Windows into Zimbabwe

In 2019, Franziska Kramer and Jürgen Kramer compiled and introduced a selection of short stories for the anthology, Windows into Zimbabwe (Weaver Press). Here they share part of their introduction, looking at literature in Zimbabwe and key literary figures from the country.

Courses on African Literature(s) in European and American universities and schools have proliferated over the past few decades. Slowly but distinctly, the relevance of the African continent, its peoples and cultures is being recognised and paid heed to in many spheres of education. Unfortunately, discussions of sub-Saharan literature(s) in English have mainly focused on texts from South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya because of the economic and political importance of these countries, but also because of the great diversity as to content and the unquestionable literary merit of their writers’ products. Other countries, however, have also produced texts of literary and cultural relevance which deserve to be read closely, analysed meticulously and enjoyed for their literary brilliance. The present collection of short stories is intended to open windows on the history, politics and culture of Zimbabwe over the past half century. In this period, momentous social and political changes took place which resulted from developments that can be traced back as far as the nineteenth century. Understanding today’s Zimbabwe requires a brief look at the history of the British Empire.

Literature

A glance at Zimbabwe tells me that this is a bad story that needs more than thorough editing; it needs a complete rewrite.

Brian Chikwava

To begin with, looking at fictional texts involves the twofold analysis of how they apprehend, work on and reflect the world they draw on, and how they attract, appeal to and affect the readership they address. Accordingly, the first thing to find out is if and to what extent the assembled texts provide a variety of ‘windows’ on Zimbabwean history, culture and society, what kind of viewpoints they offer for an appreciation of the country’s development over the past half century and if and how the wider context is established. Secondly, as a reader one’s immediate points of interest, of approval or rejection can be found in the various protagonists (be they perpetrators or victims), their characters, motives and ideologies. The latter usually form a part of the ‘messages’ and ‘morals’ of the texts. Potentially, they are amplified or mitigated by the texts’ structures and the various kinds of language employed.

More specifically, literary texts act as ‘windows’ on the history and culture of a particular society and form a significant part of this society’s cultural memory. The latter can be understood to have three dimensions serving three different functions. Firstly, it can be used by the ruling political, social or cultural strata as a means of legitimating their rule. Moreover, whoever rules, be it by force or hegemony, may want to retrospectively legitimate their coming to power as well as to fix it firmly in the eyes of posterity. But secondly, as all exercises of power tend to generate resistance, those who do not belong to the ruling strata and/or do not believe in their ways of legitimating their rule tend to critically and subversively question the cultural ‘work’ supporting them. Moreover, they construct alternative memories, by which they tend to de-legitimate whatever the ruling strata want to legitimate and, of course, also to legitimate their own perspective. Thirdly, there is the dimension of distinction which is used by both parties. It comprises all cultural forms which help to enhance the collective identity of a group or society.

These ideas are applicable to more or less all kinds of societies; they can also be applied to coloniser-colonised relationships as well as to the post-colonial relationships between rulers and their subjects. In the case of Zimbabwe, it could be argued that, on the one hand, since independence, the ruling strata have not preoccupied themselves with literary matters: with one exception books have not been banned, and hardly any writers been silenced. On the other hand, the censorship laws (a residue from the colonial government) were not abolished, fear has possibly led to self-censorship and self-imposed exile, there is a constant awareness that narratives, whether literary or pedagogic, which are not sufficiently ‘patriotic’ may be dismissed, and their authors or teachers marginalised. All governments since 1980 have been anything but neutral in cultural matters and all texts which conveyed critical images of the country were potentially subversive, implicitly or explicitly de-legitimising the views of the ruling strata.

While literary texts can (and do) contribute to all of the three dimensions sketched above, in our collection we have focused on the second and the third, because what is represented (i.e. remembered) in literary texts is inextricably combined with ethical considerations. The latter, we think, should recall Aristotle’s sentiment that ‘the weaker are always anxious for equality and justice, while the strong pay no heed to either’ and should, therefore, privilege the perspective of those ‘who paid the bill’, who suffered from neglect, torture, trauma. Certainly, literature can inform and please us, but it comes into its own when moves us, enrages us and inspires us to act. It is in this context that a particular choice we made should be regarded and appreciated: roughly a third of the texts in this collection either focuses on or is narrated from the perspective of children or young teenagers. While these protagonists certainly labour the most under their conditions of survival, they also inspire the reader best through their capacity for suffering, their courage and their resilience.

The history of Zimbabwean literature is not very long; it compasses but four generations. The first generation were born and raised before the Second World War, and became part of ‘the first elite of educated Africans in Rhodesia, a formative group in the rise of nationalism’ . The second generation comprised those writers mostly born after the Second World War, whose adolescence was strongly influenced by the political climate in UDI Rhodesia and who began writing in the 1970s: ‘Political and cultural isolation from the outside, fierce oppression inside and the general feeling of hopelessness made this period what later became known as “those years of drought and hunger” [Musaemura Zimunya]’ (Veit-Wild, Flora (1992), Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers. A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature, London: Hans Zell: 153). With independence, the third generation of writers emerged who could enjoy dramatically improved conditions for black writing (new publishing houses, expanded education, writers’ association and unions etc.). However, ‘while political power changed hands, political restrictions remained’: the censorship laws, introduced by the UDI government in 1965, were neither abolished nor changed (Veit-Wild 1992: 303). The fourth generation of writers, the so-called ‘born[1]frees’, began writing and publishing in the second half of the 1990s, when the Zimbabwean ‘crisis’ began to bite.

