The Sunday News
Micheal Mhlanga
Somewhere in Bulawayo’s less frequented thrift shop lies an ignored wealth of Zimbabwe’s priceless history bound in a sculpture-cover text banking sonnets inspired by the gallant anti-imperial Umvukela. Surprisingly, the Indian shopkeeper knows less of the scarce resource in his empire fringed and piled with old clothes and stuff being sold at nearly nothing. Here I am inside the shop looking for a toilet plunger after being referred to that cheap place. It is way hilarious to find toilet kits in a shop that sells maternity dresses, old clothes and rolled tobacco.
As I enter, I am greeted by an old folk whose accent reminds me of my late grandfather Juliyasi Phiri who was from Malawi. I nippingly associate the accent of the cheerful lad with the popular senior citizens of Sizinda. This old man is a living artefact and undeniable proof of the memory of the then nascent factory labour which sustained colonial capital. He represents those whose hands and mind give rise to the Rhodesian Railways — one which became the hub of nationalist awakening in the late 1940s right up to 1957; the year which marked a defining moment to the nationalist movement.
The presence of the Malawi-accented old folk working in an Indian shop which sells nearly everything old spells a volume of philosophy, history and quite a striking symbolism of the relationship of the colonised and capital class. Even after independence, the black man is comfortable with being the servant to his masters’ sons even if it means believing in old ideas, they both are sure that most black people trust old products and systems.
Perhaps the black folk is the marketing consultant because never at one point did the Indian folk talk to me except on collecting the due payment I made, and the old yet frail folk continued to roam around the shop entertaining more incoming black customers. This is the spatial reality in the city and it’s strikingly painstaking; very few people see it this way.
Anyway, back to my precious experience in that shop. From searching for a toilet plunger to shopping books. As my grandpa lookalike was directing me to the plumbing section I laid my eyes on a heap of books, probably many which are sold in the expensive Rare Books store on 15th Avenue. On top of the pile lay Charles Mungoshi’s Some Kinds of Wounds and other Stories and I couldn’t resist grabbing that text in disbelief because from the modest collection of Mungoshi I have, that is the only text which was missing. I had searched wide and deep in our bookstores which have stocked stakes of photocopied texts of primary school “Sunrise readers”. It was as original as it could be and my gut told me to dig deeper.
I mined the heap and blam! In front of my eyes flashed Mudereri Kadhani and Musaemura Zimunya’s 1981 patriotic history poetry bank. From my college years when my literature lecturer hinted on Chimurenga literature envisaged in poetry, I had always wanted to be intimate with the whole anthology graced by many of Zimbabwe’s great philosophers.
Over the few years of my life I have only come across excerpts of Masaemura, Kizito Muchemwa, Monday Sambanikhophe and the very prophetic Edson Zvobgo’s Grandma at 90 O’clock. Here I was holding the Mambo Press 1981 printed copy of wealthy memoirs which will be shared for many Khebesi generations to come — this is a scant resource in our country now — knowledge is a rare commodity; not cash.
As I left the shop, I did not have the toilet plunger I had gone in for, but a library of scarce information lodged in scant texts — very absent in the public domain, too much that many political commentators and speedy critics sound like gongs! When I was smiling about the purchase from an Indian shop with a Malawian attendant who has worked there since the current owner’s grandfather, I remembered one of Zimbabwe’s great columnists to ever grace the Press, Nathaniel Manheru. I would religiously read “On the other side” since high shool through college, but one thing strode through all his informative pieces about Zimbabwe: to understand Dzimba Remahwe, you have to fall in love with literature, because in it lies the secret and prophecy of what we experience today.
He always argued that there is nothing new under the sun; we are always reliving history and he impeccably did that with so much spectacular ease of referring to griots and narrators of yesteryear’s events. Such has always been my prison, believing in the old text and assimilate them to our status experience: Indeed nothing is new under the sun, it was said long back, we are simply rehashing the same echoes.
Banana’s rendition in “Together”
Page 166 which almost demarcates the end of the text is former and late first President of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana’s contribution. From the many possible descriptions of this man, I invite you to use an academic lens through many of his texts such as “The Gospel according to the ghetto” (1981) and “Theology of Promise: The Dynamics of Self-reliance” (1982), through which he theologises our liberation struggles, Africanising foreign religion as a powerful sermon to the young men and women who gave up their lives to free everyone. In “And Now the Poets Speak” (1981), Banana joins a legion of many who screamed for preferment of nationhood and erasure of ethnic labels.
It is no secret today that ethnic essentialism has had a fair share in disintegrating the nation by informing politics. Countless efforts to re-create the “us” only aspect as a holistic and nation building philology have been in motion and Canaan, like the former President Robert Mugabe and His
Excellency Cde E.D Mnangagwa calls for unity and reflects on the scars of tribal exclusion. Let me allow Canaan Banana to speak for himself:
National Solidarity pours scorn on tribal mongers,
ethnocentrism becomes a lethal dynamite; the povho out of the nation is like fish out of water — individualism sounds a discordant note . . .
The obligation of independence challenges one and all to the solemn duty and sacred vocation of Nationhood:
that sacramental state of being
that includes all and excludes none.
In Banana’s thoughts then, lessons on wounds of tribalism are crystallised but very few have learnt what brutal identity discord is. We have manufactured tribes, clans and groups which we transfer to our little and innocent children so that they exclusively belong and discredit anything said and done by one who is not “theirs”.
As years progressed since independence, political conflict, corporate legislation and public opinion have been shaped by tribal excerpts imported for greed’s interests. Should one speak or be silent they are judged according to their surname yet daily, since 1981 the lessons of unity according to independence of blackness, not ethnicity have been core subjects.
When Banana tells us that National solidarity pours scorn on tribal mongers” he brazenly broadcasts the detriments of those who force the gospel according to the surname. He relates to one of the deadly war weapons; the “dynamite” analogising to many then, from war how ethnocentrism is shattering to human livelihood. Through “Together”, today we repeat the question: who belongs where to be more important than the other? Did we fight the war to better identify ourselves different from other black folk? How many times should we be taught that no single “mujibha or povho” should “opt to blaze a lonely trail”.
The scourge of such identity actions were prophesied in 1981 by Canaan but here we are today struggling to celebrate our liberation because we have informed everything with our village of origins and surnames. We are proud of our literacy rate yet we dodge valuable lessons such as those in the poem penned a year after independence, perhaps it is sure that literacy rate has nothing to do with learning but only reading and writing prescriptions.
If we are to correspond to His Excellency’s proposition that 2018 is the “Year of the people” then remember that “the people” are one not classified or different. I am quickly reminded of my grandmother who says “bekulabantu abangaki lamakhiwa amangaki?” Her question in English might sound euphemistically incorrect (loosely translated as: how many people were there and how many whites were there?), but its value responds well to the problem we are facing today and the centrality of His Excellency’s message — The people refers to a unison of blacks, not village or surname categorised to exclude, ridicule or hate each other. Aren’t we tired of mourning for the multitudes we have lost after independence and today because they perceive each other “different?” Let us learn from the Canaan Banana’s “Together”.
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