10 Books about Zimbabwe

 

Petina Gappah's top 10 books about Zimbabwe

This selection of fiction and history reflects my own obsession with the country’s national and personal struggles

There are many more than 10 great books about Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean writers of the last decade alone, particularly Nozipo Maraire, Alexandra Fuller, Irene Sabatini, Bryony Rheam, NoViolet Bulawayo, Peter Godwin, Ignatius Mabasa, Brian Chikwava, Wonder Guchu, Christopher Mlalazi, Tendai Huchu, Memory Chirere and Togara Muzanenhamo could be part of this list, as could the American James Kilgore. The prolific triumvirate of Charles Mungoshi, Ndabezinhle Sigogo and John Eppel could each have a top 10 list of just their own work.

The fiction and non-fiction titles in this list echo my own obsession with the history of Zimbabwe, and, most particularly, its social history, a subject in which my novel The Book of Memory is steeped. I am particularly interested in the external and internal struggles reflected in these books, struggles both national and personal – whether over land ownership and national identity or the individual’s right to self-determination.

I hope that this “personal canon” provides a good introduction for those who may be new to Zimbabwe, and inspires debate among Zimbabweanists about who else I should have included.

1. Zambesia, England’s El Dorado in Africa by Edward Peter Mathers (1895)

Zimbabwe is an unusual case study in African colonialism in that it was invaded by a private company under Royal Charter. First published in 1895, this rare book provides the inside track on the Pioneer Column, the occupying force of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. From speculation over the location of the fabled “lost mines of Ophir” to the meticulous enumeration of the many titles of Lobengula, the soon-to-be-deposed “King of the Matabele”, this Victorian delight is a wonderful resource for anyone who wants to understand the motives for and mechanics of the colonisation of Zimbabwe.

2. The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing (1950)
This bleak and unsparing novel, set on a remote farm in Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s, is propelled by three deeply unlikeable but pitiful people: Dick Turner, an inept but stubborn white farmer; his wife, the frustrated, proud Mary, and Moses, the domestic servant whose brooding presence oppresses the book and leads to its catastrophic conclusion. Lessing’s novel is a masterly study of the unnatural and constricting artifices that were necessary to maintaining Rhodesia’s “colour bar”.

3. Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (1998)
Set in the Bulawayo township of Makokoba in the 1940s, this is the story of the doomed May-December love affair between Fumbatha, a construction worker, and the much younger Phephelaphi who dreams of being a nurse. A brutal event separates the couple. Vera’s prose can be elliptical – the horrors that befall the couple are described with such lyrical beauty that they are not always fully felt by the reader – but no other writer has so powerfully captured the many faces of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest, and loveliest, city.

4. Pafunge (Think of It) by TK Tsodzo (1972)

Supposedly a morality tale in which the reader is meant to recoil from the unwitting incestuous relationship between Rudo Moyo and her long-lost father, Josiah Rugare, aka Joe Rug. But this Shona novel is, in reality, a joyous caper that moves between a mission school and hospital in Fort Victoria province and the seedy nightspots of the town of Gwelo. Published by the Rhodesian Literature Bureau, which was established to encourage black writers away from political writing, Pafunge riotously glories in the many sins and pleasures of city life before piously renouncing them. The character of Phainos Kamunda, a young man enamoured of made-up English jawbreakers (dananability, syllambability, gigotism) is particularly popular with Zimbabweans, who can perhaps be forgiven for seeing in him the forerunner of a certain verbose and highly excitable former minister of information.

5. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988)
“I was not sorry when my brother died,” begins the first novel to be published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman. With its echo of Camus and title from Fanon, this haunting novel is an intelligent and penetrating exploration of young Tambu’s fight for the education that will lift her out of rural poverty. It is her brother Nhamo’s death that creates the opportunity she deserves. Considered too radically feminist for conservative Zimbabwe, the novel was rejected locally and eventually published by the Women’s Press in London. It has since become a deservedly cherished novel about what it means to be a young woman in Zimbabwe’s patriarchal cultures. In addition to rooting for Tambu, the reader is not sorry at all when Nhamo dies – like the generation of Zimbabwe’s first political leaders to which he belongs, so strong is his sense of entitlement that he would have most likely used his elevated position to close off to others the very doors that had been opened for him.

6. The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera (1978)

This superb collection (a novella and nine short stories) was a co-winner (with Neil Jordan’s Night in Tunisia) of the Guardian fiction award in 1979. With its publication, Marechera, the exceptionally gifted enfant terrible of Zimbabwean letters, seemed poised for a glittering career. He died in poverty just eight years later. Easily his most accessible work, The House of Hunger is clear-sighted, beautifully observed and far removed from the sometimes histrionic solipsism that characterised his subsequent work.

7. Harvest of Thorns by Shimmer Chinodya (1989)
The prolific Chinodya has written a number of striking books, most notably Dew in the Morning, an exploration of an idyllic rural boyhood; the sophisticated Strife, in which sins from the pre-colonial past cast shadows into the present; and the rich and varied short-story collection Can We Talk? But it is Harvest of Thorns, widely acclaimed as the best novel ever written about Zimbabwe’s independence war, that is his crowning glory. As well as being a fine novel about the pitiful waste of war, it has at its heart a touching love story and a trenchant critique of the hypocrisies of religion.

8. Kunyarara Hakusi Kutaura? (Is Silence Not Also Speech?) by Charles Mungoshi (1983)
A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe’s finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family. In this groundbreaking novel, he uses multiple voices to unfold, in a stream of consciousness, the unease caused by the return from England of the arrogant Eric Chimbimu. His poor judgment and unthinking actions ensnare him in a love triangle with his half-brother, the weak-willed Paul, and Paul’s beautiful and ambitious wife Lorna. The tensions between the three bring to boiling point the resentments that have been simmering for two generations in their polygamous family. This very modern novel takes an old language in new and unexpected directions.

9. Becoming Zimbabwe edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo (2009)
This is an impeccably-researched collection of essays by the historians and political scientists Brian Raftopoulos, Alois Mlambo, Gerald Mazarire, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Joseph Mutisi, Munyaradzi Nyakudya, Teresa Barnes and James Muzondidya. It chronicles the history of Zimbabwe from pre-colonial times to the unity sharing government of 2009. Rich in insights and incisive in its analysis, Becoming Zimbabwe is animated by the influence of the Zimbabweanist historian Terence Ranger, who died last year. He inspired this generation of historians to give both dignity and academic rigour to a history that both the Rhodesia and Zimbabwe regimes have, at one time or another, sought to distort for political reasons.

10. The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers (2010)

This warm and funny memoir is a love letter to a country in the grip of madness. Lyn and Ros Rogers are the owners of Drifters, a farm they bought after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Their son Douglas tells the story of how they and their motley staff seek to coexist with the Comrades who try to take over their farm while the economy crashes and spins out of control around them. This book gives the reader an understanding of why there will never be an Arab spring in Zimbabwe – we Zimbos are resilient to the nth degree. We don’t revolt, we “make a plan”. In my favourite passage in the book, a most unlikely character turns out to be the biggest pothead on Zimbabwean soil since Bob Marley and the Wailers played the independence concert. Magic.