Category: zimbabwe

THE LAST RESORT by Douglas Rogers

This book tells the story of the author’s parents’ attempts to hold on to their land during the decade of Zimbabwe’s collapse from about 2000 on. The perspective is surprisingly honest: Douglas Rogers couldn’t wait to shake the dust of Africa from his feet, and can’t understand why his parents would fight to stay.

Rogers grew up on various farms in eastern Zimbabwe, and once he left school fled this rural idyll as fast as he could. On retirement, his parents bought a rocky piece of land and decided to run a backpackers lodge, which did well initially, until the economy, and thus the tourism industry, began to crumble.

That Rogers worked as a journalist for many years is abundantly clear from this book. The style is simple and unaffected, and the plot moves quickly enough to keep the attention of any commuter. This is almost to a fault; the book is sort of forgettable, though the story is not.

After the backpackers left, the prostitutes started arriving, then a small dagga business (that’s pot to the non-African readers), then the dispossessed farmers (both black and white), then the illegal diamond dealers, then, most dangerously, the MDC activists in hiding during the dark days of 2008 (that’s during the bloody elections, non-Zimbabwean readers). Meanwhile the possibility of their land being seized was constantly in the air; at one point they found out that their property deed had been cancelled, and ‘vested in the president,’ without their even being informed.

It’s a very intimate portrait of his parents, and of their struggle to maintain not just their lives (it gets very dodgy at the end), and their land, but their definition of themselves as Zimbabwean. In the final chapters, when the father is taking considerable risks protecting the MDC members, there’s a very sweet section about how, for the first time in his life, and for the first time in the history of his family in Africa (an impressive 350 years) he is at last on the right side of history.

This books sounds quite tragic, but is largely written in the comic vein, which is I think very Zimbabwean. It also a story more of victory, than of defeat. I hope that’s very Zim too, though possibly not.

Here’s a rather sweet interview with the author.

ELEGY FOR EASTERLY by Petina Gappah


This collection of short stories won the Guardian First Book Award recently. One can’t help but feel proud of a Zimbabwean girl flying the flag high!

I actually read my first of her stories when it was in the Guardian in 2009. It was set in the Mabelreign OK, which was very weird, as that’s the supermarket that I grew up going to with my parents (every Saturday, without fail, same till, same packing guy, etc, etc, my parents are like that). On a side note, I’ve probably never interacted with a piece of art set specifically somewhere I know in my life before, so that was notable for me. It was a sweet and sad story about a meeting with an old teacher.

I enjoyed the book itself, especially “Something Nice From London”, about trying to get a body back from the UK, and “The Annexe Shuffle” about a UZ student who was briefly interned in a mental institution. I think Ms Gappah’s at her best when she’s writing about middle class life (perhaps because that’s the world she grew up in?) and a bit more unsteady when dealing with people outside that world. The class gap in Zim is truly immense.

I also thought there was something peculiarly and charmingly Zimbabwean about her light-hearted and cheerful handling of the country’s serious problems. I was once told by a theatre’s artistic director (who shall remain nameless) that a Zim project I was working on was ‘too cheerful.’ Apparently, for some, Zimbabwean stories must always be stories of misery. English people can laugh and be silly, but we Africans are all tragic figures apparently.

What nonsense. Zim couldn’t stagger on if Zimbabweans did not have a strange ability to keep their chins up (if only to stop the water closing over their heads . . .)

Petina Gappah’s blog is great too. Here it is.

THIS SEPTEMBER SUN by Bryony Rheam


I realised a couple of years ago that your average American and I were very different, in that a 30 year old American has seen versions of themselves and their lives in books, and in films and TV, thousands of times. In fact, they rarely see anything that isn’t about some version of their life. Whereas, for a Zimbabwean, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen me or someone like me represented in the arts, or in media. In fact, as a Zimbabwean in the diaspora, I can’t think when I’ve ever seen me. Until I read THIS SEPTEMBER SUN.

Ms Rheam was born in 1974, and thus this is, thankfully, not another how-we-survived-the-war white person story, because like me she doesn’t really remember the war. This book is about life in Zimbabwe since Independence, and then about life in the diaspora – London to be exact – with a classic what-am-I-doing-with-my-life story line, that I am familiar with not from fiction but from the actual diasporic Zimbabweans I know.

Basically, the book tells the story of a young girl, Ellie, who is very close to her grandmother. She leaves Zimbabwe to got to university in the UK, and her gran dies. She comes back and gets involved in reading her gran’s letters and diaries, and the second half of the book is largely flashbacks to her grandmother’s early life, when she moved to Zim from the UK and had a tortured romance. It ends in the present, with the young woman getting married and moving from London to Mocambique.

The book is in general very well observed. At one point, for example, Ellie rejoices in sleeping in a Zimbabwean bed, noticing particularly how the sheets smell of sunlight, from being dried outdoors. Occasionally there did seem to be a little too much tolerance of the sentimental cliche; she closes one chapter by saying something along the lines of how she loved her daughter, but just didn’t know how to show it. Oh dear.

I went to a talk with the author, who seemed a very nice woman. She said that she is struggling to get her book published outside Zim, and she thinks it is because no one wants personal stories, or romances, from Zim – they only want political tales, and the obviously topical. There was a Shona man there who lectures I think at a University in Zim, and he said he had never really read any white Zimbabwean literature before, and how he felt it ought to be on the syllabus, as minority work. It was very sweet, because he was explaining to us what he learnt from the book about the white community; that it’s a very small one, and that people are constantly leaving it.