A recording from The Poetry Library’s Special Edition series. Featuring Jack Mapanje and Landeg White in conversation, chaired by David Constantine. Recorded in The Poetry Library on Wednesday 4th May 2016.

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Review of Chenjeerai Hove, Bones: a Novel Baobab Books (Harare, 1988) & Isheunesu Valentine Mazorodze, Silent Journey From the East (Zimbabwe Publishing House.

These two books, the first an elegiac prose-poem, the second a novel of bald action, continue the enquiry which has preoccupied Zimbabwean literature since the mid-Seventies into the struggle for national liberation. It has been an enquiry into violence analysed morally and psychologically in terms of its rationalisations and its consequences. Ironically, it is the heirs of the former ‘terrorists’ who are conducting the enquiry rather than the heirs of the custodians of ‘civilised’ values for whom Wilbur Smith remains compulsive reading.

Tim McLoughlin has distinguished “two poles” in Zimbabwean writing, “the one that manifests historical, social and political forces in external action, the other an exploration of internal awareness” with violence being seen as a “necessity and inevitable” in both. There is a further distinction worth making, this time at the level of language. Consider the following extract from Silent Journey From the East :

Donald listened carefully as the man continued. “It is very important, therefore, to look back at those times when we suffered, when we lost friends and relatives without emotion so that we can extract the very important lessons delivered to us by such incidents. The ability to look boldly into the past without remorse or emotion is, I think, one of the ingredients of success in life Whether you like it or not, you are part of the war and you should never try to fight against that reality. Bow yourself down to the rules of the revolution in the same way you have to bow down to the rules of life.

The language here derives from the English-language politics of the liberation struggle – a language of speeches and semi-theoretical debate supplemented by the educational and bureaucratic English which has become the medium of Zimbabwe’s official culture. It is obviously capable of analytic insight, particularly in the public arena, but it tends when deployed in literature to depend on regular supplements of ‘feeling’ or analogy which are essentially sentimental glosses on the ideological content. Its inadequacies appear most exposed in poems about the liberation struggle, such as these overloaded lines by Chenjerai Hove:

Limping hearts leapt sky-wards
and sore throats blackened
as thunder boomed roared
to cleanse defiled tribes
Of human desecration
In camouflaged hearts
Licking bare soles of torn souls
seeking to pay in lead
the debt owed by so few to multitudes

It’s not the poet’s impulse that has failed here, the desire to honour the hopes of oppressed people as the war rages on their behalf, but the language — too many adjectives, sensationalised verbs, metaphors which don’t work (the debt is being paid the wrong way round, and why “licking”, why the sudden capitals at the beginnings of lines 5 to 7?)

But there is another Zimbabwean English used in this literature of violence, represented again by Chenjerai Hove in this extract from Bones:

Did people not get sad when Rukato was stabbed to death? They did — but they said too that they hated his way of boasting about having slept with so-and-so’s daughter or so-and-so’s wife the day before Yes, what can you do to me? I am Rukato the tree of many hooked thorns. Who can tackle the tree of many hook thorns without dying? Try to tackle Rukato and only the neighbours will be able to tell their neighbours what a real corpse looks like But when Rukato’s corpse lay there like a bag of mielie-meal dropped from the tractor by Manyepo’s driver, who did not hear their heart beat with sadness? Death is like that. Even if you wish it on someone, you may not be the one to see the corpse before anyone else.

I am no Shona speaker and must be careful about asserting the Shona sources for this English. It is obvious at once, however, that the doctrinaire message of the first passage could not be conveyed by the language of the second.

There was a time, following the publication of Aaron Hodza and George Fortune’s Shona Praise Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1979), when there seemed grounds for scepticism about the sheer lyrical beauty of Shona poetry in translation. The Shona Praises seemed so unlike the contents of companion volumes in the Oxford African Literature series and Hodza,who did most of the collecting and translating was plainly a very fine poet in his own right. Was he using the oral praises as the inspiration for rhapsodies of his own? His death and the disappearance of his papers to Cape Town does not quite resolve some of these doubts. But there has been abundant evidence since of the ability of Shona writers, even in English translation, to express dimensions of Zimbabwean experience which bureaucratic Zimbabwean English cannot match. Colin and O-lan Style’s Mambo Book of Zimbabwean Verse in English (Mambo Press, 1986) contains approximately 240 poems by Zimbabwean Africans. Fully half of these are in fact translations from Shona (or Ndebele) written sources and much of the remainder reads like the translation of poets, like Musaemura Zimunya and Eddison Zvogbo, operating easily between Shona and English. The richness of the volume derives for the most part from the number of these poems rooted in Zimbabwe’s living languages as they in turn are rooted in the landscape and culture.

