Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography

Reconstructing and Remembering

M. Hove, M. Hove, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kgomotso Masemola

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137340320
• eBook ISBN: 9781137340337
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography investigates how selves are represented and reconstructed in selected auto/biographical readings from African literary discourse. It examines how such representations confirm, validate, interrogate and pervade conversations with issues of identity, nation and history. In addition to providing an overview of the multidimensionality of auto/biography, the book also introduces readers to various ways of reading and analysing auto/biographical writings and develops specific perspectives on the genre and views inherently expressed through the re-imagined, re-membered and re-constructed self that speaks through the pages of autobiographical scripting. The focus on auto/biographical writings from southern Africa, specifically South Africa and Zimbabwe, offers a fresh reading of the work of significant figures in the political, economic and sociological spheres of these nation states. This collection shows that auto/biography may be more than simply the representation of an individual life, and that the socio-cultural memory of a people is a core aspect influencing individual self-representation.

1

Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo’s The Story of My Life

Maurice Taonezvi Vambe

Interfacing fact and fiction

Autobiographies are personal histories and stories of one’s life, and they tend to lay claim to objective truth. However, the “migration” of a personal story from the individual to the community, from the local context of its production to the global arena of reception is one that is fraught with contradictions. First, within the genre of autobiography, what should be questioned is the claim to the subjectivity of a single voice that constructs and accesses a single objective reality. Second, autobiographies or accounts of the self are also, in the words of Coetzee, “autre-biography [or] an account of another self” (Coetzee in Coulliee et al. 2006:1). Third, an account of “another self” can manifest itself in autobiography, through what the story teller has not included, or as a result of perceptions that readers bring when interacting with the autobiography as political and literary artefact. These different ways of writing the self in autobiography often collide with each other, resulting in unstable identities being codified in autobiography. “Accordingly, auto/biographical accounts can function as sites of governmentality that produce sanitised subjectivities as well as practices that hold the promise of emancipation and autonomy” (Coulliee, Meyer, Ngwenya and Olver 2006:3). Autobiography can also “become the door through which the marginalized enter into the house of a non-familiar tradition of literature or culture, often irreparably modifying the genre in combination with other cultural forms” (Gready 1994:165). But, as Levin and Taitz argue, autobiography cuts across generic distinctions of fact, fiction, history and narrative, and this protean nature of autobiography makes it a “metanarrative [that] critiques . . . the process of narration and the implicit authority that events are endowed with through this act” (Levin and Taitz 1999:163).

In the political discourse of post-independent Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo is described as “Father Zimbabwe” who, in the story of his life, is being persecuted and “driven into exile from Zimbabwe by the armed killers of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe” (1). In the first chapter of his autobiography, Nkomo writes that he has to explain how he “got away and lived to tell the tale” (1). In the introduction to the autobiography, Nkomo warns us that “this book is not a history – one day, if I am spared, I may contribute to the writing of one with a happy ending” (xv). This is the crux, the problématique, of representing identities through autobiographies. The historical individual that is autobiography’s subject is representative of some larger collective. Nkomo’s story of his life may appear to be a uniquely personal account, but it is ordered and structured in a particular way. Its language is not neutral but politically contaminated such that it becomes a polemical text serving a particular political agenda. The end and purpose of this narrative is assumed before it begins and it refuses any other way of reading it, of seeing in it different interpretations other than those that the author wishes to inscribe. The irony of this process of self inscription is that Nkomo is forced to appropriate and use discourses that obscure some facts or fictions of his identities. At the same time, he unconsciously reveals the fractures within the reality of the identities he seeks to recover in “ordered words”. The literariness of Nkomo’s “tale” and the contingent nature of autobiographical representations expose the “tale” to infinite revisions of its meanings in the light of new interpretations and more sophisticated reconceptualisation of the fictions of what Hayden White describes as the “literature of fact” (White 1987:121).

