Contested Criminalities in Zimbabwean Fiction

Tendai Mangena

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429807565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria africana

This book addresses the ways in which writers deploy the trope of contested criminality to expose Zimbabwe's socially and politically oppressive cultures in a wide range of novels and short stories published in English between 1994 and 2016. Some of the most influential authors that are examined in this book are Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, NoViolet Bulawayo, Brian Chikwava, Christopher Mlalazi, Tendai Huchu and Virginia Phiri.

The author uses the Zimbabwean experience to engage with critical issues facing the African continent and the world, providing a thoughtful reading of contemporary debates on illegal migration, homophobia, state criminality and gender inequalities. The thematic focus of the book represents a departure from what Schulze-Engler notes elsewhere as postcolonial discourse's habit of suggesting that the legacies of colonialism and the predominance of the 'global North' are responsible for injustice in the Global South. Using the context of Zimbabwe, it is shown that colonialism is not the only image of violence and injustice, but that there are other forms of injustice that are of local origin. Throughout the book, it is argued that in speaking about contested criminalities, writers call attention to the fact that laws are violated, some laws are unjust and some crimes are henceforth justified. In this sense crime, (in)justice and the law are portrayed as unstable concepts.

1 Remapping the criminality of the Gukurahundi in Christopher Mlalazi’s Running with Mother and “Tsano”

Running with Mother and “Tsano” portray a politicization of violence by Zimbabwe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF in the context of the Gukurahundi. Running with Mother is a novel narrated by Rudo Jamela, a 14-year-old girl born of a Shona¹ mother and a Ndebele² father. “Tsano” is a short story narrated by Rudo’s father called Innocent, now named Gubha. Innocent features briefly in Running with Mother and disappears but remains one of the absent members of the narrator’s family whom they think has been killed by the soldiers. “Tsano” becomes the text of Innocent’s fate, which he narrates from Mbongolo primary school jail. His separation from his wife and daughter is because these are privileged victims or survivors of the soldiers’ violence who are saved the wrath that is reserved for Ndebele people. Since he is a Ndebele, Gubha experiences the atrocities from a different location. He is captured by the soldiers while Rudo and Mamvura are allowed to escape. One could argue that Mlalazi uses this separation of Gubha from his wife and child as a narrative strategy to foreground at least two of the possible narratives of the historical Gukurahundi. That is from the perspectives of the Ndebele victims and the Shona people who occupied Matabeleland and Midlands provinces but were not the targets of the violence.³

Mlalazi’s texts show that the Gukurahundi is an example of political crimes committed by the Zimbabwean state against a section of its citizens. The state’s suppression of ZAPU – instituted through the Gukurahundi violence – has widely been interpreted as an attempt to establish a one-party state (Sithole 1997; Eppel 2004, 2008). Boundaries between ZANU and the state were intentionally blurred by the political elites (Bratton and Masunungure 2008). This blurring of boundaries and lack of distinction between ZANU and the state is an important factor in the use and proliferation of state violence, especially in the context of the Gukurahundi. Thus, what passes in the Gukurahundi as the state is actually ZANU.

The aforementioned blurring of distinctions between the state and the ruling party is clarified by Joshua Nkomo in his autobiography The Story of My Life (1984). His observations are made from the point of view of both a witness and a participant – Nkomo then was the leader of ZAPU. He established links between the Gukurahundi and ethnicity through tracing tribal conflicts that led to the 1963 split of ZAPU which marked the birth of ZANU. He also distinguishes ZANU, especially its leader Robert Mugabe, from the early Zimbabwean government. This he makes clear in the following statement:

Robert Mugabe had decided to have me out of the way, and he evidently did not care what method was used. But I hold the legitimate government of Zimbabwe innocent of this atrocity. Mugabe was acting not as prime minister, but as leader of his party, ZANU […] As leader of ZANU he acted outside the law: but the law and the constitution of Zimbabwe remain in force, and I hold the ruling party, not the lawful government, responsible for the attempt on my life.

(1984, 1)

Nkomo clarifies that ZANU and its leader Robert Mugabe, and not the state, were responsible for threatening his life and that of ZAPU supporters. His words, however, contradict Mugabe’s recollection of the Gukurahundi at the only time when he was close to acknowledging the violence:

It was an act of madness, we killed each other and destroyed each other’s property. It was wrong and both sides were to blame. We have had a difference, a quarrel. We engaged ourselves in a reckless and unprincipled fight.

(As quoted in Nyambi 2014, 2)

It is not immediately clear whom Mugabe meant by “we” in his statement. If he meant ZANU and ZAPU, then in that statement, he subtly confirmed the blurs between the state and his party. His statement could be taken to imply that state agents were used to kill and torture ZAPU supporters for purposes of maintaining his party’s hegemony. In that statement, Mugabe also seems to suggest that both ZANU and ZAPU were complicit in what he terms an unprincipled fight.