Bones is a marvellous book, drawing on this Shona lyricism to create an English idiom which persuades, more completely than anything else I have read, that this was how the war was experienced in rural Zimbabwe. It is a difficult book to get through not, as has been suggested, because the narrative is confusing but because the writing is so eloquent, such a sheet delight to read, that the eye keeps pausing to re-read and relish instead of proceeding. Its success in winning the 1989 Noma award restores faith in literary competitions.

On first reading, there appears to be a number of different narrators — Janifa (Jennifer) the girl, Marita the mother of her “boyfriend”, Murume Marita’s husband, Manyepo the white landowner, Chisaga his cook, an Unknown Woman who accompanies Marita to the city, and the Spirits. By the end, however, it is clear that all these voices exist in Janifa’s disturbed mind. She lives in chains in the local asylum, reliving the tragedy of a war which destroyed her and the women she most cared for though neither of them witnessed any fighting.

The story is straightforward. Marita married Murume, the son of a chief, but they were unable to have children, and after years of suffering from herbalists they leave home to become labourers on the farm of the white settler nicknamed Manyepo. There, at last, Marita has a son who, in his adolescence, writes Janifa a love letter. He disappears to join the freedom fighters and Marita and Janifa become friends, joined by the letter in a relationship which stops just short of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Because of her son’s action, Marita is beaten and raped by the security forces.

She decides to go to Salisbury for news of her son and pays for the journey by persuading Chisaga, Manyepo’s cook who has long wanted to sleep with her, to steal from his boss in return for sex — and then leaves before completing the bargain. In Salisbury where she is again ill-treated, Marita dies and an Unknown Woman who travelled on the bus with her and who is herself compensating for her husband’s betrayal of a group of freedom fighters tries to claim the body for a proper burial. Chisaga claims Janifa as Marita’s substitute and when she refuses him he rapes her. Her own family disown her as she refuses to marry Chisaga and she becomes insane.

There are events that are recreated in Janifa’s disordered mind, the voices crowding her head asserting their separate claims. The voices blend, overlapping with each other, creating a haunting elegy for the sufferings of rural Zimbabwe and especially of the sufferings of women. They reach backwards in time to a vision like Ezekiel’s of the bones littering the landscape after the first Chimurenga, and they reach forward into the first years of independence. When the Unknown Woman persists in trying to give Marita a proper burial, staging her personal protest outside the morgue, the new Zimbabwean officials complain about the mad people in rags who are allowed to spoil their nice city: ‘this stubbornness couldn’t have been heard in the time of the white man’s rule: the women would be sitting in prison now, waiting for tomorrow’ (p.94). Meanwhile, back on the rural farm, Manyepo declares ‘I rule here If your government wants to run this farm, let them bloody take over. Then we will see if they can run a farm’ (p. 120).

For the poor of this novel, nothing has been changed by the war. For mad Janifa, conjuring with visions of alternative endings, there is none that would bring comfort or happiness, none that would be right.

In an interview with Flora Wild, Chenjerai Hove described teaching near Masvingo in 1977/78:

You always found yourself there with the people, you don’t look at it from a Rhodesian soldier’s point of view or a guerrilla’s point of view, you look at it from a peasant’s point of view. When you are with them you see their problems, you attend a funeral of some who have been massacred and so on. And then you begin to understand what it is to be without a gun between two people who have guns.

This is not neutrality. Later in the same interview, he praises the poet, Wilfred Owen, for recognising “the absurdity of war, how wasteful it is of youth, young people going to war to be butchered”, and this vision is present in Bones in the description of children being massacred in a righteous cause. But the perspective is that of the peasant caught between two sides with guns. “You people of the city”, says Marita at one point, “do not know what war was all about” (p.88). What Hove has done wonderfully is to give a voice to the powerless, creating an idiom which makes available not only their experiences but a strong sense of their values.

The experiences are vivid — the schoolteacher’s bullying over the love letter, conversations behind the ant-hill, the overseer’s obscenities, the feel of sweat and hunger. But what resonates most strongly is the bed-rock of rural charity. Marita, for instance, refuses to testify to the guerrillas against Manyepo insisting ‘his badness is just like any other person’. When challenged in this by Janifa she explains: “Child, what do you think his mother will say when she hears that another woman sent her son to his death.” Like Homer, these villagers know that the death of one’s enemy is tragic too.

