Sunflowers In Your Eyes

Title: Sunflowers in Your Eyes – Four Zimbabwean Poets
Editor: Menna Elfyn
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
ISBN: 978-1-907090-13-4
Year: 2010
Reviewed by Memory Chirere
89pages
Be on the lookout for Ethel Irene Kabwato, Blessing Musariri, Fungai Rufaro Machirori and Joice Shereni. They are vibrant women poets from the contemporary working class of Zimbabwe.

It means that all of them are decision makers. Amongst them you may find a mother, sister, wife or friend of someone big or small in Zimbabwe. They variably write about individual scapes. They write about woman’s love for man who usually does not return the favour in equal measure. They write about their country (Zimbabwe) at a time of deep political strife; the period towards the Government of National Unity (GNU). Each of these women answers, in her own way, to the questions: what does a woman want? What is love? What is country?

Fungai Machirori’s is a questing poetry, sometimes demanding, and praying too, for the restoration of the dignity of woman. Machirori’s persona insists that she is:

…not ketchup,
to be had on the side,
Along with a main course

She wants to be the main meal itself because she is ‘distinct and complete’. Fungai Machirori could be the most ideologically nuanced poet in this collection. She creates balance between suffering and hope. Sometimes Machirori’s poetry is about resurrection from a fall or the contemplation on it. Her persona, a radical woman cries out: ‘No man is worth fighting for’ and ‘no man is worth dying for’, too. And if a genuine man’s love is hard to come by, she says:

I’d rather wrap cold chains and iron locks
Around the throbbing core of me
And watch and let my fetters grate and rust and cool
My blood

Machirori has no regrets and she writes with a clear certainty of those who are used to traveling until they arrive at destinations. Her other poem is even boldly entitled ‘Tears Will Not Cure’.

But Joice Shereni writes for matrimony. She does not give up on anything. Hers are probably the deepest poems in this collection, compelling and conversational. Her persona wants to reach out, to converse and reconcile with the runaway man and heal from old wounds. She hurts very deeply from inside. Suffering is not a curse but a school. It is even a career. She knows how fire burns. But she also does not want to lose control. ‘Should I let myself need you?’ she asks in ‘Destiny’. In ‘Hunters’ she feels that when you are an object of pity, you become naked until you run for cover like Adam and Eve. Shereni addresses man out there who doesn’t know how to be husband. Any man who participates in the humiliation of woman is also humiliating himself, seems to be the philosophy here.

Blessing Musariri’s poetry has lots of room, literal and metaphorical. She writes maybe the most transcendental poetry of the four, causing collocation of time and place. She is carefully laid back, edgeless like fog and reminiscent too. You find that in ‘Last Goodbye’. Musariri is a calm day that promises to be hot right there in the morning. She can also be as treacherous as honey! Because her lines pretend to wonder about, when in fact, they gather up bits and pieces to brew a final whirlwind effect as in ‘Breaking News’ and in ‘Related’. Her prose poetry is sometimes deliciously dreamy:

Daytime flights are dangerous because you see the place you might land should you chance to fall. Here among rolling clouds my thoughts meander- this is as close to snow as I as I’ll get today, as close to you- standing in the foyer, laughing about how your father bought you an Easter egg for your birthday. A glass of wine with lunch has aroused my fancy- touching cool glass as I have touched your face. High in this blue sky, in nothing else but sky, I am further than I have ever been from you.

Ethel Kabwato’s haiku are better than all that she writes here. There is especially the very short poem ‘Hate’ which goes:

So consuming
like uncontrolled
veld fire.

Or the other one called ‘Painting’:

Show me that painting
again
of happy children
playing.

But Kabwato’s political persona is a rock with a jagged edge. She goes deep to the jagular vein, as violent sometimes as Zimbabwean politics. She shouts at what she sees as betrayal of the nation by its own politicians. She writes the most tumultuous poetry in this collection, pricking you especially where the heart is supposed to be. Kabwato has no faith in the nation’s history or its institutions for she thinks that they are only full of political mobs. You travel down her lines and discover that she actually has faith in the individual conscience that registers and registers and registers the misdemeanors of those with power, reminding you of Charles Mungoshi’s friend in Waiting For the Rain, who is being buried alive, ‘minding the sand no more’.

