Stanley Nyamfukudza and the Zimbabwe of the early 1980's

(Memory Chirere's reflections)
For Zimbabwe, turning thirty brings unbearable memories of 1980. But, maybe, for us interested in Literature the joy is also in picking, sometimes at random, on any book or story based on the feelings, thoughts, promises and revelations of around the independence period 1980.

One settles on Stanley Nyamfukudza’s 1983 collection of short-stories called Aftermaths especially those that go beyond celebrating 18 April 1980. These stories by Nyamfukudza dwell on “finer” reactions to independence. They explore various emotions, expectations and some anxieties of a freshly independent people.

In that context, you cannot also avoid the fact that during the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe Stanley Nyamfukudza went to exile in Britain. He was part of the 1973 University of Rhodesia black students who were imprisoned for protesting against racist policies on the campus and the whole country. Some of Nyamfukudza’s contemporaries in this act have become prominent names today in different fields. Among them the late politician Witness Mangwende and fellow writer, Dambudzo Marechera.

This generation went to exile or crossed boarders into Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana to bolster the nationalist war of liberation. Aftermaths is exciting because some of the stories here are decidedly based on the ‘the return’ home of the exiles and fighters around 1980.

In the title story “Aftermaths” a “returnee” goes down his boy-hood street in the location trying to reconnect. He tacitly takes a mental register and inventory of the township houses and folk. The signature of time is plastered on the walls of the township and although there is an air of carefree, a sense of tension is discernible.

The “return of the native” is generally a fascinating theme in Literature.

Many stories in Zimbabwe are told of the ex-combatants who threw large parties on their return. Their people wanted them to sing the war songs, to crawl on the ground as they did in the war and to sneak through the bushes and disappear as they were reputed to have done during the war. Many who returned from exile boasted about their impeccable English, German, Swiss or Swahili.

Time and experience had created a certain unbelievable social gap between those who had remained at home and those who had “gone away.” Nyamfukudza’s persona feels “robbed, childishly but painfully.” One takes note of a hazy suggestion that this is a community that has gone through a shock and soon there would be time to stand up and be normal again.

Maybe Nyamfukudza’s most dense and poetic story of the new 1980’s era is “Settlers.” It is apparently based on the earliest Zimbabwe’s resettlement programme. A young man and his pregnant wife find themselves clearing up dense bush to set up home and field.

Looking at his own circumstances, the man is overwhelmed. The Zimbabwe revolution had delivered a first, offering virgin land to the formerly dispossessed peasants:


“Sometimes, in the morning, standing there with
his pick, shovel and axe on his shoulders, it
seemed pointless, mad even. How could one
man and woman fight against all this thick
forest, sustained only by the dream that if
they kept at it, they would in the end claim
some room…”

One cannot escape from the “garden of Eden” feeling evoked by this story. By extension, husband and wife are Adam and Eve, respectively. The whole metaphor extends to the new nation state of Zimbabwe. Reading on, one recalls the heavy rains of the first Independence summer season and the subsequent bumper harvest. The phrase “Zimbabwe the bread basket of Africa” stuck as people flocked from “tired” territories in Masvingo, Madziva, Chiweshe, Gwaai… to open up heavy virgin tracts of fields in Muzarabani, Sanyati, Gokwe... Indeed “swords turned into plough-shares.” All of a sudden one wanted to be useful, to dig a hole in the earth and rest like some kind of a veldt bird.

Sleeping, working or walking, husband and wife “felt they were intruders, fenced in by a forest which just stood there, as if watching and waiting…” Implicit in the references to the flora and fauna is the plunder of nearly a century that had made a people stranger to their own space. Colonialism raptures spiritual connection between men and his heritage.

But the fecundity overflows into the human world in this subtle short story. The man likes to sit by the fire-side “watching her (wife’s) by now faintly swollen belly as she moved about in the small, smoke filled kitchen, preparing the evening meal.” The young wife’s pregnancy creates a sense of continuity and celebration which typifies 1980.

The forest in “Settlers” is however not that new or impenetrable. Physically and spiritually this is a place that leaves one with a feeling that one has been here before. Only one does not know exactly when and why.

Nyamufukudza also dwells on the other part of the miracle of 1980: the massive journey back to school. After the war old schools reopened and new uncountable ones sprouted. They were called ‘Upper-tops’ but even the derision in that title was thankfully ignored. Old tobacco barns became schools. Old churches became Adult literacy spots. Under the big Baobab tree a black board was erected, a teacher was found and a school was founded! Someone thought the old Rhodesian camp could be put to some good use and a school was founded. Men with beards and women with protruding breasts put aside the war memories and went back to school! Minister Dzingai Mutumbuka traveled the length and width of the country preaching, coercing and opening schools.

