Chapter 1: the Trajectory of Life Writing in ‘A Land Divided’

CHAPTER 1: THE TRAJECTORY OF LIFE WRITING IN ‘A LAND DIVIDED’ Background The history and place of autobiographies in Zimbabwe has been shaped and influenced by what Mair and Sithole (2002: 21) call “four main influences: the pre-colonial, the colonial, the armed liberation struggle, and Zanu-PF rule”.1 These four streams have had a bearing on the socio-cultural, geo-political and economic spheres in Zimbabwe, and have resulted in what has been aptly described as “extreme polarities” (Palmer and Birch 1992: 3). In their book, Zimbabwe: a Land Divided, Palmer and Birch (1992) describe Zimbabwe as a land of diametrically opposite elements in all spheres of life. They argue that Zimbabwe is a land divided by geography, climate, race, class, ethnic differences, gender, agriculture, law and history, and culture. The polarities are manifested in the disparities between ‘high and low- lying areas’, ‘regions of high rainfall and drought prone areas’, ‘black and white’, ‘rich and poor’, ‘Shona and Ndebele’, ‘women and men’, ‘commercial and peasant farmers’, ‘white- owned and black-owned land’, and ‘Zimbabwean and Western music, dance and art’ (ibid.: 3). These binaries reflect Zimbabwe’s socio-political and economic culture and are in turn reflected in the trajectory that has been charted by autobiographical writings in this divided land. Autobiographical writings in their diverse forms have a traceable history in Zimbabwe’s literary trajectory dating back to the period before the invasion and occupation of Zimbabwe by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) in 1890. According to Chennells (2005: 131), the earliest life writings began with “the narratives and diaries of missionaries, travelers and hunters”. They took the form of travelogues and hunting narratives, and provided a model of what came to be known in European literary canon as “imperial romances” and adventure writing meant to promote, laud, celebrate and consolidate British imperial culture (ibid.: 131). 1 The history of Zimbabwe’s political landscape can be traced back to the year 1890, commonly known as the watershed period, which saw the British invading and occupying Zimbabwe. Described by Cecil John Rhodes as the jewel of Africa, Zimbabwe became Southern Rhodesia. The 1890 occupation of Zimbabwe was met with resistance by the indigenous people, first in 1893 and then in 1896-7, in what came to be known as the First ‘Chimurenga’ (Liberation) war. This was followed by the Second ‘Chimurenga’ war 1966-80, which, led to the attainment of Independence on 18 April 1980. Ninety years of British colonial rule were followed by 36 years of rule by President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF. Under the stewardship of Robert Mugabe, the history of Zimbabwe has been revised in the service of the governing Zanu-PF party. A ‘patriotic’ version of history, disseminated by intellectuals and state media, has distorted legitimate history. See Blessing-Miles Tendi’s Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media (2010); T. Ranger’s “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation” (2004). 1 Chennells (2005) further contends that the early published autobiographical accounts were written by missionaries, travelers and hunters such as Robert Moffat (1856), David Livingstone (1857), William Baldwin (1863) and Frederick Sellouts (1893). Despite making a godly claim to truthful description of events with clarity and precision by invoking the detached objectivity of science in giving meaning to Africa’s topography, the writers saw things in Manichean binaries: white as opposed to black, good versus evil, western civilization versus African backwardness and literacy versus illiteracy, among others. Such narratives have earned themselves the label, ‘white autobiographies in Zimbabwe’ as opposed to autobiographies of and by White Zimbabweans (Chennells 2005). Aside from purely economic and expansionist influences, the history of British invasion and occupation of Zimbabwe was also motivated and shaped by the trajectory of, largely “White” autobiographical narratives for the “main[ly] White book-buying public” (Roberts 1982: 139). The objective of these autobiographical travel and hunting narratives was not just to keep a personal record of one’s experiences in Africa, but to contribute to the larger imperial narrative and to prepare England for its imperial destiny. Similarly, the rise of Black Nationalism gave birth to autobiographical narratives by black Zimbabweans as a way of forming black nationalistic consciousness and a subversion of the dominant version of white imperial history. This speaks to McAdams’ (2008: 247) view that “[w]ithin any society, different stories compete for dominance and acceptance […] and reflect, in one way or another, prevailing patterns of hegemony in the economic, political, and cultural contexts wherein human lives are situated”. While power elites may privilege certain life stories over others, “people may resist dominant cultural narratives, give voice to suppressed discourses, and struggle to bring marginalized ways of imagining and telling lives to the cultural fore” (McAdams: 247). Commenting on what he calls African modes of self- writing, Mbembe (2002a) argues that by anchoring themselves on three phases of history namely; slavery, colonialism and apartheid, African self-writings have tended to follow a fixed, racialised tradition of victim narratives of loss. Therefore, titles such as Crisis in Rhodesia (Shamuyarira 1965), An Ill-fated People: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodes (Vambe 1972), From Rhodesia to Zimbawe (Vambe 1976) and Roots of a Revolution: Scenes from Zimbabwe’s Struggle (Sithole 1977) were efforts to make sense of lives lost, to borrow from Mbembe (2002a). 