This is a collection to remember; crispy, inspired and sparsely put together for readers who hate melodrama and verbosity. Many thanks to the Welsh poet, Menna Elfyn who brought together these pieces.

From Where The Wind Blows: a book review

From Where The Wind Blows: An Anthology Of Modern Zimbabwean Poetry

Edited by  Oliver Nyambi and Tendai Mangena
Published by Mambo Press, 2012
Reviewed by Aaron Mupondi

 From Where the Wind Blows edited by Oliver Nyambi and Tendai Mangena and published by Mambo Press in 2012 is a breath of fresh air on the Zimbabwean literary landscape.  I say so because from the beginning of the 21^st century the Zimbabwean readership has been so much bombarded by short stories that made Ruby Magosvongwe end up remarking that at the moment, ‘Zimbabwe is a short story country.’

The title of the new arrival (From Where the Wind Blows) is derived from the title of the last poem,  ‘Where the Wind Blows’, by  Mika Nyoni which to me is not surprising because the poet proves to be one of the more probing voices in the collection.  The title of the collection is a very appropriate one in the sense that Zimbabwean readers can easily guess that Zimbabwe is the place ‘from where the wind blows’.  The metaphor of the wind in the title reminds one of the unsettling situation in Zimbabwe during the years of economic meltdown (1998-2008) which were characterised by hyperinflation, scarcity of basic commodities, erosion of salaries, political violence and polarisation to name but a few issues.  The link between the ‘blowing wind’ and change is not lost to a discerning reader.

It is interesting to note that poems in the collection come from people from different walks of life and with different life experiences rendering the collection richer in terms of insight and creativity. The collection was written by established writers such as Zvisinei Sandi (the only female poet in the collection), university lecturers Jairos Gonye, Mika Nyoni, Madhlozi Moyo, Mickias Musiyiwa and Aleck Mapindani, a banker John Gotora, a nationalist Elisha Zacharia Kahari and students Austin Shumba and Hillary KeniWitsani.

The collection is divided into five sections: ‘Trying in ‘Trying’ Times’, ‘Going and Coming Around’, ‘Conflicting Spaces and the Haunting Past’, ‘Feeling and the Dreaded Shadow’ and ‘Odes’ although the editors indicate that the last section is ‘From the ‘Mind’ of a Mind’.  I agree with the editors that many poems burst the seams of the categories into which they have been ‘imprisoned’ to also fit into other categories or even go beyond all the laid down categories in the anthology.  However, one notices that the majority of poems harp on the predicaments the majority of Zimbabweans experienced during the ‘decade of crisis’ while others warn society about the AIDS pandemic and yet others re-assert the African culture and its past but others especially by Gotora and KeniWitsani appear very personal and private.

Sandi’s poem ‘Mercenary Thoughts’ (Trying in ‘Trying’ Times) is full of anger towards the greedy and unscrupulous in society. The militant mood in this poem is loud and clear. The poem itself is an instrument of war. In Nyoni’s ‘40 in 2008 in Zimbabwe’ we realise that some people find consolation in having survived the lean years.  The people are aptly referred to as the tree with scars in Nyoni’s other poem ‘Aggrieved’.  The ‘scars’ represent the problems that afflict the people while the ‘axe’ stand for the source or sources of the problems.  Gonye in ‘A Scene in Independence Street’ focuses on the tribulations of a typical worker whose salary is not enough to meet his endless obligations.  I have noticed that in a number of his poems Gonye who is a university teacher himself is a spokesperson of teachers whom society of late, has chosen to look down upon.  In this section, Shumba’s poem ‘To be Free’ makes effective use of irony to lash at the selfishness of the rich and powerful.

 Poems in ‘Going and Coming Around’ deal with prostitution, among other issues.  Shumba’s ‘Sisi Anna’ uses dialogue between a prostitute and her prospective client to dramatize negotiations for sex.  In ‘Ximex Mall’ Shumba reveals how some people in Harare unashamedly practise shaddy deals for the sake of money.