In the story “A fresh start” there is captured a small school in the middle of a rural community that is emerging out of war. Everything about the school is small, makeshift and experimental. One classroom block, three teachers who stay in thatched houses and pupils who wore neither shoes nor uniforms. Everything has the magical touch of “a fresh start.” The major character in the story is a teacher from the urban areas who happen to have a soft spot for the rural and the natural. For him “the lack of amenities, basic books even, seemed hardly important.”

The scene, typical of the rural Zimbabwe 1980, is set for adventure. After the war, communities tended to be inward looking. The basics first, seemed to be the dictum. A people had to have at least several shops, a bar and a grinding mill at the “growth point.” Then people needed a deep tank and a small school for a start. The teacher in “A fresh start” is part of the spirit of educating the nation. His pupils are his family. They keep a distance of respectability as he shares with them his knowledge and sometimes his own food. They respect and revere him and he knows it. The parents fraternize with him, always using the word “teacher” before his name.

But part of the fresh start here is that the teacher stumbles into a very beautiful woman who has sadly been maimed mentally in contact in the previous war. As he takes in the wonder and the beauty of the river, one day, she strays onto his hideout and he cannot believe there could be such a beauty out here.

The teacher goes through a restless panic. The ugly side of the just ended war is typified by this very beautiful young woman who will never have her mind again nor speak. The message that the war was a give and take and not romance gradually descends on the teacher. In that reawakening, he is first “sad and thoughtful” and later settles on the seemingly personal but national project. “The children looked up at him expectantly. He cleared his throat… were these the only available redeemers, if he was to recover from the rigours of apathy and jaded hedonism?”

Nyamfukudza captures the feelings of the times with a touch that is very personal and eternal. He has a certain sympathy for people that does not allow him to easily paint them right or wrong. Nyamfukudza leaves you feeling that individuals in their private endeavors represent the scattered conflicting sensibilities that make a nation.

Aftermaths is a natural sequel to Nyamfukudza’s war-time novel, The Non-Believer’s Journey

Musaemura Zimunya's prose

Musaemura Zimunya: ever read his prose?
(reflections by Memory Chirere)

Despite its special place in the Zimbabwean short story canon, Musaemura Zimunya’s ‘Night shift and other stories’ will always need a bold footnote.

Appearing in 1993, it is the only creative prose book by a man who has always written and published mainly poetry since the late 1960’s.

Musaemura Zimunya is clearly Zimbabwe’s leading poet. He is, arguably, the most anthologized of all Zimbabwean poets. He writes poetry both in the English and Shona languages and is also a prominent scholar of Zimbabwean literature. His ‘Those years of Drought and Hunger’ (1982) is considered a pathfinder text on Zimbabwean literature in English.

He broke into print gradually in the 1970’s in periodicals like Two-Tone and Chirimo. Later, he appeared more emphatically in group anthologies like Gwenyambira (1979) and Kizito Muchemwa’s Zimbabwean Poetry in English (1978).

Afterwards’ the floodgates opened in such a record breaking way for Zimunya. He published (and sometimes editing) the following books of poetry: And Now The Poets Speak (1981), Thought Tracks (1982), Kingfisher, Jikinya and other Poems (1982), Country Dawns and City Lights (1985), Samora! (co-authored in 1987), Chakarira Chindunduma (co-authored and edited it in 1985), Birthright (1989), The fate of Vultures (1989), Perfect Poise (1994), Selected Poems of Zimunya (published in a Serbian language and in English in 1995).

In an ‘afterword’ to the Serbian/English version of his collected poems in 1995, Zimunya describes his poetry thus: “When you read these poems, it is my cherished hope that you will gain some insight… into the brutality of colonialism, the vagaries of growing up permanently dispossessed in a racially structured society, the tortuous quest for reconciliation of a shattered old culture with a hostile and spiritless new world cultivated to disadvantage the African and… the undying quest for harmony with nature… And then also you may wonder about the chaos artistic rhythms and traditions forever tussling for my creative attention.”

Indeed’ Zimunya’s poems over the past three decades reflect on the physical beauty of his country, his people’s struggles against settler occupation and racism, the meaning of African myths and traditions and the meaning of freedom to the individual.