Political autobiography as fractured memories of the self

If one asks who Joshua Nkomo really was, and what the story of his life actually amounts to, perhaps we can be disabused of thinking and assuming that he is “Father Zimbabwe”. The best way to do so is to look at the story of his life. Any story is only a half story: there is no evidence, empirical or scientifically verifiable, to suggest that when we tell our stories we do or should remember every detail; how we ate, were hurt, jilted others, stole cobs, fought for the land, betrayed as we fought and fought back as we were also fought against. In fact, the stories – rather than story – that we call “ours” are as much a product of the teller’s imagination as stories of us are a product of other people’s perceptions of us. As we remember details of our stores, we suppress other details, dismember or disremember only certain facts and deploy words in certain calculated ways to elicit certain responses. Commenting on the existence of the literary double is inherent in autobiography, Coulliee and fellow writers note that our notion of self is also constituted through the accounts others give of us. The coexistence of these two forces leads to a particularly interesting way in which the “self is constituted, namely, in the contestations associated with aligning the autobiographical accounts we give of ourselves and the biographical accounts others offer about us” (Coulliee et al. 2006:3).

In Nkomo: The Story of My Life (2001), it is a fact that Joshua Nkomo was run out of Zimbabwe in disguise. This revelation of disguise evokes tragic pathos. It is eye-catching for Joshua Nkomo to start his story with the declaration that “Just before dawn of 8 March 1983, I crossed the dry river-bed into Botswana, driven into exile from Zimbabwe by the armed killers of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe” (2001:1). Nkomo’s bad blood with Mugabe actually started in the struggle. It was Robert Mugabe, supported by Nyerere of Tanzania, who threatened to derail the unity of liberation forces (2001:144). It was Robert Mugabe, supported by Takawira, a man Nkomo describes as of a “nervous character [and] of great personal ambition (2001:144) who fanned the fires of tribalism, and resentment against Nkomo, “Zimundevere” (2001:117, 142). Even Herbert Chitepo, whom Nkomo holds in high esteem, yielded to the temptation so common among the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) leadership, to exploit tribalism in his own interest (2001:163). At Morogoro, over a hundred young Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) fighters died at the hands of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) soldiers (2001:165). In Nkomo’s story, ZANU adopted a policy of forced political indoctrination of the local population – in Shona they called it pungwe, meaning compulsory all-night mass meeting (2001:166). At the Lancaster House Conference, the ZANU delegation looked as though any money they saved [was] spent on whisky (2001:200).

The morning after signing the Lancaster agreement, Mugabe announced that ZANU was contesting on its own, thereby scuttling and undermining Nkomo’s story which then scuttled the ZANU/ ZAPU agreement to talk, “broken not by me but by Robert Mugabe and the leadership of ZANU. The national campaign of reconciliation that I dreamed of remained a dream. I, and the fighter and followers of ZAPU, had been deceived” (2001:206). For Nkomo, the 1980 elections were a massive fraud orchestrated by Mugabe. About the results of the elections that resulted in ZANU as the ruling dominant political party, Nkomo is convinced that “even the known and massive campaign of intimidation could not have achieved that. The people, knew as well as I did, that the election was a cheat” (2001:216–218). After 1980, Nkomo is hounded by Mugabe, because Nkomo does not agree with the new ZANU government. Nkomo is further pained because “Zipra boys got the worst, being unemployed because the private deals of ZANU ministers produced some results for their own ZANLA people” (2001:224). On the other hand, Mnangagwa conspires with Mugabe and plants arms so that the Zimbabwe African People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), the armed wing of ZAPU, should be persecuted (2001:231). When the ZANU-controlled army moved into Nitram farm, ZIPRA war records are confiscated and, as a result, the history of ZAPU is effaced, and that of Zimbabwe is written from the perspective of ZANLA:

Among the party’s property removed from one Nitram farm were all the complete historical records of Zapu and of Zipra, in exile and at home, including all lists of our casualties. As a result, no name of the Zipra dead are included in the Roll of Honour kept at Heroes Acre outside Harare.

(2001:235)

The confiscation of ZAPU property is a prelude to the political persecution of ZAPU and Nkomo by ZANU-led government soldiers in 1983:

The perpetrators were young man in camouflage uniform with distinctive red berets, calling themselves The Fifth Brigade. In reality they were out to terrorise the people. They burned villages, slaughtered cattle, assaulted women and killed simply to instil fear.