From the section ‘Conflicting Spaces and the Haunting Past’  one gets the feeling that the city represents a soulless modernity that is so stifling to the individual that he resorts going back to the rural area which provides him freedom and cultural shelter as the persona in Nyoni’s ‘Re: Letter of Resignation’ does.  While others flee from the city to the rural areas, others migrate into exile as shown in ‘Little Victories’ by Moyo.

The section, ‘Feeling and the Dreaded Shadow’ has poems about personal emotions and AIDS.  In ‘AIDS’, ‘Mucha’, ‘The Boy at the Clinic’ by Nyoni, Shumba and KeniWitsani respectively show how AIDS preys on its victims. However in this section one cannot fail to be moved by poems by Gotora.  The persona in all these poems is lamenting the loss of a beloved son whose name is  Gift as shown in ‘Once Upon a Time’. The loss of Gift is heart-rending as the persona in ‘Did You Have to: says, ‘My heart is bleeding internally.’ In ‘What Should I Have Done’ the persona asks existential questions about the meaning of life and death.  He ends up turning to God for comfort.  The poems makes us realise that mortals cannot escape pain and sorrow as Homer puts it, ‘human beings are wretched things, and the gods…have woven sorrow into the very pattern of their lives’. Indeed we are puppets of fate. Gotora’s poems are autobiographical. They are based on his first-born child, Tatenda Gift, who was killed in a road traffic accident when he was just about to arrive at his school, Kutama College on 6 February 2011. (‘Notes on Contributors’)  The poems are an attempt to heal the emotional wounds of the poet/father.

From Where the Wind Blows therefore makes a serious engagement with pressing problems in the contemporary Zimbabwean society particularly the ‘decade of crisis’ from which we are emerging. This book is highly recommended for study in High Schools, Teachers’ Colleges and Universities.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

ZWA goes to Masvingo

Picture: a recent ZWA meeting in Harare: Mashingaidze Gomo in white cap.

 

The Zimbabwe Writers Association (ZWA) is having an outreach meeting on Saturday 1 December 2012 in Masvingo at the CHARLES AUSTIN THEARTRE'S DOUG HILL ROOM (Masvingo Civic Centre) at 9am to 1pm. Writers around Masvingo and the outlying areas are all invited.

Our outreach would take the shape of introductions of associations and individual writers, followed by an open exchange of problems, challenges, ideas etc as the basis of consultation. On our part, we shall introduce the idea of ZWA and its constitution to Masvingo and what we have managed to achieve so far and how beneficial it has been to writers. In other words, it is really an open ended occasion. We shall discuss the ZWA constitution and how those interested may join.

Our contact persons are Dr Shumirai Nyota 0772529014 and Dr. Jacob Mapara:0772387981. Membership fee is only $10.

We bring along a guest; writer Mashingaidze Gomo, whose NAMA-winning novel, A Fine Madness is currently on the Advanced level syllabus. Gomo has agreed to answer any questions on his book towards the end of the meeting. Teachers and their students who are reading this book for exams are welcome.

The Zimbabwe Writers Association (ZWA) is the newest nationally inclusive writers Organization whose formation started in July 2010 leading to the AGM of June 4, 2011. Zimbabwean writers have taken the initiative to coordinate themselves to form an organisation to represent them and defend their interests. ZWA was registered with the National Arts Council in January 2011 and has since been to Gweru, Bulawayo and Mutare.
+inserted by ZWA secretary, Tinashe Muchuri:0733843455

Sunflowers In Your Eyes

Title: Sunflowers in Your Eyes – Four Zimbabwean Poets
Editor: Menna Elfyn
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
ISBN: 978-1-907090-13-4
Year: 2010
Reviewed by Memory Chirere
89pages
Be on the lookout for Ethel Irene Kabwato, Blessing Musariri, Fungai Rufaro Machirori and Joice Shereni. They are vibrant women poets from the contemporary working class of Zimbabwe.

