Tag: zimbabwe

ADVENTURES IN MASHONALAND by Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman

Clearly I did not really understand what total ballers some Victorian woman were.  This book is the first-person account of some young nurses who decided to come to Mashonaland in the 1890s, and it is some hair-raising stuff. I thought they were all at home wearing corsets and having vapours, but apparently not. 

This was when Florence Nightingale had made nursing acceptable for Victorian women, and what I got from this book is that girls who wanted out grabbed this opportunity with both hands. In this case, the nurses are asked to go to Mashonaland when there is no road or train, and after various efforts by boat, (and being abandoned by the Bishop), they get tired of waiting and decide to walk – from Beira!  Here is a discussion with the various men telling them not to try it:

No women he had known had ever walked in Africa; even men found it trying, and sometimes died on the way.  We told our excellent advisors that we could only  die once, and that dying was just as disagreeabale in a room as on the veldt.  If women had never walked in Africa there was no reason why they should not begin

It’s an extraordinary walk, and when they get there the hospital is hardly a hut.  They spend two years dealing with ‘fever’ (I assume malaria?), and with all kinds of other wild problems, lions, etc.  One of them finds someone to marry.  I liked this line:

Africa is the land of the unforeseen. . . ‘Questions,’ ‘wars,’ ‘difficulties’ spring up at an instant’s notice.

So true still today, though we call them ‘challenges.’  So tough are the conditions that when the next batch of nurses arrive to take over (a road having been built) half of them turn around and go back to Beira! 

An amazing story of people leading big crazy lives against the odds.

THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER 1864-1875 by William Finaughty

As always with these kinds of books one is just left stunned by how very much more wildness there used to be in the world.  Try this:

We had scattered out, Mr Price being on my right, when he came racing along by the side of about 300 to 400 giraffe.  It was a wonderful and beautiful sight.  It seemed  a pity to shoot them, but we bottled up sentiment and got five of them.

300-400 giraffe?!? I’ve never seen a group larger than about 10. I didn’t even know they would naturally herd in that size, because I guess there just aren’t enough of them alive to do so. He also at one point sees an elephant herd a MILE AND A HALF LONG.  Even if he’s exaggerating, it’s still enormous.

I learnt a lot from this book, not least that older male giraffe do not make good eating, and so are colloquially known as ‘stinkbulls.’  It is sad to note the collapse of the ecosystem even in his lifetime.  When he first came, he could shoot into a herd and elephants would not even run, they were so unused to bullets.  After ten years, if you sounded a gun anywhere, you wouldn’t even see any elephants for days. 

Apparently he went on to gold prospecting and gambling addiction.  A full life.

SALLY IN RHODESIA by Sheila McDonald

If you are from London, you have many books about past life in your town. If you are from Harare, not so many, in part because Harare is just that little bit younger than London.  This is a book created out of letters sent home by a young wife after moving to what was then Salisbury in 1909, shortly after the city’s founding. 

I am struck by how very little seems to have changed.  People are in and out of each other’s houses, without calling in advance; people take pride in not being thrown by accidents and emergencies (I am not quite Rhodesian yet, she confesses at one point, when she weeps after an unplanned 10 mile hike with a baby); and people love a little drink at sunset.  ‘I’ll never think of Salisbury without the sundowners,’ she says, and 110 years on it’s still the case.  Her mother, who she wrote the letters to, was obviously worried about her moving from England to the colonies, and the letters are remarkable for the enthusiasm with which she adopts her new country.  I guess pioneers are self-selecting.

I was also very interested to learn that Rhodesian women were thought to be ‘fast.’  She assures us this is the wrong impression (sadly I agree). Apparently it comes form a book called VIRGINIA AMONG THE RHODESIANS, which was a huge hit.  I am naturally in hot pursuit of a copy to find out that hot 1900s goss

RAINBOW’S END by Lauren St John

Here is a book that aches for the past, and a place. It’s about a childhood on a Zimbabwean farm, and let me tell you it is not recommended reading for the English winter. The author is about ten years older than me, and so bears the unfortunate burden of actually remembering the war. This makes her childhood days on the farm somewhat hair-raising. The farm they live on, Rainbow’s End, was previously owned by a family who were killed by guerillas in the war. One of the family was a little boy who SAT NEXT TO HER IN CLASS. When she moves in she finds HUMAN BLOOD ON HER WARDROBE DOOR.

And then apparently she goes on to have a blissful childhood, as the farm is also a game reserve, and she is mad for horses. She is also big on Zimbabwean food, which I enjoyed, it is not often I hear the joys of Mazowe described as they should be. In any case, it was interesting to read what it was like for young people to see the end of the war, and how it changed their perspective on what it had all been for. I am glad to be spared that burden.

I was struck by how much of Zim life is unchanged form the war. She talked about people ‘making a plan’ which I thought was a more modern framing, to do with our current issues, but apparently not. The book is full of the beauty of the landscape, and of dread. Here is an example sentence:

In late 1979, when our friends Bev and Fred Bradnick (in whose garden Lisa had once found a live grenade) were firebombed by terrorists on their farm on the Lowood Road . .

Can you believe that finding a live grenade is just a parenthesis? In other memoirs that would be a chapter. Bizarrely, what ages the author the most is not the blood on wardrobe doors, or the dead horses, but the discovery her father is having an affair. But there you go, I guess everyone has their own problems.

OUT OF DARKNESS, SHINING LIGHT by Petina Gappah

A fantastically fun telling of the true story of the group of people who carried the corpse of David Livingstone from where he died, in today’s DRC, to the coast, a journey of 3,000 kilometres.

