“Dictatorships Are Transient”:
Chenjerai Hove interviewed by
Ranka Primorac
Chenjerai Hove talked to Ranka Primorac in London
on 25 and 26 June 2007.
Abstract
Novelist and poet Chenjerai Hove gained international fame in 1988 with his novel Bones. In recent years, his work (which revolves around the theme of the spiritual importance of land in African cultures) has gained a new significance in the light of the social crisis unfolding in his native Zimbabwe. In 2001, Hove left his country of birth amid the escalating violence triggered by the government of Robert Mugabe. He now leads a migrant’s life in the West and is an outspoken critic of the Mugabe regime. Interviewed in London by Ranka Primorac, Hove speaks about the circumstances of his leaving, the Zimbabwean land reform,traditional attitudes to land and how the corruption of language can become the basis of other corruptions.He also discusses his relationship to literature, his friendship with fellow-writer Yvonne Vera and his hopes for the future.
Chenjerai Hove was born in 1956 in the Mazvihwa communal area, southern Zimbabwe,and is one of his country’s most prolific and original writers. He is a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist and lecturer and his fictional works include novels Masimba Avanhu? (1986), Bones (1988; winner of the Zimbabwe Literary Award and the Noma Award for Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications http://jcl.sagepub.com (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) Vol 43(1): 135–146. DOI: 10.1177/0021989407087829 publishing in Africa),Shadows (1991) and Ancestors (1994).He has also published the poetry collections Up in Arms (1982),Swimming in Floods of Tears (with Lyamba wa Kabika, 1983), Red Hills of Home (1985), Rainbows in the Dust (1985) and Blind Moon (2003), the journalistic collections Shebeen Tales (1994) and Palaver Finish (2002), the coffee- table monograph Guardians of the Soil (with Iliya Trojanow, 1997) and the children’s story Les Clefs du Ramb (2003).In November 2001,Hove left his country of birth amid the escalating violence triggered by state appropriation of agricultural farmland and he has since led a migrant’s life in various locations in the West.(At the time of writing he was based in Norway, about to take up a position at Brown University, USA.) In the light of the current Zimbabwean crisis, Hove’s work – which has repeatedly returned to the theme of the spiritual importance of land in African cultures – has acquired a new significance. He talked to Ranka
Primorac while visiting London in order to help publicize the Zimbabwean, government’s crimes against human rights.
RP:You have just arrived here in London from Norway,where you are now living. Can you tell me how it happened that you left your country?
CH: I chose to leave the country because the pressure on me by the state was getting extremely dangerous. I was receiving death threats; I was under surveillance;my phone was bugged.There were attempts to find some kind of reason to arrest me after I refused to join the establishment,because I could not accept to join the establishment which was against me from way back in the ’80s when I was Chairperson of the [Zimbabwe] Writers’ Union.There are a lot of writers who accepted to be co-opted [by the government]. I was offered a farm, but don’t want to farm. I grew up on a farm, but I don’t want to farm, I want to write my books! When that failed, there were other attempts to lure me into the system, and I refused, so the next line of attack became looking for a way to find a crime against me.
RP:Was this crime anything to do with your writing?
CH: The government tried to entice me – as the President of PEN Zimbabwe – to organize a PEN congress in Harare,which they said they were going to pay for.
RP:When was this?
CH: It was in 2000. I said, why do you want a PEN congress here, why do you want to spend so much money? They said the image of the country was really bad and people believe what writers say, so when the writers come here we will spoil them with [trips to] Victoria Falls, with [the] Sheraton [Hotel], with Great Zimbabwe, with Nyanga and all that.And I said that won’t work!
RP:Was this before you wrote your political columns?