It means that all of them are decision makers. Amongst them you may find a mother, sister, wife or friend of someone big or small in Zimbabwe. They variably write about individual scapes. They write about woman’s love for man who usually does not return the favour in equal measure. They write about their country (Zimbabwe) at a time of deep political strife; the period towards the Government of National Unity (GNU). Each of these women answers, in her own way, to the questions: what does a woman want? What is love? What is country?

Fungai Machirori’s is a questing poetry, sometimes demanding, and praying too, for the restoration of the dignity of woman. Machirori’s persona insists that she is:

…not ketchup,
to be had on the side,
Along with a main course

She wants to be the main meal itself because she is ‘distinct and complete’. Fungai Machirori could be the most ideologically nuanced poet in this collection. She creates balance between suffering and hope. Sometimes Machirori’s poetry is about resurrection from a fall or the contemplation on it. Her persona, a radical woman cries out: ‘No man is worth fighting for’ and ‘no man is worth dying for’, too. And if a genuine man’s love is hard to come by, she says:

I’d rather wrap cold chains and iron locks
Around the throbbing core of me
And watch and let my fetters grate and rust and cool
My blood

Machirori has no regrets and she writes with a clear certainty of those who are used to traveling until they arrive at destinations. Her other poem is even boldly entitled ‘Tears Will Not Cure’.

But Joice Shereni writes for matrimony. She does not give up on anything. Hers are probably the deepest poems in this collection, compelling and conversational. Her persona wants to reach out, to converse and reconcile with the runaway man and heal from old wounds. She hurts very deeply from inside. Suffering is not a curse but a school. It is even a career. She knows how fire burns. But she also does not want to lose control. ‘Should I let myself need you?’ she asks in ‘Destiny’. In ‘Hunters’ she feels that when you are an object of pity, you become naked until you run for cover like Adam and Eve. Shereni addresses man out there who doesn’t know how to be husband. Any man who participates in the humiliation of woman is also humiliating himself, seems to be the philosophy here.

Blessing Musariri’s poetry has lots of room, literal and metaphorical. She writes maybe the most transcendental poetry of the four, causing collocation of time and place. She is carefully laid back, edgeless like fog and reminiscent too. You find that in ‘Last Goodbye’. Musariri is a calm day that promises to be hot right there in the morning. She can also be as treacherous as honey! Because her lines pretend to wonder about, when in fact, they gather up bits and pieces to brew a final whirlwind effect as in ‘Breaking News’ and in ‘Related’. Her prose poetry is sometimes deliciously dreamy:

Daytime flights are dangerous because you see the place you might land should you chance to fall. Here among rolling clouds my thoughts meander- this is as close to snow as I as I’ll get today, as close to you- standing in the foyer, laughing about how your father bought you an Easter egg for your birthday. A glass of wine with lunch has aroused my fancy- touching cool glass as I have touched your face. High in this blue sky, in nothing else but sky, I am further than I have ever been from you.

Ethel Kabwato’s haiku are better than all that she writes here. There is especially the very short poem ‘Hate’ which goes:

So consuming
like uncontrolled
veld fire.

Or the other one called ‘Painting’:

Show me that painting
again
of happy children
playing.

But Kabwato’s political persona is a rock with a jagged edge. She goes deep to the jagular vein, as violent sometimes as Zimbabwean politics. She shouts at what she sees as betrayal of the nation by its own politicians. She writes the most tumultuous poetry in this collection, pricking you especially where the heart is supposed to be. Kabwato has no faith in the nation’s history or its institutions for she thinks that they are only full of political mobs. You travel down her lines and discover that she actually has faith in the individual conscience that registers and registers and registers the misdemeanors of those with power, reminding you of Charles Mungoshi’s friend in Waiting For the Rain, who is being buried alive, ‘minding the sand no more’.

This is a collection to remember; crispy, inspired and sparsely put together for readers who hate melodrama and verbosity. Many thanks to the Welsh poet, Menna Elfyn who brought together these pieces.

Tafataona Mahoso: the poet that you may not have known

You may not have known that Tafataona Mahoso is a published poet. His one and only collection of poems published in Harare by Nehanda Publishers in 1989 is entitled ‘Footprints about the Bantustan.’

