Post-minority rule literature

You could think that the end of apartheid or minority rule and colonialism would ordinarily cause an immediate outburst of celebration among poets and writers.

As demonstrated by the two examples below, several writers welcomed democracy and black majority rule in their respective countries from various angles.

As Stephane Serge Ibinga would point out, South African texts published after the first democratic elections in 1994 are torn between celebrating the new era or outright insistence on the need to be careful since the structures of apartheid are still painfully visible.

The old system was still visible within the new. There was still need to build a new political system in South Africa based on respect for democratic values and human rights.

In his poems of 1999, just after democratisation in 1994, South African poet, Lesego Rampolokeng, a South African poet is already warning the reader about how easy it is to get drunk on power.

He appears to suggest that the excessive use of power of the apartheid era needs to be condemned as a useful warning to the leaders of the new era.

His poem, “Lines for Vincent” is a horrific piece, dwelling on the violence still prevalent in the township:
“they pulled out his teeth
with a pair of pliers before he died
wrenched out his nails
‘cos they wanted his manhood denied
they cut off his genitals
with a butcher-knife
while he bled they skinned him
& let the blood flow with the wind
i got the full blow of the message
in the red rage of a storm
whipping hard at the back of my neck of shame
& still the shack of memory rattles its bones…”

As a reader, you sit back, alarmed at this gory sight. The poet writes that Vincent was killed by what he calls “a nation’s homicidal glory” meaning that what the nation is going through is not real glory.

The new forms of subjugation in post-apartheid South Africa continue to inspire the poet. These include but not limited to the displacement of the poor, housing problems, crime, poor living standards.

They are a sad left-over from the oppressive culture of apartheid. Lesego Rampolokeng continues on a sad path as you also see in the other grim poem called “habari gani Africa”

There is still blood in the streets. Reconciliation is botched. Everywhere there are mangled bodies as the world out there is concerned with news of the fear of a nuclear war. The poet writes lines that are as mangled and as unreadable as the new post-apartheid system which he is describing.

He cannot move because there is no movement. There is risk that the poet is says that 1994 did not take place. His poems are almost not readable, with no structure and clear direction:
“bloodstains on morguesheet sweat of impotence
born to die lie dead in the street the lie of omnipotence
scarstripes on the soul sign of demention/delusion
look of drugged minds hidden behind illusion
& outside the grenade-reality-cracked window the botched moment
licemen of the west bearing gifts rearing rifts of torment
come to perform reconciliation a land’s abortion operation
nuclear wasted to the world’s acceptance/assimilation
a disembowelment your creation cursed a braindeathblow
manchildwomananimal NOWHERE left/right/middle/O…
sixfeetdownbelow
glow longknifenightsessionsplashed blooddroplets in the sewers
fleshpieces from crossed Xs/axes of man-made-wood hewers.”

As also seen in his other longish poem, “Notes from a dream,” this community cannot heal. There is hysteria. The leaders of the new South Africa do not know where to start.

They sit in the new cabinet like zombies. He even playfully mocks the powerful and iconic phrase “no easy walk to freedom”:
“the long walk wanted to be a march …
it just had ingrown toes
with the shout FORWARD!
came the realization : our knee-caps have been peeled backward.”

Considered a dissident artist, Lesego Rampolokeng, is a South African poet, playwright and novelist who came to prominence in the 1990s due to his blunt and unflinching examination of social degradation and oppression in his society through his works.

He has written several poetry collections: Horns for Hondo (1990), Talking Rain (1993) and The Bavino Sermons (1999), which have won him an African Kwanzaa Award. He has also written End-beginnings (1998), Blue V’s (1998), The Second Chapter (2003) and most recently Head on Fire (2012).

His play “Fanon’s Children” was performed at Cape Town’s Baxter Theater in 2002 (Poetry Foundation, Lesego Rampolokeng). He has also written two novels Blackheart: Epilogue to Insanity (2004), and Whiteheart: Prologue to Hysteria (2005).

Meanwhile, Stanley Nyamfukudza’s 1983 collection of short-stories, Aftermaths, explores various emotions, expectations and some anxieties of a freshly independent people of Zimbabwe in 1980. This collection contains the poems that he writes soon after his return to independent Zimbabwe which used to be a minority ruled Rhodesia. Nyamfukudza had been imprisoned for questioning Rhodesian policies and on his release he had gone into exile in Britain.

In the title story “Aftermaths” a “returnee” goes down his boy-hood street in the location trying to reconnect. He 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 carefree, a sense of tension is discernible.