While for the first generation (with writers like Lawrence Vambe, Stanlake Samkange and Solomon Mutswairo), a writer was a kind of ‘moral guide’ (Veit-Wild 1992: 78 et seq.) who would do well to reconstruct the people’s pre-colonial past and play a part in developing and spreading civilised behaviour across the country, the second generation (including amongst others, Charles Mungoshi, Stanley Nyamfukudza and Dambudzo Marechera) rather focused on the concerns of the present and the artistic nature, i.e. the literariness, of the texts they wrote. The third generation (including Chenjerai Hove, Shimmer Chinodya and Tsitsi Dangarembga) dispensed with such self-imposed demands with regard to form and content – and the next generation even more so: they simply want to write as and about what they like.

The members of this fourth generation – amongst them Petina Gappah, Christopher Mlalazi and Brian Chikwava – knowingly set out to tread new ground. They neither overly lament the horrors of the colonial past, nor excessively bewail the atrocities of the liberation war and its aftermath; they do not feel sorry for themselves as latecomers to a great (but largely illusive) struggle or as disadvantaged or alienated protagonists who had deserved something better. Theirs is a particular mixture of cool clear-sightedness, tough resilience and wry humour which enables them to register, record, react to, reconstruct and, most importantly, rewrite the Zimbabweans’ struggle for individual freedom, social justice and human dignity. Whether they have stayed in the country or are living in the diaspora, their motto is ‘we write what we like’ (Christopher Mlalazi). And, although it seems hardly likely under the current economic and social conditions, they find small local publishers who invest their scant resources in the publication of poetry, novels and short story collections. Avowedly, these publishers want to provide a platform for young writers who might not otherwise be heard or read because they believe that ‘fiction is a form of truth-telling, offering a perspective on life in particular periods that once told cannot be erased’. Referring to the Weaver Press series (edited by Irene Staunton) which began with Writing Still (2003), Brian Chikwawa suggested in 2007 that,

a natural progression ought to be Writing Nervous, for it is a nervous pulse that beats beneath the face of any Zimbabwean, be it a writer or a crack lipped mother in the rural areas who knows first-hand the kind of tricky relationship a child can have with its empty stomach, or a nurse in the diaspora who dreads the text message from her family asking her to wire more money back to their family who find themselves increasingly unable to look after themselves in an economy ravaged by inflation, the unemployed citizen who braves the aquatic predators of the Limpopo to become an illegal immigrant in South Africa, or the firebrand intellectual who dabbled in utilitarianism of a Stalinist variety – advocating the tearing down of the social fabric and national institutions in the name of the final revolution, the third chimurenga – and now finds him/herself sitting at his/her desk; pondering the question of again cutting off whatever is left of our national nose to show what we are capable of when push comes to shove. All are in a nervous condition; all are hostages. That includes the president himself, who is held hostage by his own will, is nervous about the future. Nervous because although he may have seen the moral shallowness of imperialism, colonialism, global capitalism and mutations of such, far from raising himself above such moral conventions, he continues to live in a moral depravity that he makes up for by exercising brutal power over ordinary citizens. His would be a fascinating contribution to Writing Nervous. (Chikwawa, 2007, Zimbabwean Literature: A Nervous Condition, Pambazuka News )

The publisher did not follow this suggestion, but Chikwawa’s diagnosis of ‘an urgent pulse’ in Zimbabwean writing may suitably give the reader perspective and direction for the impending reading process. Sadly, in Zimbabwe hardly anybody buys books. Except for the small local publishers already mentioned, the national book business is dead; international books are costly and hard to come by. Even if books (other than school textbooks and how-to manuals) could be had, most people would not be able to afford them.

How to use this collection

Our selection of twenty-three texts is ‘introduced’ by Shimmer Chinodya’s story ‘Queues’, in which two narratives are interwoven: a ‘personalised’ version of the history of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe from the mid-seventies to the end of the millennium, and a story of two people falling in and, subsequently, out of love with each other. While this text cleverly delineates the specific properties of the individual and the collective, the personal and the political as well as their inevitable interdependence, its meaning forms the sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit common thread which runs through all the stories. We thought it worthwhile, however, to differentiate several themes or foci: (1) Independence – Before and After and What Came in Between; (2) Gukurahundi; (3) Whose Land is it? (4) Gender Relations; (5) Money Matters; (6) Social Relations; (7) Exile and (8) Resilience. We allotted two or three stories to each category to provide as complex an understanding of the problems involved as possible. The final story, Nevanji Madanhire’s ‘The Grim Reaper’s Car’ was already published in 2003. Strangely enough, it represents not only a kind of bottom line of the collection as a whole but could in itself not be more topical. Each author is briefly introduced, indispensable bits and pieces of information are provided and a short ‘opening-up’ of the text is suggested. We hope to make it clear that different readings are possible, nay desirable. 

This is an edited extract from Windows into Zimbabwe: An Anthology of Short Stories by Jürgen Kramer, Franziska Kramer. It is available from African Books Collective. 
To see more by Weaver Press, take a look at their publisher page.