 

When you happen to come across Mahoso in an auditorium, he tends to quickly fold up after the greetings and niceties. He appears to listen to the voice inside the voice of whoever is speaking at the podium.  But when he wants to respond, he shoots up and speaks his mind. He has dedicated his life to pursuing the project of demystifying myths, especially western myths on Africa and Africans.

 

His poetry is just like that!  The man is his poetry and the poetry reminds you of the man himself in many ways. Although these poems were published in 1989, there are pieces in there from as far back as 1976. 

 

On the plain white cover of ‘Footprints about the Bantustan’ are four naked footprints of what must be a gigantic walker going down a village path.  But when you look closely at the footprints on what appears to be a sandy background, you realise that each footprint roughly assumes the map of Africa.  The naked footprints must refer to the usually soulful and unassuming African personality. 

 

These footprints on the sand may also stand for the idea of being fully rooted in Africa, a subject that Mahoso can dwell on at length.  He will also talk about the all-embracing African concept of the circle.

 

Mahoso’s poetry, like most of his other writings, is decidedly about the unequal relationship between what he often terms ‘the North and the South.’  Sometimes Mahoso calls it ‘the North America and Europe against the rest of us.’  Reading these poems, one’s knowledge of the man’s voice is very useful for they are meant to be read aloud.  They are rhythmic, cascading and cajoling.

 

In ‘To The Guardian Angel of Consciousness,’ the persona unravels the whole historic western project of the pacification of Africa and the Third World through lies and the glitter of cheap gadgets.  Like that moment in ‘Hard Times,’ the persona sets out to find ‘the facts’ about the relations between the North and the South, to prune out the chaff and get to the bare realities:

 

“I wanted facts, unslanted, but penetrated like beads

with sinews of analysis:

the ability of the mind to thread issues

out of the paralysis

of denominations, the ability to choose

what is seminal

from what is marginal.”

 

That could be as well be Mahoso’s chosen forte: to undress imperialism and its machinations.  Written in 1979 and revised on July 30 1987, the poem taunts western characters against using haze biblical excuses for the West’s exploitation of ‘the other.’  The persona scoffs at those who threaten the so-called non-believer with the Christians’ devil and hell.  The persona also insists on the point that only critical thinking and open rebellion, instead of giving the other cheek, gave birth to Zimbabwe in 1980.

 

In that poem, the persona who has been to a colonial school rises above the colonial propaganda and sees reality for what it is.  What comes out is that the colonial school and its syllabus are not education but a whole project of alienation.  The project was not to make the pupil understand where he is but to move him from where he is.  That was the only method to make him a perfectly unquestioning servant.

 

The title poem called ‘Footprints about the Bantustan’ is a single monstrous eight page poem.  It swallows and embraces various traditions that you find in each of the other Zimbabwean poets of Mahoso’s generation, ranging from the early nationalistic Chenjerai Hove to Musaemura Zimunya’s sweet-sad romances, through to the combative verses of Freedom Nyamubaya and Thomas Bvuma.

 

To the persona, all colonized space is a Bantustan, as in Apartheid South Africa.  In that case the poem insists that the colonized must dutifully rediscover his fighting spirit so that he can create and name a new reality and identity for himself.  All because in the international Bantustan in which we live, there is:

 

“…enough

drought and dust here.

I cannot count the footprints of

the tick, now all glossy

from sucking the sick dog.”

 

Fortunately, the victim in the Bantustan is not lying down on ‘our page of history.’  The Bantustan cannot be a decent destination because it is made for ‘us’ by ‘them.’  However, as the poem suggests, there is need for us to use this tiny space that we are trapped in, to write our rebellious signature and retrace our footprints out of the Bantustan, back to positive history.  Using our mission-school-taught handwriting, we must, instead, write our very own signature.  The persona in the poem does it in front of the other awestricken villagers:

 

“I go out to scribble my name

over your footmarks in the dirt: Tafataona:

Before we die yet, we shall have seen…

Before we die yet, we shall have realised…

Why would you name a child so?”

 

That poem reads much like Aime Cesaire’s ‘Notebook of a Return to My Native Land’ where history becomes a filthy emotion that becomes a beautiful emotion, that becomes life, that carries the once upon victim to an eternal hygiene! 