The “return of the native” is generally a fascinating theme in literature. Ngugi employs it in his short-stories about the end of the Kenyan Mau-Mau war of resistance. Often the returnee has no home to return to. His wife is already married to some other man.

Often, as in Chekhov, he asks after people who are long dead and lie buried in the local cemetery.

Maybe Nyamfukudza’s most dense and poetic story of the new 1980’s era is “Settlers.” It is based on the earliest Zimbabwe resettlement programme. A young man and his pregnant wife find themselves clearing up dense bush to set up home and field.

“Settlers” is a story that follows the great Ernest Hemingway’s “theory” of short-story writing: “Easy writing makes hard reading. Hard writing makes easy reading.” Hemingway’s images are like objects of nature themselves; evoking sights, sounds and smell that assault the reader’s senses with their freshness and immediacy.

“Settlers” describes the young husband intensely and sees the bush, the wife, earth and sky from his point of view. Looking at his own circumstances, the man is overwhelmed by the sense of plenty and virginity of his new environment.

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. The whole metaphor extends to the new nation state of Zimbabwe. There are references to the heavy rains of the first Independence summer season and the subsequent bumper harvest.

The phrase “Zimbabwe the bread basket of Africa” stuck as people flocked from “tired” territories in Masvingo, Madziva, Chiweshe, Gwai… to open up heavy virgin tracts of fields in Muzarabani, Sanyati, Gokwe… Indeed “swords turned into plough-shears.” All of a sudden people wanted to settle, to dig a hole in the earth and rest like some kind of a veldt birds.

As the title “Settlers” suggests, one got lost in one’s new forest. Sleeping, working or walking, the husband and wife “felt they were intruders, fenced in by a forest which just stood there, as if watching and waiting…” Colonialism, as Fanon would point out, defamiliarises and raptures 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-side “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.

Physically and spiritually this is a place that leaves the individual with a feeling that he has been here before. Only one does not know exactly when and why. As the husband wanders in the bush he finds it “strange” that “even in an isolated area such as this, you still found footpaths, sometimes already turned into shallow gullies…”

Also “now and again he thought he heard voices passing by, but he had seen no one.” The connection between the present and the past, physically and spiritually, is central to this short-story. You feel that Nyamfukudza is teasing the mind for failing to see that colonialism is only recent. The paths and voices of our ancestors are still in these forests, asking us to reclaim them.

Nyamufukudza also dwells on the other part of the miracle of 1980: the massive journey back to school. After the war old schools reopened and new uncountable ones sprouted. They were called ‘Upper-tops.’

Old tobacco barns became schools. Old churches became adult literacy spots. Under the big Baobab tree, a black board was erected, a teacher was hastily identified and a school was founded! Someone thought the old Rhodesian camp could be put to some good use and yet another school was founded.

Men with beards and women with protruding breasts put aside the war memories and went back to school! Minister Mutumbuka travelled the length and breadth of the country preaching, coercing and opening schools.

In “A fresh start” there is captured a small school in the middle of a rural community that is emerging out of war. Everything about the school is small, makeshift and experimental.
One classroom block, three teachers who stay in thatched houses and pupil who wore neither shoes nor school 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 pastoral. For him “the lack of amenities, basic books even, seemed hardly important.”

The scene, typical of the rural Zimbabwe 1980, is set for adventure. After the war, communities tended to be inward looking. The basics first, seemed to be the dictum. People had to have at least several shops, a bar and a grinding mill at the “growth point.”

Then people needed a deep tank 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 respectable distance as he shares with them his knowledge and sometimes his own food.

They respect and revere him and he knows it. The parents fraternize with him, always using the word “teacher” before his name.

But part of the fresh start here is that the teacher stumbles into a very beautiful woman who has sadly been maimed mentally during contact in the just ended war. As the new teacher takes in the wonder and the beauty of the river, one day, the demented beauty strays onto his hideout and he cannot believe there could be such a 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 neither have her mind again nor be able to speak. The message that the war was a give and take and not romance gradually descends on the teacher.

In that reawakening, he is first “sad and thoughtful” and later settles on the seemingly personal but national project.

“The school children looked up at him expectantly. He cleared his throat…”

Nyamfukudza captures the feelings of time with a touch that is very personal and eternal. However underneath his gaze is a whole national agenda unfolding into a drama of peace and promise.

Aftermaths is a natural sequel to Nyamfukudza’s war-time novel, The Non-Believer’s Journey. He has a certain sympathy 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.

Memory Chirere