(2001:243–244)

The new government led by Robert Mugabe as prime minister is depicted in Nkomo’s autobiography as very intolerant to alternative ideas that the new political dispensation does not agree with. As a result, The Fifth Brigade depicted in Nkomo’s book is all too willing to undermine through killing those who have different ideas. Mugabe himself is portrayed as a leader who confuses “opposition to particular policies with general disloyalty” (2001:254). The Fifth Brigade’s Gukurahundi operation is depicted as targeting women and children to make them confess the whereabouts of the “dissidents”. In Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002), women who failed to cooperate with the Fifth Brigade were raped, bayoneted and their remains were thrown into disused mine shafts. This negative account of ZANU in Nkomo’s story, summarised thus far, can be rehearsed by anyone in the political opposition and even outside. To this extent, Nkomo’s story is potentially that of anyone who opposes Mugabe in that this story is constructed as a critical dossier of the misdeeds of Robert Mugabe.

Is this Joshua Nkomo’s Mugabe story or Mugabe’s Joshua Nkomo narrative?

However, a question can be asked: so far, where is Nkomo’s story? Is it buried under or constructed by the same discourses that Nkomo attempts to undercut? There is no question that the issues of political persecution that Nkomo raises happened to him and to the gallant ZIPRA forces. But one is left with a sense that Nkomo has told Robert Mugabe’s story. When Nkomo uses autobiography to answer back to his political enemies, how much danger awaits his narrative when he argues adopting the “reverse political platform” already saturated by the ideology of ZANU that Nkomo’s account attempts to dethrone? In seeking to deconstruct the image of Robert Mugabe by revealing the seamy side of the new Prime Minister, Joshua Nkomo’s autobiography has adopted the language of the spectacle. The language of the spectacle of excess relies for its sustenance on constructing reality in binary terms. In Nkomo’s story, Robert Mugabe is a wicked, Machiavellian politician, a ruthless dictator who is unreliable. Some writers have criticised Robert Mugabe’s philosophy of “degrees in violence” (Blair 2002). Others have traced the chronology of the decline of Zimbabwe’s economy to mismanagement due to Robert Mugabe’s pseudo-revolutionary policies. Mugabe’s policies are seen as self-preserving for the leader who, for many Zimbabweans, has outlived his usefulness (Bond and Manyanya 2002).

In Nkomo’s story, the piling of the most visible aberrations of Robert Mugabe’s rule draws its strengths and validity from the moral law: Robert Mugabe does not care. But the question is whether this moral standpoint that Nkomo’s narrative creates is able to dislodge the dialectic of him (Mugabe) and me (Nkomo) that the sort of personality politics which the autobiography seeks to deconstruct but inadvertently naturalises and promotes? Does Joshua Nkomo, a veteran nationalist politician, possess sufficient political language that can undermine his own identity as a nationalist? Put differently, in Nkomo’s story, what the auto biographer has achieved is not simply articulating his political grievances against a man who was once his secretary, but now has become a political monster (Ngugi 2007). Nkomo’s story has shown that it is possible, as well as being in Zimbabwe’s interest, to interrogate the political “immorality” of Robert Mugabe’s rule by military operations. Nkomo’s story can then be said to have been brave enough to shatter the image of Mugabe, which, in Zimbabwe’s official circles, is considered sacrosanct and unassailable. Ibbo Mandaza, the publisher of the edition of the book that I have used says that “even as incomplete as it might appear to those of us who yearn for a fuller account of this man’s autobiography” (Mandaza in Nkomo 2001:xiv), the account of his life that Nkomo has given can make him both a hero and a villain.

The coupling of the idea of “hero and villain” in Mandaza’s description of Nkomo is interesting not only for its assumption of the fallibility of Nkomo’s narrative. Having adopted the polemical stance of a political autobiography, Nkomo is forced to fire salvo upon salvo on Robert Mugabe. At this point, Nkomo’s voice is appropriated by the discursive official apparatus for which vilifying Robert Mugabe has become a lucrative industry. In the “swallowing up” of Nkomo’s voice that presages the swallowing up of ZAPU and ZIPRA in the 1987 Unity accord to become ZANU-PF, the reader is regrettably blocked from accessing Nkomo’s story, which could have survived the lure of Mugabe-phobia. Nkomo is therefore forced to tell not his story, but that of Robert Mugabe. Nkomo is forced not to reveal the complexity of ZAPU and ZIPRA that the reader so much wished to read about when Nkomo ends up writing ZANU politics. Njabulo Ndebele (1991) has written about the “entrapment of resistance in an unreflective rhetoric of protest” which happens when subaltern voices are articulated to the dominant voice in ways that make the dominant voice complacent that it can survive moral criticism from its political opposition. Gareth Griffiths (1994) understands how such dominant ideologies can sanitise the values of political opposition by allowing the opposition to talk, albeit from the standpoint partly constructed and sponsored by those in power. Griffiths notes with concern (and this can apply to Nkomo’s story) that “even when the subaltern appears to ‘speak’ there is real danger as to whether what we are listening to is really a subaltern voice, or whether the subaltern is being spoken to by the subject position they occupy within the larger discursive economy” (1992:75). The political forces that threaten to deactivate Nkomo’s voice do not totally succeed in appropriating his voice of resistance, but those same forces have to some extent managed to weaken the force of that voice of protest in Nkomo’s narrative. The further question to be asked then is: where and how can one locate the source of the contradiction in Nkomo’s autobiography?

