“This is a story of five marriages and one gun.” A great tagline for the cover, if not totally accurate, as the focus of this book is much more on the former than the latter.
A character in the book makes an observation that could also have been a great tagline: ‘It is hope that causes most of the problems.’ The bonus of this is that it would have worked not just for this Zimbabwean novel but for most Zimbabweans’ lives for the last twenty years.
Rex Nhongo was the nom de guerre of Solomon Mujuru, an important liberation era military leader, who unlike many important leaders around the time Mugabe wanted to become President actually managed to survive beyond the liberation era. He went on to become a fabulously wealthy businessman, whose wife remained in politics, and died in mysterious circumstances in a fire. This being Zimbabwe, for mysterious circumstances obviously read murder.
In any case, this is all by-the-by, as THE DEATH OF REX NHONGO has next to nothing to do with Rex Nhongo, and is not at all what this book is about, though I am sure it helped get international reviewers interested, because the outside world always assume that people who live in dictatorships do nothing but think about dictators day and night. What this novel is actually interested in is marriages, and how they work. The first marriage we meet is that of a taxi driver called Patson, who finds the gun in the back of his car; and then we learn of the marriage of one of his riders, who is part of the British embassy; then there is an American businessman; and a domestic worker. They’re variously happy and unhappy; honest and dishonest; sexual and not; just as real relationships are.
The end is sort of unsuccessful, with lots of highly dramatic narrative telescoped into a few pages, plenty of death, and a very dubious ‘supernatural’ plotline that for some reason has to do with West African folklore. The end didn’t matter though; this was still for me a very successful novel. It was an impressive feat of imagination across contemporary Zim, delivering a believable range of characters across race and income levels. I’m wild to know who wrote it, as CB George is a nom de plume. Despite how accurate it is about Zim, I’m going to say it’s not a Zimbabwean. It has a very precise feel for the expat world, so that’s my guess; but I’ll have to wait till I’m back in Harare to sniff it out a bit further.
Well done to them, whoever they are, for creating the city so well; I’m proud my relatively small, currently unlucky hometown has so well been immortalized in literature, not just in this book but in many others. (This year, see Petina Gappah’s ROTTEN ROW). Our authors have served us better than our politicians.