Mhenenguro

A conversation with my loved little mother When I first saw my little mother, I was also a little boy. Fifth or fourth grade I think. She was a lovely little girl from the city. She knew her other name which was erased when her birth was baked at the registry offices. ‘Ndinonzi Melisa Magumbo follow me’, said her when introducing herself. And being attracted to creativity, I loved her from that day onwards. This is not the story of the story but allow me to give this background so that maybe my little non-sense will make sense to you. Fate separated us for a few years from this encounter of little son and little mother. I will not bother you with the details of the separation but with our lovely r-union. We met again, in the year 2007 in the month of August. She was still bright. Now in grade five, I think. It was a brief reunion which was rekindled on the first day of the year 2009 when she was doing grade 7. She scooped the number of points as mine though not as balanced ...

What else is there for a ‘bookshit’ locked down like the cheerer of the global and national events such as Easter, Ramadan, soccer and our very own independence. The novel citizens could not allow me to forget 18 April. A day strangely recognised as the birthday of Zimbabwe. A day that makes it difficult to imagine baby Zimbabwe in a free-way. What is the ‘bookshit’ saying by free-way? Waaaaaal I sometimes feel a disconnection between the historical interpretation of the facts of Zimbabwe in relation to the maintenance of the borders and systems that sustains the parameters of the nation as country and state. This is not why I am here to preach about. I am here to commit a crime by sharing you the words by some literary citizens in the Zimbabwean literary texts I have in my library as of today. I will put less analysis to the extracts. WHOSE LAND IS IT ANYWAY Interesting ideas about the day and its precursor; the war comes out of the imaginations and conversations of Benjam...

Waiting Here we are!! At Bole International Airport. I think. i always lose sense of place and time. They are of little consequence to me. I pay much focus on the insignificant occurrences around. Things only known to the tiny CCTV cameras and other insignificant figures around me.  An Ethiopian Catholic Church priest is holding his precious bible. Being the Crayie I always am, always crazy for inked paper. It doesn't matter you inked it with what; as long it reflects the letters of the languages that the little world I was thrown into imposed on my poor language acquisition device, me I send my eyes and ‘thief’ into the pages. I have also mastered the way of peeping into people’s phone messages. It doesn't matter if I fail to connect your infatuations, lies, deception, joys, ‘sads’, sorrows I just look and look away, look away then look again. During one of my great discoveries through texts peep I saw them quarreling in French these love birds. One of the quarrel...

Chennels in Muponde and Primorac (2005) edited Versions of Zimbabwe: New approaches to literature chose to entitle his contribution ‘Self-representation and national memory: white autobiographies in Zimbabwe.’ Chennels’ title aptly captures the soul of white authored texts that emerged in Zimbabwe after the historic and much publicised and debated Zimbabwean land reform programme. The exercise provided fertile ground for new and interesting authorship by the affected white land owners. This is not to remove equally interesting black-Zimbabwean authors about the same event from the scene. In these ‘white’ writings, there emerged interesting dimensions of issues to do with skin pigment and its relationship to ownership, law, power, identity and belonging among many other themes.   This adds an interesting flare that fascinates readership and audience of Zimbabwean literature. One such author who offers scintillating dimensions of the epoch is Douglas Rogers in his book The La...

The post-colonial madness in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun After going through Adichie’s moving story about post-colonial Nigeria in Half of a Yellow Sun I had the impression that: art has this way of narrating history better than historians, reimagining society better than sociologists, theorising human minds better than psychologists and points to human follies better than the preacher. Don’t worry Mr Preacher I still will take time for your sermons, my sociologist and psychologist friends I will still take time for your theorisations and my historian I will follow your facts. However, I will go to the artist to decipher the greater visions that the fathers and idealists might have missed and might still be missing. Half of a Yellow Sun is a thrilling story that falls under literatures that depict what I have come to think of as the ‘post-colonial madness’. Archille Mbembe calls this phase in which the post-colonial madness manifests itself; the ‘negative moment’. He went furthe...