2 However, the same narratives were created outside of, and in opposition to, dominant cultural modes, and marked the construction of counter-narratives (Bamberg and Andrews 2004). Autobiographical narratives by black Zimbabweans took the form of a counter-discourse to the imperial literary canon whose sole objective was to preach the imperial gospel of domination. Here, we are confronted with literary polarity shaped by race, with white writers and imperial narratives on the one hand, and black writers and their narratives on the other. The narratives by black writers set out to contest colonial narratives of the past in order to open new spaces for the recreation of memory and representation of the self and the collective other. It is however, important to note that the ‘other’ is not always authored as a “collective”. It could be a powerful individual/coterie with which the autobiographer is in contest. Commenting on the racial antagonism in the narratives of both Black and White writers, Collin Style (1985: 55) argues that young black writers have “faced the white squarely, and incorporated him, for good or ill, in [their] work” while White writers “are equally deficient in their handling of the black”. According to Style, the antagonism “stems from a certain [mutual] cultural distaste created by the class divisions of the society” (ibid.: 55). The transition from white colonial rule to Zanu-PF rule on 18 April 1980, after a decade and half of what is known in Zimbabwean history as the Second Chimurenga [Liberation War], saw the emergence of “Zanu-PF narrative(s) of the past” (Ranger 2005: 218). The earliest writer of these “nationalist narratives”, and “patriotic history” (Bhebhe and Ranger: 2001) was Maurice Nyagumbo the author of, With the People: An Autobiography from the Zimbabwean Struggle (1980). However, the early 1980s witnessed relative quiet and dearth on the literary front in terms of life writing, but academic research, and novels, poetry and drama flourished.2 The publishing of Nkomo’s The Story of My Life in 1984 by Methuen in London, and its subsequent ban in 1985 by the new black government of Zimbabwe meant that voices that wanted to make important personal statements on the country’s political 2Works such as Zimunya and Kadhani’s (1981) And Now the Poets Speak: Poems Inspired by the Liberation Struggle, Martin and Johnson’s (1981) The Struggle for Zimbabwe: the Chimurenga War, Ranger’s (1985) Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War, Lan’s (1985) Guns and Rain, Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, Nyamubaya’s (1986) On the Road Again, Hove’s (1988) Bones, Moore-King’s (1988) White Man, Black War and Chinodya’s (1989) Harvest of Thorns, among others, were published in the first decade of independence in Zimbabwe. However, the same cannot be said about life writing in Zimbabwe during the same period. 3 process using autobiographies would be suppressed.3 The suppression was due in part to the genre of autobiography itself; that it is a “self-portrait” (Howarth 1980: 85), whose claim to truthful depiction of the life of the narrator has landed itself what Olney (1980: 4) calls “a fatal attraction” of its critics. In the case of Joshua Nkomo’s political autobiography, we begin to see the changes in the contestatory aspect of political autobiographies by blacks writing about the post-1980 period compared to those writing against colonialism in the pre- 1980 period who contested against white writing, but not black politics and black rule. Described as “a personal record of a life that has played a part in [Zimbabwe’s political] history” (Nkomo 2001: xv), Nkomo’s political autobiography was banned because it contradicted an emerging dominant narrative of Zanu. Staunton (1997: 1–2) astutely describes the 1980s period in Zimbabwe as follows: [I]t was a period of adjustment, of quiet grief, of mourning, of pain, [and] peace was too precious, hope for a black government too great, reconciliation too precarious, war and memory of war too painful for anyone to want to immediately probe the complexities of war [and its aftermath], … [thus] in the early years of independence there was an expectation that Zimbabwean Authors would write books that proclaimed the socialist message; didactic novels. Notably, the lack of clarity and uncertainty about the socio-political and economic ideology and policy of the new government resulted in people adopting a wait-and-see approach.

Load more