No such insight mars the complacencies of Silent Journey From the East. Incompetently plotted and ineptly written, it tells the story of three boys from Waddilove school (‘loud cheering from the jovial crowd as the young men scrambled to earn points for their houses’) who cultivate the habit of visiting the local compounds where they are “touched’ by the villagers’ ‘rural simplicity and straightforwardness.” But they also get drunk and in a scuffle injure a girl friend’s father and then kill the girl herself. Fleeing towards Mozambique, they are implausibly accepted by the freedom fighters as recruits. They take new names, undergo many hardships, go through a period of physical and political training, and then make their silent journey from the east towards the war zones. In the heat of the battle, their different characters are confirmed.

At one level, this book is a Zimbabwean version of the oldest white settler myths. Three callow adolescents go into the bush and emerge as men, initiated by the disciplines of violence. There are curious echoes of Rider Haggard and even, in the laboured humour, of Three Men in a Boat. At another by no means incompatible level, it reflects accurately Zimbabwe’s current political atmosphere, the double-think of socialism and personal advancement, patrician politics with a revolutionary face. The novel’s opening anecdote preaches that the people must be helped but it is dangerous to help them for they are “primitive animals” not to be trusted. The solution lies in submission to the “rules of revolution” and to the “rules of life”, incorporating presumably the rules of one-party rule.

The novel has one interesting passage, describing the moment the guerrillas re-enter Zimbabwe and the rituals of their dealings with the spirit mediums. These appear to be based on experience (the author is an ex-combatant) rather than on a reading of David Lan and the passage (pp. 143-7) deserves attention. Elsewhere, the quality of the writing is best illustrated by this grotesque passage introducing the girl killed in the compound:

The girl was indeed a lovely testimony to the infinite artistic capabilities of nature. One could look at her for hours on end, imagining the skilful hand of nature running carefully through the deep grooves which formed her eye sockets. One could sit and imagine the skill invested in placing the eyes so deep into the skull and still avoid depriving them of the gift of sight and beauty. It was indeed equally amazing how her large jaws (on which her yellow teeth stood) remained attached to her skull, having been delicately hanging for a staggering period of seventeen years.

Are there no editors at Zimbabwe Publishing House? Silent Journey From the East is a sympton of Zimbabwe’s disease. Bones, in complete contrast, is part of the cure.

First Published Southern African Review of Books, Issue 13, February/May 1990

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Review of Alec Pongweni, The Oral Traditions of the Shona Peoples of Zimbabwe: Studies of their folktales, songs, praise poetry and naming practices (Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society, 2012)

For scholars at African universities, life continues to be tough. The pay is wretched, the workload in both teaching and administration beyond the wildest nightmares of AUT members in Britain. Facilities are cramped and crumbling, and libraries starved of publications. Even for those who have negotiated the political minefields of states where neutrality is not an option, there remain the hazards of inadvertently giving a bad grade to a student with important connections, or of simply being from the wrong part of the country. Meanwhile, our putative scholar has to watch his compatriots, exiled by compulsion or by choice, flourishing at foreign universities, with access to proper libraries and opportunities for publication. The most visible research on African themes has long been conducted in the United States and in Europe.

Scholars at universities in southern Africa have had to contend with another problem. The best regional resources are found in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet universities there were seriously damaged by the academic boycott over three decades, which left much scholarship “provincial” in the worst sense. After 1994, researchers at the universities of Malawi, Zambia or Lesotho could find themselves patronized by colleagues from the south, who actually knew less about the key issues than they did. The balance has yet to be fully restored.

Alec Pongweni is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Botswana, which has itself over the past three decades offered internal asylum to scholars in trouble (Pongweni formerly lectured in linguistics at the University of Zimbabwe). His Oral Traditions of the Shona Peoples of Zimbabwe is characterized by clarity of expression, generosity towards other scholars, a deep love of Shona culture and a concern for the state of the language. Versions of each chapter have appeared before, but in small editions, not easily located. Cape Town’s Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society was amply justified in combining them in this volume.

The longest is a monograph in itself, a humane and richly entertaining study of “Shona naming practices”. People may acquire names in six different ways: two at birth as personal and lineage names, a third conferred by the diviner, a fourth descriptive of character, a fifth marking an important event, and a substitute replacement name, such as those of guerrillas fighting during the war of independence. Their linguistic structure is described and analysed. But “any list of Shona names is a palimpsest … one cannot but be struck by the wealth of information, historical, merely descriptive or picturesque, or social”, contained in a telephone directory or a graduation programme. The essay is exemplary in teasing out examples.