CH: No, it was during [that time]. Yes, you could call my columns political because for me everything is political, but I was writing about all the things that I saw happening to my society. So after they failed to do that, four policemen came to try to arrest me, on the basis that they had found my car in [the south-western border town of] Plumtree, loaded with twenty-three and a half kilograms of marijuana, and I was exporting marijuana to Botswana. It was such shoddy work, because the number plates they gave me, they said it was a Datsun 140Y station wagon.And my car, which I had sold five years before, was a sedan! But with the same number plates. I was lucky that I had sold my car through a garage. So I gave them my mobile phone and they phoned the garage owner and he said oh yes, I know, he doesn’t even know who bought it. If you come over I’ll give you the details of who bought it.
RP: So did they manage to arrest you?
CH: The policeman just shook his head and said, this is a lucky old man [laughs]. I said, why? He said:“We have orders …we have instructions from above.”
RP: So you decided to leave.
CH: Yes. I began to realize that, with these things being cooked up, there was worse to come.
RP: You said you already had differences with the [ruling] party in the ’80s.
CH: [It started] a long time ago.
RP: But I remember seeing a commemorative book you did with fellow writers for [Mozambican president] Samora Machel right after independence
CH:Yes, when he died…
RP: … and I thought you seemed to be in sympathy with Mugabe then, like so many other people.You were wondering what would have happened if it had been Mugabe and not Samora who was killed, how many white people would have come to mourn him.
CH:Yes.What worried me was … Samora Machel was a figure of very high stature in the region. And when he died I went to the [National] Stadium in Harare and there were no whites there. That worried me a lot because I thought, this is as if it is only a black problem.The whites could have come and shown that they are a part of the region – part of the national consciousness, the regional consciousness. But they didn’t.
RP: But this [racialized] rhetoric is now going on.
CH: Yes. The whites were involuntarily putting themselves in the corner. You should know that at that time they were fighting to have their own private primary schools and high schools. So they were going backwards.They were even, later on, fighting to have their own private
university, which was resisted by the state. What worried me was that the white Zimbabwean community was not trying to partake of the total national programme;they were putting themselves into a small [separate] enclave.And in our history since independence, every time Mugabe got cornered, he found the weakest people to attack. And [in 2000], when he discovered he was going to lose the election, he saw that the nearest target in terms of popularity – the ones who had exposed themselves and put themselves in a very weak position – were the whites.Their life-styles were separate from everybody else, and Mugabe exploited that.
RP: So by 2000, it was not the same situation as when Samora died?
CH: It was not.
RP: How was it different?
CH: The difference was that in 2000 the whites made a big mistake. They were shown on national television issuing big cheques to [the opposition party] Movement for Democratic Change. Remember that episode? They were shown writing cheques and [the MDC leader]
Morgan Tsvangirai [was shown] receiving the cheques. One of them said:“I’m an investor and MDC is what you invest in now”.This is now used for propaganda by Mugabe, to show Tsvangirai is a puppet of the whites. White Zimbabweans should have taken part in all the national
programmes from the beginning. Then [in 2000] they could have said OK, we have been doing this together, but now we disagree. Instead, they had a lifestyle which was outside everybody else’s and Mugabe exploited that.
RP: What you have just said leads me to the issue of language. The idea of the corruption of language comes up in your poetry from Up in Arms all the way to Blind Moon – you write about how people use language in order to inflict violence. Can you say more about that?
CH: Yes. For me, even the financial, economic corruption begins with the corruption of language.Look at people talking about “American interests”,or Mugabe talking about “sovereignty”and “patriotism”.All of a sudden there is a new definition of patriotism. Suddenly, some of us who are critical of the system are no longer patriots or nationalists. Of course, the person who is in political power – [former information minister] Jonathan Moyo, for example – is in charge of defining who is a patriot, who is a nationalist and what is sovereignty. All of a sudden these words are being given a new meaning. So the corruption of language, for me, psychologically and emotionally, is the beginning of a multiplicity of other corruptions. You can see, for example, how language was manipulated during our liberation war. I was teaching in
the countryside and the guerrillas were called the magandanga by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information. In Shona, a gandanga means somebody who just … [hesitates].
RP:A thug?