“All Autobiography is Autre biography”: Locating the contradictions in Joshua Nkomo’s story

In the rest of the chapter, I attempt to locate the source of the incompleteness of Nkomo’s story of his life. I have read Joshua Nkomo’s story in the Zimbabwean version published by SAPES Books (Harare 2001), alongside the version published by Methuen (London 1984). This I did in order to ascertain whether or not anything was excised by the Zimbabwean publishers, because there is a perception that the Zimbabwean version was politically sanitised of radical content. This perception is unfounded as the two versions look alike in almost every detail except for the preface by Ibbo Mandaza of SAPES. I also took the trouble to compare the editions to find out whether or not there were chunks of material left out from one version that were present in another. Such an exercise was necessary because publishing houses are also driven by ideological agendas.

The possibility of cultural implantation in the production and publication of individual and collective identities of prominent nationalist leaders is no longer a matter of speculation. Cultural industries have the power to implant preferred meanings, which is why in critical discourse one is able to talk of the phenomenon of “authorised biographies”. The position of publishers as “cultural enablers” (Gready 1994) suggests that their participation in producing a book can end up as an ideological intervention that can twist the tale through the processes of editing in order to make the autobiography fit the imperatives of the moment, either conservative or revolutionary. This not to imply that Nkomo’s autobiography was “over determined” by its producers, although readers may never come to know what Nkomo considered inconsequential and therefore did not include in the tale. Life determines autobiography, but what is chosen, what is left out and how facticity is produced by the fictive imagination and consciously arranged in an autobiography remain contentious issues.

In other words, although the essence and meaning of Nkomo’s story can rest with how different interpreters interact with the two versions, it was necessary to crosscheck and dispel the myth that anything written by opposition (and in the case of the present context of Nkomo story) carries the complete historical “truth” of the Zimbabwean nation. In each of these two versions, Nkomo’s story is credible and stands out as a detailed cry, an angry voice against betrayal. But, as pointed out earlier, Nkomo’s life has no context other than the political life of ZANU and the personality of Robert Mugabe. This has impoverished Nkomo’s account as he is never allowed to become the epicentric subject of his own autobiography.

“Abandoning” the conventional autobiographical mode

There are brief exceptions to Nkomo’s obsession with ZANU, especially in the earlier chapters of the autobiography, where Nkomo is detailing his growing up, moving to South Africa and meeting with Mafuyane. These sections capture the essence of the conventional genre of autobiography, and they are not only captivating but read like the story of a real person. This individual narrative, which Nkomo subordinated to the pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo’s The Story of My Life
• 2. Memory, Gender and Narration: Reconstruction of Subjectivity in Makeba’s My Story and Masekela’s Still Grazing
• 3. Imagining the Nation: Autobiography, Memoir, History or Fiction in Peter Godwin’s Writings
• 4. Denomi/Nation: Envisioning Possibilities of Reconstructing an Alternative Zimbabwe in Muzorewa’s Rise Up and Walk
• 5. Reading Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter
• 6. Vortex of Violence: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Peter Godwin’s The Fear
• 7. “We Were Little Kings in Rhodesia”: Rhodesian Discourse and Representations of Colonial Violence in Kandaya and Let’s Don’t Go to the Dogs Tonight
• 8. Women Re-defining Themselves in the Context of HIV and AIDS: Insights from Tendayi Westerhof’s Unlucky in Love
• 9. Historical Metaphors of the Self: Chimurenga Names as Autobiography
• Index