 

For the Mahoso persona, the challenge that people of the South face is how to turn from victimhood to becoming agents of their own lives and destinies. 

 

The third poem called ‘Zimbabwe’ is quite a bold poem.  With it Mahoso critiques what happened in Zimbabwe at independence: reconciliation without compensation.  Written in July 1980, the poem shows Mahoso’s bitterness with the new nation’s presumptuous theory of reconciliation.  Mahoso  asks  why we chose to reconcile with those who had not even given up that which they had looted:

 

“Will the nerve reconcile itself

to the naked knife?  By what softness

 of heart can we turn

swords into ploughshares

when we never had swords?”

 

But Mahoso is not through with you yet.  His persona asks another question:

 

“On whose terms, dear commander,

shall the lamb feed together

with the fox? Can the worm bask

in amity with the hoe

which only yesterday cut its spine

into halves?”

 

Indeed, as events would show, two decades down the road the policy of reconciliation in Zimbabwe was proven to have been ‘a strange hope.’  Its basis had been sunk very far from the real ‘goods’ that define life.  As soon as the victims started to reclaim the real ‘real economy,’ Zimbabwe went ablaze!

 

But Mahoso the poet is not just as tough as teak.  He also has some very titillating love poems.  He describes man’s love for woman in a mouth-watering way and could challenge even the master of romance Musa Zimunya himself. In ‘Professor’s Cards A, B,C,D,’ Mahoso goes:

 

“Vivian Mavhaire, since you graduated

I ache like a crater relieved

of its last volcano.”

 

Mahoso’s love poems praise the African woman as the original woman:

 

“African woman of the South

you know how to provoke passions

sharper than the flame lily of Zimbabwe.

Your nipples are packed

with nodules of firm sweetness,

like the black raspberry

of the Sabi River ripening

in its wildness.”

 

Beyond his poetry, Mahoso gives speeches and writes newspaper articles. He was born in 1949 in the Eastern Chimanimani District of Zimbabwe.  He holds a Doctorate in History.

+ Memory Chirere

a review of Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's 'Shadows'

(picture: Novuyo reads from her 'Shadows' at book launch)

 Title:Shadows, Author: Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Published in 2012 by Kushinda, pp95. isbn: 978-0-9571420-1-5

 As this novella begins, Mpho (the narrator) is already steeped in being who he is; a man on a sharp decline. He can never go up. His very first wish, which is the first sentence in this book, is: ‘I want to be alone.’ But he cannot be alone in a populous and seething Bulawayo township.

Mpho does not and may not know who his father is. Mpho does not love his mother; an ageing-nearly-out-of-business and sickly prostitute. Sometimes he watches through the key hole as she is being laid. He has already taken his mother’s prostitute friend, Holly to bed (during a freak sexual storm). Holly cannot wait to have some more from Mpho. This symbolically incestuous act stays with Mpho up to the end. He is going out with Holly’s daughter, Nomsa whom he beds at will. He desires her the way one desires to perform an irresistible ablution. Mpho drops out from a lucrative Chemical Engineering degree at NUST after a student’s riot.

 

Mpho smokes mbanje and only when he is like that, does he see the political and spiritual turmoil in his country more clearly. He writes very desperate poems and uses his brush to paint pictures of death and doom. Mpho has no clear political ideals besides wishing to be happy. He attends both ruling party and oppositional party rallies interchangeably (for the abundant food and t-shirts). That makes his subsequent arrest and harassment misplaced and unjustifiable. The only release available to him towards the end is the hope to meet his dead mother ‘in dark places.’

 

At some point, he leaves behind his mother’s corpse decomposing in the morgue and skips the boarder into South Africa. Unlike the other Zimbabweans who take this archetypal route, Mpho is not in search of a job. He is only after Nomsa, the love of his life. He cannot work. Mention of a job riles and makes him bitter. He eventually learns, like the other stock characters, in Christopher Mlalazi’s Many Rivers and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, that whilst Zimbabwe is in inimitable turmoil, there is necessarily no sweetness abroad for the unwanted Zimbabweans. Mpho eventually returns home to be hounded relentlessly by both the incognito spirit of his mother and the police.