Maybe his most enduring poems include ‘The Valley of Mawewe’, ‘Zimbabwe (after the ruins)’, ‘Zimbabwe bird’, ‘The Mountain’, ‘To be young’, ‘Kisimiso’ and ‘No songs.’ One of these has been adopted by the curio shop at the Great Zimbabwe monument as a theme poem. It must be to do with the poem’s evocation of the spirit in rock and the seeming silence of traditions that have deep roots.

It is important to remember that Zimunya, like Henry Pote, Kizito Muchemwa and others, emerged at a time when the challenge was to forge a believable black African poetic sensibility in an environment that often persuaded the black poet to imitate wholesomely the poets of empire. Zimunya refers to this in an essay as ‘the jacaranda-piccaniny-musasa-culture’.

So after a compact and long poetic stretch, Zimunya broke into short story in 1993 with ‘Nightshift and Other stories’.

Although this book might never win the war against the books of poetry by the same author, it breathed and still breathes fresh air into the Zimbabwean short story.

Dominated, until very recently, by Stanley Nyamfukudza and Charles Mungoshi, the Zimbabwean short story tends to be an exercise in the use of the technique of understatement. It tends also to be about the underdog against the ‘bigger’ society. The narrative tends to alternate conversation with description of action. There is almost always the use of realism – man in the everyday tangible environment. There is also the twist in/of the tail/tale that recalls the works of foreign masters like Hemingway, Poe and others.

Zimunya’s short stories, especially the more endearing ones, tend to explore reality as it relates with the vast underworld. There is also exploration of the functions and sometimes dysfunctions of myths and traditions. Zimunya goes for what is generally not visible in men and women, their other deep-seated realities much more than any other writer has done with the Zimbabwean short story. Thankfully, he does that to show the link between the spiritual and the physical and not as an exercise in dabbling with empty superstition.

In the ‘Mbira Player’, Hakuna’s relations and conversations with his father and his totem, the monkey/baboon, is real. As he plays the mbira in an auditorium in wintry London, Hakuna sees ‘the moving shadow of a baboon ambling with that superior grace and defiant air which only baboons are capable of. As it did so, it turned and cast one long gaze at him and then suddenly began to run towards Murehwa mountains.’

In ‘The Peach Tree’ a sickly grandmother almost manages, rather unwillingly too, to bring her wrath upon her daughter when a branch of a tree that she is lying under falls onto and injures her daughter. She is shocked by what she can cause to happen through her wishful thinking. In that story reality and religion are one and the same thing. Prayer too is portrayed as not always conscious and positive. The electricity within the being is part of the being’s character.

In ‘Tambu’, a village girl is obsessed with water that she is constantly going down to the well to fetch it even when there is lots of it in the home already! She is in touch with njuzu the underwatwer goddess. She provokes fear and sly whispering in the village and nobody wants to marry her. But when Tambu is rapped by an unknown assailant- some suspect that it is by her demented father- the village well dries. The message here, maybe, is to do with the fall of the African people after the great rape at the moment of conquest. The metaphor is monstrous and far reaching.

The magical powers in central characters in stories like ‘Mother’ and ‘Crocodile Bile’ raise the issue of domestic sacrilege that becomes national sacrilege. The killing of fathers and mothers by their sons and daughters point at a people who strike down all connections with history, and begin to worship at the alter of empty anger and pride. Inversely the story points at the fact that elders need to conduct themselves with care so as to safeguard prosperity. If you see a son picking an axe and chasing his mother in order to hack her down, to injure her or to rape her, there must be something going wrong in the universe. The short story called ‘Mother’ makes good reading but it leaves you with genuine fears of the world and of relations that we have often taken for granted.

Zimunya’s short stories, even those that are based on realism, shift from the technique of ‘description and dialogue’ to one where the narrator seems to know something you need to know now-now, telling the story as if it were happening in a dream inside a dream. Therefore Zimunya allows you to fly away from three dimensional reality and see ‘what was’ or ‘what could be’, more like the effect of folk tale.

As writers reach a high level of maturity as in Zimunya, indeed the tendency is to go for that area that had been put aside as Myth in order to mine classic meanings to life. A reading of Ngugi Wathiongo shows the same development. After having duels with ideology all his career, Ngugi reawakens useful myth with the novel Matigari where the make-believe Matigari is actually standing for that undying desire amongst Kenyans to come to terms with their space. In the case of Zimunya, one hopes that there could be another prose collection before he returns to his beloved poetry.

Musaemura Bonas Zimunya was born in 1949 in Mutare and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe where he lectures in Literature and Creative Writing.

**You may engage Zimunya: musaz@arts.uz.ac.zw