A similar social focus informs his analysis of advertising in Zimbabwe. Beyond linguistics, Pongweni shows up the casual racial stereotyping in the marketing of skin-lighting creams (“for beautiful women”), Bata shoes (“a new style walking our nation”), and urban furniture (“no one wants to eat sitting cross-legged”). Typically, he links this with the decline of the extended family. Whereas a schoolteacher was formerly expected to meet school fees for his third cousins, his own children now demand “Bata bush babies” and Fanta that “freshivates” (Pongweni adds, “who can blame them?”), making wider responsibilities unaffordable. There are essays on Figurative Language, on Gender and Sexuality, and on Text and Context in Shona Folklore, including Stereotypes of Women. But the most substantial ones, following on from the concern with naming practices, are on Shona praises and resistance songs, patently his first love.

Much oral poetry, clan praises included, is not readily accessible. References can be obscure, even to the performer, and when the metaphors refer to movements between settlements, or succession disputes, the history can be lost in the poetry. Pongweni is meticulous in teasing out the meanings of dense texts, paying particular attention to linguistic forms. This is invaluable. But in decoding the poems’ alternative history, he skimps rather why they are valued as poetry. About one construction, describing a totemic lion, he notes how the “low tones and affricative and plosive consonants onomatopoetically imitate the guttural, seemingly subterranean roar of the lion”. On lines from one of the Chimurenga songs, about “women possessed of indolence / Who spend their time sharpening fingernails, / Fingernails for scratching the people of Zimbabwe”, he comments that nzara (fingernails) also signifies famine, while kwenya (scratch) doubles as the word for lighting a fire. One would like more of this, demonstrating the performer’s riddling ingenuity.

Attempts to express the sheer power of the material can misfire. The line Ndopatigere pano from a song by Jordan Chitaika about forced relocation is translated variously as “This is where we live”, “This is now our home”, “We have to call this home”, “Whether we like it or not, this is our home”, “That’s home for us”, “But now we find ourselves here”, and “How fickle fate is”. The linguist’s anxiety to capture the line’s rich nuances is manifest. But the song’s poignant economy is dissipated, as Chitaika is made to sound garrulous. This niggle comes from a reviewer who honours the material as Alec Pongweni does, without a fraction of his expertise.

First Published Times Literary Supplement, 13 December 2013

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When Paul Celan met Heidegger
in that Black Forest hut

where the philosopher and nature met
in the manner of soiled centuries,

his question hung in the damp air:
what of Jews and the Gypsies?

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Review of David B. Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals, The word music of South Africa’s Basotho migrants (University of Chicago Press, 1994)

Hurry quickly people,
You know, those of Mojetla’s should take dry grass stalks:
Now you fold them double,
Now each one dig out the earwax,
And listen to the wonders and evils of the world.

Marvellous things are happening in the study of African Oral Literature. The days are gone when the subject was dominated, in Ruth Finnegan’s words, by the “study of detailed stylistic points or formulaic systems leading to statistical conclusions”. Students have dug the wax out of their ears and begun to attend to the intellectual content of performance. Thus, hard on the heels of Karin Barber’s superb study of Yoruba Oriki (I Could Speak Till Tomorrow, 1991) and Isabel Hofmeyr’s eloquent account of South African oral narrative (We Spend Our Lives as a Tale that is Told, 1994) comes David B. Coplan’s loving analysis of Basotho migrants’ sefela.

The Basotho have been selling their labour to South Africa first on the railways, then in the diamond mines of Kimberley and the gold mines of Johannesburg since the days when Moshoeshoe successfully repulsed attempts to absorb his mountain kingdom. Today, labour migration is the pervasive reality of Basotho life, involving 80 per cent of men and an unknown number of women for long periods of their working lives. Sefela, or to use the full name, sefela sa setsamaea-naha le separloa-thota, “songs of the inveterate travellers” (or as one of Coplan’s singers put it, “songs of those who have seen the places and the spaces in between the places”), are the poetic autobiographies of these adventurers. Coplan has recorded performances from both men and women, mainly in the shebeens of the lowland border towns where the recruiting offices are located, following up the recordings with interviews to elucidate points of meaning and form. Proving the appropriateness of the name sefela, he never found a single performer in the same place twice.

No sefela were recorded before 1975, and the history of the form is uncertain. The name links it with the self-praises of initiates on the day of their graduation (and hence to the name missionaries gave their hymns, operating on the principle that the devil has the best tunes). But Coplan shows persuasively that sefela are related to the non-chiefly self-praises commonplace throughout southern Africa, and he offers riveting exegeses of two comparable texts published by Hugh Tracey in 1959 and by H. E. Jankie in 1939. Internal evidence suggests origins in the late nineteenth century. Singers boast about walking to Kimberley. Hardly any work at Kimberley these days, and none of them walk there, but “Going to libere” (De Beers) is still shorthand for working in South Africa, and it was 1906 when the first rail link reached Lesotho. Further internal evidence is the common “set piece” describing the train journey south. Most migrants these days go by taxi, taking the diesel from the border. But sefela are full of loving descriptions of centipedes panting and belching smoke as they carry the workers south.