Here is a tale about a dog that chases its unwanted tail, but never hoping to catch it. I have come across similar characters-in-constant-decline in Orlando Patterson's The Children of Sysiphus and Marechera's The House of Hunger. Rasta, the mbanje intoxicated artist at the Bulawayo gallery summarises it all: ‘I am coming my man…Forever coming. I never reach the place where I am going. And this is the whole point. To be forever coming.’

 

This does not mean that this is a depressing book. Far from it! This story is consistently underlain by a satiric comic strain. We are invited to laugh when we should be crying.

 

The descriptions of especially female characters could be the most convincing attributes of Novuyo Tshuma. This book is a startling gallery of women’s images: ‘Holly is a piece of work. Her face is yellow; not a natural from having caramel skin, but a jaundiced yellow from all the lightening creams she uses. The rest of her body is dark. It is a frightening contrast; an oval yellow face and then brown from the neck going down. Brown ears. Brown spots on her yellow forehead. Her weave is a huge blonde coronation that dominates her head. She lights a cigarette.’

And: ‘Mama at dindindi. She is caught by the camera in the middle of a dance. She is halfway to the ground, as though she is squatting. Her bum sticks out behind her. She is gazing over her shoulder at it, as though to make sure it sticks out in the right way. In her hand is a bottle of Black Label. She has a perm on her head, and huge earrings that dangle all the way to her shoulders. Her lips are pulled into a pout, something that can be considered sultry and seductive…There she is getting down. The people have stopped to watch her. They are cheering. She pouts and breaks into the sweetest laughter you ever heard. And there she is, caught in timelessness in a beautiful photograph.’

 

And: ‘A fat woman beckons me. She is standing by the side of the pavement, leaning against Fazak Store. There is a careless wealth in the way in which her doek slops over her shaved head. A wealth that allows her to tear at a piece of Chicken inn thigh, shovel the meat in with a chubby finger and chew with her mouth wide open for us all to see exactly how well this meat slides down her throat… She swings her bulky frame this-a-way-and-that-a-way as she hisses at us the passers-by. Her voice throws a rhythm into the air that matches her pendulum movements. Her pockets bulge with the much coveted forex.’

 
Tshuma’s debut is a second novel by a Zimbabwean going by the title 'Shadows.' Chenjerai Hove has a novel, Shadows, published in 1991. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is an award-winning short fiction writer from Zimbabwe. She was the winner of the Intwasa Short Story Competition 2009. Currently, she is pursuing her studies at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

 + Reviewed by Memory Chirere

 

The story of Chiyadzwa diamonds in fiction

Title: Gweja Nyumwawo, Author: Reason Kufonya

Publisher: Lleemon Publishers, Harare, 2010, pp104

ISBN: 978-07974-4397-6

Reason Kufonya’s debut novel, Gweja Nyumwawo, covers an important gap in Zimbabwean fiction. 

This is the first long fictional work on the goings on during the initial diamond rush in Chiadzwa - Marange diamond fields, a period before government intervention. It is also important to note that the author himself comes from South East Zimbabwe.

Then Marange diamond fields were an area of widespread small-scale diamond production in Chiadzwa, Mutare West, Zimbabwe. As a result, the word Chiadzwa is now associated with the recent diamond rush in Zimbabwe. It all began about 2006 and accelerated tremendously to legendary proportions. By mid-December 2006, around 10,000 illegal miners from all over Zimbabwe and abroad were working very small plots at Marange, and an immediate water, sanitation and housing crisis developed. The miners initially sold their diamonds to the government, but a black market rapidly developed, offering better prices. Gradually the government took over, following subsequent running battles with these illegal miners.

The grapevine in Zimbabwe has many juicy stories from the Chiadzwa diamond rush but most of these stories have largely remained oral. Mistaken Chipikiri is involved in a fight with one of his teachers at Mashoko Mission, Bikita. He is incorrigible and headstrong. Eventually he abandons Form six and decides to hitch hike to nearby Chiadzwa, hoping to find diamonds and make a shorter cut into life.