This group were those who had been travelling with him in his huge, and very bizarre search for the source of the Nile, guided by, of all things, the ancient Greek Herodotus. I mean I know Livingstone was parading around Africa but I did not know it was using an ancient Greek who had never been to Africa as a guidebook.

It is a quixotic choice to carry this body to the coast, and I don’t suppose anyone really knows why it was done. The story is told from that of two perspectives, real people who actually accompanied him. One is a Zanzibari cook, who annoys everyone by continually going on about Zanzibar. The other is a man who was abducted and sold into slavery as a teenager, liberated on the ocean by the British, dropped off in India where he was taken to school, before returning to Africa to do one of the weirdest roundtrips of all time.

It’s a charmingly written book, with both voices fully imagined and very enjoyable. What mostly inspired me about it though was how all these people, Livingstone included, were living lives so far outside the pale of what they were ever born to or was expected of them. What wild lives!

TRAVEL LIGHT, MOVE FAST by Alexandra Fuller

I guess we’ve all got a lot to say about our parents, but this lady REALLY has a lot to say.  This is the third book of hers I’ve read, and it’s the third to mostly be about her parents.  Rather than them being a character in her story, I am starting to get the impression that she is a character in theirs.  They loom most exceedingly large over her life.

Her parents lived variously across southern Africa, but in her childhood largely in Zimbabwe.  There is much that is comic about them.  Her father reels at the revelation that a laptop might be expected to die after the first decade, regarding planned obsolescence as a scam (which indeed it probably is). 

And there they are on South African politics, an opinion I have heard before in Zim:

The Afrikaaners took it to far, the blacks are bolshie and you can’t blame them.  I find it very creepy, all of it.  Just look at that Oscar Pistorious.

And her mother after the war that gave birth to Zimbabwe:

I mean she was all of us, all of us Rhodesians; hurt, sore, surprised losers.  She’d vowed to fight to the death; and even if everyone else had now forgotten that vow, she’d meant it.  . . . She wept bitterly in private; drank bravely in public.  “Your mother has difficulty cutting her losses,” Dad had explained. 

It’s a book framed around the unexpected death of her father while on holiday in Budapest, but it’s very much a celebration of his life. I don’t know what all this author is working through, but I’m enjoying being a part of it

HOUSE OF HUNGER by Dambudzo Maruchera

Dambudzo Maruchera lived a short and remarkable life.  He was born in Rusape (a small town in Zimbabwe) to a mortuary attendant and a maid, and had a rough childhood.  He excelled at school, and went to the Universities of Rhodesia and then Oxford, neither of which worked out.  He drank a lot, maybe had some mental health challenges, and was dead of AIDS at 35.  And somewhere in there, he wrote a handful of books that revolutionized African literature

HOUSE OF HUNGER is his most famous book.  It begins with this amazing first line:

I got my things and left. 

I love this. I don’t know why.  Humour me by letting me quote extensively. Here he is talking to his mother and his brother:

That hoarse bass voice of hers had not always been like that.  She blamed it on the way she had ‘come down in the world;’ which was merely a euphemism about her excessive drinking. . . She liked nothing better than to nag me about how she had not educated me to merely sit on my arse. And when nagging me her language would take on such an earthy hue it made me wonder why I ever bothered to even think about humanity. . .

“I sent you to University,” she said.  “There must be big jobs waiting for you out there.”

“Tell that to Ian Smith,” Peter butted in maliciously.  “All you did was starve yourself to send this shit to school while Smith made sure that the kind of education he got was exactly what has made him like this.”

I did not like this so I began to whistle ‘Little Jack Horner Sat in a Corner.’

Peter, as usual when something indistinct disgusts him, farted long and loudly and spat in my general direction, and muttered something about capitalists and imperialists. 

“And the bloody whites,” I added, for this trinity was for him the thing that held the House of Hunger in a stinking grip. 

One of the most interesting things about the world is how he inhabits two worlds, local and global at the same time.  Try this, on the local prostitutes:

Most of them had nowhere secret to take their numerous clients.  They used the bush instead.  The countryside, up to then, had left me cold and indifferent; later a hasty affair with Wordsworth’s Prelude swung me to the opposite extreme.

An amazing mashup.  It’s a bold, weird, exciting book, and makes me proud to be a Zimbabwean. 

THIS MOURNABLE BODY by Tsitsi Dangarembga

I bought this book after the author got arrested.  I wanted to show her some support, pathetic and $11.99 as it was.  I recall well when thousands of us marched in the ‘Final Push’ against ZANU in 2003.  That Push has proved lengthy, and this year only a handful of people walked, and that in middle class areas.  They all got arrested, including Dangarembga.

Dangarembga’s first book was NERVOUS CONDITIONS.  Because it was the first novel by a black Zimbabwean woman in English, it is sometimes receives the insult of being called one of the finest African novels of the twentieth century. It is one, but it is also one of the finest novels globally.  It is a coming of age story, and THIS MOURNABLE BODY is its continuation.

The epigraph is from Lorraine Hansbury

There is always something left to love

And this despondent reflection – on how much easier it would be to just give up – works for both the main character, Tambu, whose life is in a downward spiral, and the country of Zimbabwe.  Tambu is struggling in the country’s economic collapse, not least because she takes its impact personally. She quits a job where she is treated badly and

Spends much time regretting digging her own grave over a matter of mere principle 

I have definitely been there.  There is much that is witty.  Here is Tambu on her cousin, an academic, and her husband:

You begin to suspect . . that they found each other because neither possess the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect

It’s a bleak vision of a life and a country, beautifully written. It made me proud to be Zimbabwean.