CH:Not quite a thug,it’s worse…It’s somebody who lives in the forest and anybody who is passing by, they just cut their throat: a most vicious and terrible person.And the guerrillas would come to us and say, hello, we are the magandanga. So the word was turned and became positive!
[Laughs.] The villagers said, the magandanga are actually good!
RP: So what is happening in Zimbabwe now is quite similar in that sense to what the colonial government was doing.
CH:Yes,yes,yes.You know,for me,the linguistic structure is a system which builds [other] systems.And if you look at what Mugabe did, even with the physical, political structure which he inherited – he didn’t dis- mantle anything, including the language. He did not dismantle the CIO
[Central Intelligence Organization]; he perfected it. I’ve read that even the torturers who were used to torture people during the Rhodesian era, he didn’t dismiss any of them.
RP: It seems that they are using the same methods now, from what I’ve read of Grace Kwinjeh and others …
CH:If not worse.I don’t remember the Rhodesian government torturing women like that. I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember many women being arrested and locked up and brutalized and raped like that. Rape, yes, the Rhodesians used it, but it was not like an official policy. So,if you want to change things,first you have to dismantle the structure of language and then you can dismantle the other things.But if you keep the same structure of language and the mentality of how you play around with language politically, it will not be possible to change anything.
RP:You were saying you don’t want to farm because you are a writer, but in your fiction you write about the spiritual importance of land.
CH:Yes.I don’t want to farm.But land is not a place where you shoot people. Land is a place where the respect of human life begins.
RP:This is what you have written [about] in Bones.
CH:Yes.When the war happened, all efforts had been made to make sure that you don’t spill human blood – but the fight had to be done.But also, if you look at the meaning of land to the colonial settlers and the meaning of land to the local people,it was different.For white people,it
was just a place where you put seeds,grow crops and sell them and make big money and go to holidays in Portugal or London or South Africa. For us, it is the place where the living and the dead, the ancestors, meet. What it should not be is a place of abuse. Look at the vulgarity that it has been reduced to – that some people are being forced to have a farm. Even traditionally, some people did not want to farm! They had a small piece of land where they would prepare to be buried, but they did not want to farm. They were maybe sculptors, or artists, or professionals like the medicine men and women, who had a piece of land simply to practise their art, their profession. But it is not a place where you could take somebody at gunpoint and say, you farm!
RP: Is this happening now?
CH: That’s what happened with these land invasions. People who now have land don’t know the spiritual meaning of land.They are trying to behave as if they were settlers.To just go in there and grab a piece of land – a huge farm which you don’t know what to do with ….They don’t
even know that [traditionally] nobody had title deeds, that land was a collective property. Now people say, you’re trespassing on my farm, I’ll shoot you – exactly in the same way as the colonial settlers.That is not the spirit of the land which we know. As a spiritual place, land is not a place which you can do vulgar things on – it’s a place where you should have the utmost dignity of human beings, where life is respected, where fertility is respected, where people can work and celebrate life and human development.
RP: Your fellow writer Alexander Kanengoni was very critical of Mugabe in his fiction, but he is now farming as well.
CH: He is now farming. We were interviewed together for a BBC radio programme (I was in Norway and he was in Zimbabwe) and he says he is farming, but he asks the white farmer next door for help with equipment [laughing]. Some writers will make use of opportunities that come their way. I myself would not partake of the benefits of a brutal and corrupt government which tortures women, just as I did not want to partake of the benefits of the colonial government. So, Alexander is farming … I don’t know.I went to school with him by the way,at Kutama
[College].And I don’t know if he has a record of any farming knowledge. Because farming … my father was what was [in the colonial era] called the African Purchase Area farmer – he had a Master Farmer Certificate, which was the highest he could go, and he was very successful.
RP: Like some of the characters in your novels Shadows and Ancestors.