In the early years, Zimbabwean party politics were also structured along ethnic lines. ZAPU had predominantly Ndebele supporters, while ZANU was largely a Shona people’s party. Accordingly, any conflict between the two parties was easily (mis)interpreted as an ethnic conflict. It is within this trajectory that Nkomo’s description of the Fifth Brigade soldiers as a “political and tribal army that came to wipe out the Ndebeles” ought to be understood (1984, 4). Blurred boundaries between the state and political parties, ethnicity and party politics underline the complexity of the Gukurahundi criminality. These and other contested aspects of the violence are the focus of this chapter, which takes the form of a critical analysis of Mlalazi’s narratives in Running with Mother and “Tsano.”

Since Running with Mother and “Tsano” are historical, reading them involves “plung[ing] into a network of textual relations” (Allen 2000, 1). It means moving between the texts and the state’s strategies of suppressing the Gukurahundi violence. In that sense, Mlalazi’s texts bear witness to the Gukurahundi violence. That makes them what Robert describes elsewhere as “archival technology […] of remembering, of recording memory in the form of testimony” (2006, 44). Testimony,

in its most traditional routine use in the legal context – in the courtroom situation, […] is provided and called for when the facts upon justice which must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt, and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question. The legal model of the trial dramatizes in this way, a contained and culturally channelled, institutionalized, crisis of truth.

(Felman 1995, 17)

The Gukurahundi violence-crisis can be explained in terms of what Alphen in a different context calls “a past that no longer exists but keeps on haunting the present” (1997 as quoted in Mangena 2015, 80). The ghost of the Gukurahundi has never been exorcized. No reparations to the victims were made and the perpetrators are still at large. The state’s silence⁴ around the Gukurahundi fits into what Felman terms a truth-crisis that ought to be resolved through testimony. This is the crisis of justice that Mlalazi commits to testify against through his literary intervention.

Writing against silence: literary and historical intersections

The people of Saphela village in Mlalazi’s Running with Mother wake up to a normal day. They are shocked when horrific things happen to them before nightfall. People’s hands are dismembered, homes are burned down, girls and women are raped and many people are killed by a group of soldiers who speak Shona and wear red berets. The soldiers claim that they are under instructions to deal with the Ndebele people. The narrator (Rudo), her mother Mamvura and Auntie are confused about what is happening, and they turn to the radio in search of information. As Rudo recalls,

The newsreader […] first began with the news that the Prime Minister was on a state visit to the United Kingdom, where he was going to be given an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh. She then went on to report that O-Level results had been better this year than last, and that we were well on our way to having the highest literacy rate in Africa. More news followed about an invasion of locusts in Matabeleland North, and new government houses built in Gwelo. […] and then the news in Shona ended.

(34–35)

This piece of news that the narrator and her relatives listen to can be read from diverse angles. Here two of the possible readings from the points of view of criminology and discourse are invoked. The locusts’ invasion into Matabeleland, captured in the news, symbolically refers to the invasions by the red beret soldiers. Some locusts, especially those with red wings are in Shona called dzviti, a term that in precolonial times was also used to refer to the Ndebele people whose raids during the time had devastating effects on the ethnic groups raided. The targeted ethnic groups lost grain, cattle and some young women were also captured during the raids. Mlalazi’s reference to the invasion of locusts in Matabeleland implies that the soldiers are another type of madzviti (plural for dzviti). Just as locusts destroy the greenery of the land and life, so do the soldiers destroy people’s lives. The horrors experienced by Rudo’s family and other villagers are, however, not explicitly captured in the cited news. This subtle absence at another level evokes the silence that is often enforced in a repressive political environment involving state crimes, which are “carried out covertly and concealed from public knowledge” (Friedrichs 2015, 115).

The piece of news also makes sense in the context of discourse, whose makeup “has to be pieced together, with things both said and unsaid” (Foucault 1981 as quoted in Hallsworth and Young 2008, 133). The Prime Minister’s visits, examination results and building of new houses made news headlines, with the brutalization taking place in Mbongolo and such other places simultaneously marginalized. This signals a biased concentration on and re-narration of success stories that has become typical of state discourse in Zimbabwe. Self-praise has been the hallmark of the ruling party’s construction and sustenance of hegemony, all the more so in the post-2000 period, when opposition to its rule intensified at an unprecedented scale. This approach to auto-critique (similar to a sycophantic strategy) has made ZANU-PF into a lying government. The collective memory that Mugabe’s regime was comfortable with was the heroic memories especially of the liberation struggle, which they were not willing to undermine through “memories of perpetration and guilt” (Daase 2010, 19).⁵ This is a general strategy of selective and convenient remembering of the past adopted by the state, which Ranger defines as a biased version of “patriotic historiography” (2004, 218).

