By Memory Chirere
ON reflection, Zimbabwe, at 44, opens floodgates of memories of the early 1980s. For some of 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 of 1980.
Stanley Nyamfukudza’s 1983 collection of short stories called ‘Aftermaths’ go beyond celebrating April 18 1980. These stories by Nyamfukudza dwell on the ‘finer’ reactions to independence. They explore various emotions, expectations and some anxieties of a freshly independent nation.
In that context, you cannot also avoid the fact that during the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe, Nyamfukudza went into exile in the UK. He was among 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 were the late politician Witness Mangwende and fellow writer, Dambudzo Marechera.
This generation went into exile or crossed the borders 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 boyhood 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 tranquillity, there is foreboding tension underneath.
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 their impeccable English, German, Swiss or Swahili.
Time and experience had created a certain unbelievable social divide between those who had remained at home and those who had ‘gone away’.
Nyamfukudza’s persona feels ‘robbed, childishly but painfully’. There is this feeling that this is a community that has gone through a shock experience and soon, there would be time to stand up and be normal again.
Maybe Nyamfukudza’s most dense and poetic story of the ‘new’ 1980s is ‘Settlers’. It is apparently based on the early Zimbabwe land reform and 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 breadbasket of Africa’, stuck as people flocked from the ‘tired’ soils of Masvingo, Madziwa, Chiweshe, Gwaai . . . to open up heavy, virgin tracts of fields in Muzarabani, Sanyati, Gokwe . . . Indeed, ‘swords had turned into plough-shares’. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to be useful, to dig a hole in the earth and rest, like some kind of a veld 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 alienated a people from their birthright. Colonialism raptures the spiritual connection between man and his heritage.
But the fecundity overflows into the human world in this subtle short story. The man likes to sit by the fire “. . . 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 sense of deja vu — a feeling that one has been here before. Only one does not recall exactly when and why!
Nyamfukudza also dwells on the other part of the miracle of 1980 — the exodus back to school. After the war, old schools reopened while 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 blackboard 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 there, too. Men with white beard and women with sagging breasts put aside the war memories and went back to school! Education Minister Dzingai Mutumbuka (pictured) travelled the length and breadth 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 emerging from the war. Everything about the school is small, makeshift and experimental — one classroom block, three teachers who live 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 happens 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 1980 rural Zimbabwe, 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 diptank 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 fraternise with him, always using the word ‘teacher’ before his name.
But part of the fresh start here is that the teacher stumbles upon a very beautiful woman who has, sadly, been traumatised by the just-ended 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 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 back again nor speak. The message that the war was a give and take and not a romantic dalliance gradually sinks in. In that rude reawakening, the teacher is first ‘. . .sad and thoughtful . . .’, but 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 empathy for people that does not allow him to easily paint them right or wrong. Nyamfukudza leaves you feeling that individuals in their private endeavours represent the scattered conflicting sensibilities that make a nation.
‘Aftermaths’ is a logical sequel to Nyamfukudza’s war-time novel, ‘The Non-Believer’s Journey’.