CH:Yes.What was painful about the so-called land reform is that, if Mugabe was serious about land reform, the [black] farmers were there who had the qualifications.You don’t take people like [Zimbabwe “war veteran”leader Joseph] Chinotimba and give them a farm.He can’t even
shave his own beard! [laughs]
RP:When you look back on your writings, what do you think will be remembered? What is your favourite work that you would like to be remembered by?
CH:No,I don’t want to choose one [piece];I see myself as a total artist and human being. I think a writer is always searching for new forms to express complexities which cannot be compartmentalized. I am searching all the time. Sometimes I finish writing a novel and I think, if I put this on the stage … I have just done that – I have just done a theatre play which was staged all over the country in Norway. In African art, you cannot just be called a singer: you have to also be a person who can dance and play the drum. You cannot just be a carver of drums if you cannot play the drum or dance when the spirit of dance comes.We do not specialize like that. So when I do drama, it is poetry; when I do poetry, it’s performable; and you’ll notice there is a lot of music and poetry in my novels. For me, human life cannot be compartmentalized.
RP:What is the name of this play [staged] in Norway?
CH:It’s called Travel News.I took two Norwegian [characters] planning to go to Africa,and they expect to see elephants and lions and [other] game, but at the same time at lower stage, a man is just throwing old newspapers in their dust-bin. They go look at that and they find these are stories about human beings – who is talking about animals? What you must know is that,when you go to Africa to see the elephants,there are people who own them [laughs] – human beings with real, human problems. I also deal with the problem of European individualism and isolation – the lack of community support for each other’s aspirations. For me,this European philosophy of “I think,therefore I am”is ridiculous. In my language we say “I am because I am acknowledged by others.”
RP:“I am well if you are well.”
CH:Exactly.For me it’s an expression of the dialogical nature of human beings: support the other in order to realize your own dreams.
RP: It is a little-known fact that among your works of fiction is a novel in Shona, entitled Masimba Avanhu? Can you tell me something about it?
CH:The title means “Is this the people’s power?”– there is a question- mark at the end. What happened was that, in 1980 or ’81, there was a bad bus accident where fifteen, twenty people died. The story was that the driver had been drinking, some of the passengers were protesting –
“You can’t drive us like this!” – and there was a bad crash because of this. What I did was I took this bus – most of the novel happens on a bus – and I made the passengers kidnap the driver and then they take over the bus.
RP:That must have been subversive stuff, back in 1986!
CH: [Laughing] They take him captive, they remove him from the wheel and a tough woman takes over the bus.
RP:When I asked her about it,your fellow writer Yvonne Vera spoke very warmly about your ability to write women-centred fiction.
CH: I had a fantastic aunt called Makumbi and I modelled the character in Masimba Avanhu? on her. She was older than my father and sometimes she intervened between him and his seven wives. She did not go to school at all, but she was very philosophical. I remember one time, I had returned from Scotland where I was studying and she came to see me. She said, how are they over there – do they have much land? I said no, not much. She said, then why do they go on making children? They should learn about family planning - now I understand why some of them had to leave and come to our countries! [Laughs.] You can see political analysis, in a woman who was just a villager. She was very sharp – tall and elegant, a no-nonsense sort of person but in
a very diplomatic way. She taught me a lot about life and of course she was a fantastic story-teller. She knew the proper behaviour of men and women.She’d say:“When I think of men,I think of laziness.”I said what do you mean? She said look, it’s us the women who are working in the fields and then when we harvest, we have to present the grain to a husband to distribute to us. This is laziness! You are looking at economic analysis – how power is distributed. [Laughs.]
RP: How do you remember Vera?