Mlalazi’s Running with Mother, as shown in the news extract, invokes some of the known strategies used by Mugabe’s regime to conceal the Gukurahundi crimes during and after the massacres. State-controlled media were notably silent about the Gukurahundi as indicated by Eppel who states, “Reading archives of the state media of the 1980s is a surreal experience; in Bulawayo, while thousands were being massacred a few kilometres away, The Chronicle was almost silent, blaming dissidents for what little violence was acknowledged” (2004, 49). As early as 1983, the Roman Catholic Church leadership in Zimbabwe raised their concern over the Gukurahundi violence and was instead denounced. On the other hand, local news reporters were silenced and foreign journalists were deported or declared prohibited migrants (Phimister 2009). One of the foreign journalists to be deported for writing about Gukurahundi was the British newspaper Guardian’s local stringer (Phimister 2009, 470). Mugabe and his government were only held accountable for the Gukurahundi atrocities by the civil society organizations and private media as late as 1997 (Christiansen-Bull 2004). The Catholic Commission on Peace and Justice in Zimbabwe (CCJPZ) published the first comprehensive report of the atrocities committed during Gukurahundi in 1997. Although they permitted the CCJPZ report to be published in the country, the government simply ignored it, and the report was republished in 2006 as Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe (Phimister 2009, 472).

As shown in the CCJPZ report, only Moven Mahachi, the then minister of defense acknowledged the reality of the Gukurahundi. He stated in The Sunday Mail of 6 September 1992 that “events during that period are regretted and should not be repeated by anybody, any group of people or any institution in this country” (CCJPZ 1997, 16). The only time Mugabe came close to acknowledging the Gukurahundi was when he referred to it as a “regrettable time of madness” (Eppel 2004, 47). There could be various ways of interpreting Mugabe’s reference to madness, as a descriptive statement of what happened during the Gukurahundi. Here two of the possible observations shall be highlighted. The first is that his statement is obscure. It is not immediately clear who indeed was mad during the Gukurahundi. Second, if his statement refers to the perpetrators’ madness, then his utterance is defensive and is akin to what Shakespeare’s Hamlet says after committing patricide and incest, that is, “was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Him, […] Hamlet denies it/who does it then? His madness” (V. 2. 227–233). The same insanity defense by Mugabe in the Gukurahundi context could be read as a lack of commitment at truth-telling. Mlalazi invokes the same statement in “Tsano” when Ndoro dismisses the soldiers’ brutality that he witnesses as sin and madness. Ndoro uses the term madness to show that the soldiers’ actions defy reason, a judgment that can be extended to the Gukurahundi violence.

In 1985, a commission of inquiry, which worked under the authority of Mugabe was established to produce a report that was never disclosed to the public (Hayner 1994). The blanket amnesty that was given in 1988 was not directed at restorative justice, but only benefitted perpetrators and marginalized victims further (Eppel 2004). As with most forms of amnesty, individual perpetrators of the Gukurahundi remain unknown, and to date, no efforts have been made to cause these to become known. The Government of National Unity that was put in place in 2009 provided for the establishment of the organ on National Healing, Reconciliation and Integration,⁶ but without political will nothing has materialized to date (Ngwenya and Harris 2015b). In spite of the existence of that organ, Andrew Mzila-Ndlovu, the then minister of National Healing and Reconciliation was arrested in 2011 for attending a community-organized memorial service for the victims of the Gukurahundi (Ncube and Siziba 2015; Ngwenya and Harris 2015b). Memorialization of the Gukurahundi in other forms has also been censored through criminalization (Ncube and Siziba 2015). For instance, Maseko’s exhibition entitled Sibathontisele (We Drip Them On) was banned in March 2010, the day after it opened with the artist arrested for publishing false statements with intentions of inciting violence (Maseko 2014). In other words, the state here controls counter-discourses through what Terdiman conceives elsewhere as choking them off (1985). Maseko’s⁷ paintings depicted the Gukurahundi atrocities in a sarcastic manner, which the police deemed insensitive to the authorities. He was charged under the contested Public Order and Security Act (2002) for “undermining the authority of President Robert Mugabe” (Nyambi 2013, 5). The criminalization of artists and banning of art, as in the case of Maseko, is a strategy of silencing through intimidation, a political strategy of repression that Mugabe’s regime has used consistently throughout his political career.

In the case of Mlalazi, the pro-government online newspaper, The Patriot reacted to the publication of his novel Running with Mother by writing a defensive review, as is shown in the following excerpt:

The book that Weaver press...