bvuma. There is the story about real contact told by non-combatants like Shimmer Chinodya. There is the story written about this war by former Rhodesian fighters like Angus Shaw and Jeremy Ford. Then there is the story written about the activities in mobilising townships like Highfield, by non-combatants like Stanley Nyamfukudza, Olley Maruma and now, Ray Mawerera.

 

The strands keep growing, showing that war is a complex thing even for those who are not at the front.

 

Edited by prolific novelist, Philliph Chidavaenzi, Zagamo is an easy read. It will not harm you because you can read through it during a road trip from Harare to Beitbridge.

 

However, get ready for the brutally twisting plot which Mawerera has prepared for you. It appears to me that for Mawerera, the golden rule of crafting a story is that; no one and nothing is quite as it seems.

 

I predict that you will read this story and either hug Mawerera or seek his throat or both! It is thrilling to be thrilled.

 

Ray Mawerera is a veteran Zimbabwean journalist and public relations expert based in Harare where he stays with his wife Caroline. The couple has three adult children.