JIKINYA: CHAPTER TWO ANALYSIS Chedu decides to take baby Jikinya home and he saw the warriors who might have caused havoc at the Wilsons’ place. Chedu’s home is characterized with joy, happiness, division of labour and understanding. The welcome he received on his home after an unusual late coming confirms that. The third person narrator informs us “His wife notice him as he entered the yard and she immediately put the pestle on the ground and run up to him with extended arms.” The wife exclaimed “Chedu! Where were you? All night yesterday and all day today without knowing where you were!” (p.13). The way Tsitsi behaves is an early revelation of her character. She was a concerned and lovely woman (wife) towards her husband and family. When Chedu expressed shock in seeing a baby who looks like an albino Chedu told her, “She is not an albino” “She belongs to a people, a people whose skin is lighter than ours and whose hair is long and straight and much lighter than ours” (p.14). He ec...

JIKINYA: CHAPTER ONE ANALYSIS Jikinya is a story that explores a clash of people of different racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds Through the text Jikinya, Ndhlala demystifies claims by European anthropology as espoused by missionaries, explorers and hunters among others of Africa as a dark continent inhabited by backward, barbaric and savage people. Ndhala seeks to assert the humanness of blacks by writing about their love, kindness, generosity, and tolerance amongst themselves and even towards any surviving beings. For instance, we see this exposition of human love and feeling for other humans through Chedu when he saw the tragedy that had befallen the Wilsons’ homestead. Chedu is haunted by the idea of human beings killing each other because where he comes from people die of diseases (p.6). “A look of sadness and bewilderment clouded over the man’s face and his moved slowly as he surveyed the ruins” (p.5). This means where he comes from (Ngara village) human life is sacred....

On the day the world received the news of his death, in our ghetto, business and life didn’t come to a halt. Like always ZESA (the new name for electricity) also chose to go early in the morning as usual. To the people I met and conversed with or heard conversing there were two common questions: ‘Is he really dead this time?’ or ‘Where is he going to be buried?’ People were still not sure after his many deaths which led him to jokingly conclude that he has outclassed Jesus in resurrection. People were also concerned of his final place of rest after rumors that he had finally chose to abandon the place where he officiated over 99,5 percent of the burials made there. The conversation I had at kuEmployment as they call the place left me perplexed on how we sometimes read history and events amiss in a nation that boast of a high literacy rate. None of the people there believed Mugabe was still a full time member of ZANU PF, an institution that he founded. They were not so privy to t...

A Transcendent Story of Hope The Ties that Bind is one of the novels that held me captive once I set my eyes on it. It was on Easter Friday’s eve; with nothing to do I got hold of my copy and set my eyes on it as evening was fast approaching. It has this power of imposing its ties on the reader that one cannot afford to put it down. Thus it happened I failed to sleep till 0200hrs of the following day as I embark on the reading journey. To those who read the book, I am sure they know why that has to happen. And for those who haven’t seen it, I would only say, it’s the magic of words and storytelling from Chidavaenzi that imprisoned me in a journey of 156 pages. Hence, I don’t regret my captivity. The power of description took me through several journeys. It takes one through the devastating trail that the HIV (AIDS) pandemic left on individuals, families, communities and the nation at large. The pandemic threatened certain families with extinction as it did on Gogo ...

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2001) is made up of ideologically packed recollections of memories by someone who confessed that “we, as whites could not own a piece of Africa, but, [who] new with startling clarity, that Africa owned me [her]” (p.306). The protagonists there are the Fullers who are in constant conversations with their neighbours and environment: which for the most part is nations that constituted the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Fuller’s recollections make up a moving story where serious identity, belonging and power issues are continuously hammered through day-today family talk and activities that are then transferred to the immediate community, nation and region at large. These manifests through stereotypical attachments placed on humanity’s names, behaviour and attitudes which in most cases are cast on race. Thus acts like wiping the nose with the back of the hand, putting up with hostile places like Devuli Ranch and Chirundu,...

REMEMBERING YVONNE VERA THE HISTORIAN In the introduction to Charles Mungoshi: A Critical Reader, Professor Zodza Motsa (2006) made this submission: “Certain members of society may not even believe that literary creations can create and narrate history from alternative sites as well as authorized versions of literary history that can interrogate official historical accounts” This submission is equally so to one of Zimbabwe’s literary giants in the Yvonne Vera. She has a huge literary corpus to her name, which to me can be read along the grand narrative of our national history since the late 1900s up to the present day. Her narrative doesn’t read our history as a saint. Vera views history as a point where we can learn from as we realize the mountainous task in our struggle beginning at individual till we reach the national level. History thus becomes a river to learn of our mistakes, our successes as we commit to our aspirations. Thus, Some of Vera’s literary imaginations read...