This becomes a jump into the dark and what he learns, we also learn through this book which keeps you at the edge of a cliff. To read this novel is to walk through a horrific dream. When you finally close it, you want a mental holiday!

Parts of this adventure tale, however, may remind you of TK Tsodzo's Pafunge, a novel of 1972 whose use of the hilarious has no match in Zimbabwean fiction. Gweja Nyumwawo  also extends the Shona vocabulary itself, capturing the language used in the community of these petty diamond miners.

For instance; the word Gweja stands for ‘illegal small time diamond miner.’ Gweja Nyumwawo! (illegal miner beware!) is a common call amongst these hounded miners on noticing that an unsuspecting colleague is about to be pounced upon by the security forces. Gwejerine is the female version of gweja. Gwejambuya refers to an old female miner. Gwejasekuru stands for the old female miner.

Kuherereswa means to be chased by the security forces. There is usually a lot of stampede. Dzemabhinya refers marijuana that the gwejas smoke to have courage. Munda means the diamond field itself. Zvinhu zvakafudhubhaiwa means food that is cooked for sale and looks very appetising. And there are various terms for diamond. Ngoda stands for the ordinary diamond. Ngoda-girazidombo is the diamond of a higher value than the former. Then clear glass refers to diamond of the highest value.

The gwejas even come up with slogans and songs in the fashion of political parties. They are conscious of themselves as a type. Sadly, they have no capacity to see the matter beyond the individual. The author follows a thin thread, investigating how one unruly boy tries to come to terms with his desire for cash and cargo. He is caught up in a matter whose extend he cannot adequately comprehend.

Here, the law of the jungle applies. There is a wide range of artisans serving the illegal mining community. Preachers, healers, prostitutes, fortune tellers and diamond buyers crisscross the bush. At one moment a woman gives birth to a baby and all the women cordon off the maternity spot. Mistaken Chipikiri bumps into his former teacher who is digging for diamonds and the master pleads with his former pupil not to take the story back home where he is a respectable member of the community.

Mistaken Chipikiri discovers that the miners operate in numerous syndicates. These are small groups of vigilantes around certain war hardened fighters. The groups defend themselves against both the police and rival groups. They are responsible for ferrying home dead bodies, when colleagues fall by the way.There are such groups as Wagerwa Wagerwa (which means let the weak suffer) a group that Mistaken Chipikiri joins. The men in this group dare the police and soldiers on the field and their ‘wives’ do the domestic chores at the base which is often in the rear. Eventually the loot is shared equally amongst the group and some track back home to buy cattle and property. Chipikiri’s group get to the point of even buying a car!
 

There is also another group called Unemployment Benefit which is led by Dhiredhi who is a terror in this community. He collects taxes and protection fees. He is also ready to stab anyone who crosses his path. In one moment of madness, he tears apart a whole police dog with bare hands. Whenever he earns money, he retreats to Birchenough Bridge or Nyika growth point to be merry, returning only when he is broke. 

A member of this group says: ‘Mari yokwaChiyadzwa inongoda kudyiwa nemativi ose okudya nawo mari... Mari yakadai haidi vane musoro, ukatenga mombe dzinozongopera kufa nechirwere. Ukaroora mukadzi anotorwa nechikomba chaunonwa nacho doro. Ukatenga mota inoita tsaona. Ukatenga hembe dzinobiwa nembavha dzakayanikwa…Ukabhadharira mwana chikoro anofoira…’ Money from selling the Chiyadzwa diamonds is cursed. It is only good for spending and not for clear plans. If you buy cattle with it, they eventually die. If you pay lobola, the wife goes away with another man. If you buy a car, it eventually crushes. If you buy clothes, they are eventually stolen from the washing line. If you pay fees for your child, he fails his exams…

These characters seem to fly from the page because their desires are real and their follies universal.

This story is a must read for government officials, sociologists, psychologists, miners and others. Although it is clear that Reason Kufonya was looking for a clean moralist exit, what is clear is that if we are to benefit from our resources, we need a collective, orderly and nuanced approach. The gweja character in this story dramatises our primitive desire to snatch, run and eat behind the bushes.

+Reviewed by Memory Chirere