Palaver Finish
Essays by Chenjerai Hove
Since
the late 1990s, Zimbabwe has experienced unprecedented levels of public
debate about the country's political future. The debate has been stimulated
by an increasingly variegated media: privately owned newspapers have joined
the lists with state-controlled dailies and weeklies, giving a platform
to many different voices. One of the clearest voices in the press chorus
belongs not to a political scientist, or an economist, or an elected leader
of the people, but to a teller of stories.
Chenjerai Hove, one of the country's best-known novelists, brought to his weekly column in The Zimbabwe Standard a rare quality of narrative freshness and moral rigour, as this edited selection testifies. Hove repeatedly invokes the guidance and judgement of his parents, and his parents' parents, in terms of what is right behaviour and what is wrong; not for him the slippery relativism of the politicians he chastises:
'… you cannot argue that you are better than someone else because you killed fewer people. What a shame! If you are dirty you are dirty - no amount of showing us other dirty people will convince us that you are clean.'
Nor does he reserve his cautionary tales for the existing leadership. Alert to the dangers besetting all politicians, he recalls the Somali proverb, The higher the monkey climbs, the more it exposes its bottom, and warns: 'Our leaders, whether of the ruling party or in the opposition, are high up in the tree of power. Beware of exposure!'
Chenjerai Hove is an award-winning author, poet and journalist.
2002:
210 x 135; 88pp
ISBN 1 77922 001 4
Territory: World