A typical male sefela will be 500-900 lines long, performed before a noisy shebeen audience and containing (in no special order) descriptions of his origins, his herding days, his complicated journey to the mines and his experiences there. The women, who have made the journey as brewers or prostitutes (or both), are equally resolute and individualistic in their self-praises, singing of boyfriends and gang fights and defending their life-style as useful and positive. An English poet can only envy the comprehensiveness of the form and the variety of tone and diction as the singer “shakes the nation with a song about his own experience”. Sefela can accommodate this: “These clouds cradle on their shoulders the dawn / This moon cradles on its shoulders the stars”; and this: “What do I say to you, gamblers (poets)? / I was the clerk of the toilet / Man , I was serving toilet papers / I was forever viewing the backsides of people.” One singer describes how the train taking him back to the mines passes another decorated with karosses (a chiefly prerogative) carrying a gift of oxen from South African Prime Minister Verwoerd to Chief Leabua Jonathan. In this exchange of “cattle”, he sees the whole predicament of his country and his people.

Most impressive is what sefela tell of the gold mines. It is rare for Southern African songs to take us down the mines. Chopi migodo stop at “the door of the cage”, talking of the courage needed to enter, while a popular song in Malawi considers all the possible destinations of the labour migrant but balks at “ku-Joni (Johannesburg) where there are ladders going down”. These sefela singers are bolder. One graphic poem describes a mine accident in which a hundred men died: “It’s me who survived, a cannibal of a man, / I was pulling corpses from under rocks, / People’s children have rotted; they smell, / They already swarm with maggots, / No, but these mine affairs, you can leave them.” Another, in an astonishing turn of trope, uses the paraphernalia of mining cables, ore-buckets, bad food and infested clothing, the unexploded charge left in a drill hole as metaphors for poetic composition: I (recite) as long as the cable pulling ore-buckets around the scotch-winch. I refuse (to empty) into the collecting drum, Even back down to the diggings still full . . . .

What do I say to you, gamblers?
I am a dog’s stomach; I don’t get cooked.
I am skin with lice; I am not worn.
I am nest of mites; I am not entered.
I am like a charge that remained in the ore-face (unexploded).

Coplan is an anthropologist and a former professional musician. He is very good on the popular culture of shebeens, gang warfare and prostitution. His descriptions are vivid and he packs his text with fascinating detail such as that “No17” is slang for something out of control because that’s what the label on a bottle of Lion lager reads as, when drained and upside-down. In one startling passage, he gets migrants to perform for him the dance at which handsome new recruits are distributed to the older miners as their compound “wives”. On the poetics of sefela he is less agile. His approach is thematic, but the themes are anthropological (birth, herding, initiation, migration), the songs being raided for insights into these life stages. Though his quotations are generous, it is a little disappointing that he offers only two complete texts (if the University of Chicago Press is responsible for this, then shame on them; they should be urged to publish an edited selection of the “dozens of recordings” Coplan made). In his comments on the making of sefela, he is too dependent on the rather wooden comments (wooden in contrast to his own lively style) of earlier experts, to the effect that metaphors have “both emotional and ideational content”, or that games are classified by “the perceptible qualities inherent in those modes of production”. Throughout the text, he tends to insert adjectives like “intertextual”, “hypertextual” and “metapoetic” into sentences which work perfectly well without them. These over-the-shoulder glances at postmodernism seem unnecessary in the discussion of a genre in which, if the author is dead, there’s no performance and the audience goes home disappointed. What is needed is an aesthetic which has the author alive and kicking and which gives full weight to the authority of his or her language, an authority which Hugh Tracey was the first to label “poetic licence”. It is not for nothing that these singers are known collectively as “the eloquent ones”, or individually by such sobriquets as “Wheels” (because of his rolling style of delivery) or “Mr Worldly” (because of his deployment of several languages).

Coplan concludes that “the continuing development of Sesotho as a living culture guiding autonomous social action has passed in large degree from aristocratic retainers and praise singers to the inveterate travellers”. It is hard not to have some sneaking sympathy with the Mosotho professor who complained to Coplan that “these things . . . bars and prostitutes . . . were never in Lesotho, they have been brought in from South Africa”. But with this book the ball is in the professor’s court. It is in the imagined world of sefela that Lesotho’s future, whatever it may be, is contained. As for African studies, may the gods send us many such books.

 

First published Times Literary Supplement, 2 June, 1995.

 

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