CH:Vera started writing much later than me. I remember I first met her around 1988 when Bones came out, and she’d read it.When we met she embraced me and said “I want to write,like you.”When I re-read her works now, I acknowledge the resonance of my voice in her voice. We
had long discussions – we toured Germany and Holland together – and we would talk almost the whole night about how we get our characters in place. I used to say that I write about women as main characters because,in terms of human resilience and honesty,I am likely to find more of it in women than in men. Women don’t have the illusion of power that men have; we men take a lot of things for granted. I used to tell my children that in this house everybody cooks, everybody washes the plates, everybody washes their clothes. Men pretend they are masters and strong while women are told they are weak,even when they are running everything. I try to analyse power games all the time in my writing. You’ll remember in Bones the woman is asked by the guerrillas what to do with the white man and she says, he is a bad man just like everybody else – why should he be shot? Women generally have more respect for human life, although there are some women who, when they get into political power,economic power or other power,they try to imitate men and they become really bad [laughs].
RP: Can you comment on the importance of ancestors and ancestral spirits in your work?
CH:Ancestors is the title of the most [auto]biographical of my books. I had always known the history of my family from the male point of view. So I decided to interrogate the female point of view of our history,which officially does not exist.The female ancestors do not officially come into
the family line,but I wanted to hear their history.My mother used to tell me a different version of certain things in our history from my father, and I said – somebody’s not telling the truth in this place! [Laughs.] So I began to look for the women’s voices and I discovered that a long time ago, there was a woman in our family who was deaf and dumb, and who had committed suicide.
RP: How did you discover that?
CH: My father was dying of cancer of the liver and western[-style] doctors in the hospital had given up [on him], so we took him to see a medicine woman. She went into a trance and said that there was a deaf and dumb girl in the history of this man, who died a long time ago. It was the first time I had heard about it.Afterwards I went to my father’s first wife and asked if the story was true and she confirmed it.This young woman had been given away to a man she didn’t like, so she committed suicide. That was the birth of Ancestors:I said,let me listen to the voices
of the women ancestors. But of course for me, ancestors can tell you the true history [of something], but also the fabricated history, so that we always emerge as heroes.
RP : So ancestors can lie?
CH:Yes, but you can cross-check it. [Laughs.] They don’t lie, but they manipulate information. They can suppress or edit information. They can be part of a spiritual power-struggle.
RP: So the dead are like the living in that respect?
CH: Yes. That’s why we have in the Shona tradition a ritual called kutuka mudzimu – “insulting the ancestors”. It means that, if you have misfortunes in the family, you have a ritual: you brew traditional beer and you quarrel with the ancestors.You say [to them]:“Listen, you are behaving so irresponsibly! You are losing your reputation! Disasters are happening in the family, people are dying, the women are not giving birth to boys and you are sitting there thinking that you are a respectable ancestor! This is ridiculous!” [Laughs.]
RP: So you can have dialogue even with the dead?
CH:Yes,because they are not “dead”,they have only transformed themselves into another form, but they are [also] some part of us.
RP: So nothing is static…
CH:No,because the living,the dead and the gods are together in a multifaceted dialogue. When people die we are missing their physical form but they become upgraded into ancestral form; they actually become more powerful. The ancestors are living, so you can quarrel with them and say, we are your responsibilities! You have to fulfil your duties! You are supposed to talk to god to bring rain,and the rain is not coming:how can we respect you when we are starving?
RP:This goes all the way up to the mhondoro? You can take Nehanda to task?
CH: Oh yes.A mhondoro is an intermediary [in the rain-making process]. If the rain doesn’t come, the mhondoro’s duty is to see whether one of the living has misbehaved:maybe incest,witchcraft,or similar – so there will be no rain that season.But if this recurs,you tell the mhondoro: “Come on.This is bad judgment.Even if one person has defiled the land, this does not warrant the whole people to be destroyed!” If you have so much misfortune, you can challenge the ancestors.This is a tradition.
RP: [President] Mugabe often refers to tradition...
CH: He doesn’t know anything about tradition!
RP: How come?
CH: He was brought up by the Christians … For example let’s look at power. If you are a king and you are of that age, you anoint your son and you say OK, you are running things now – you try the [traditional court] cases.The king becomes like a consultant,in terms of slowly giving away the power to the next person. Once you are old, you acknowledge it.You don’t continue sitting on the throne and running the system.
RP: If Mugabe was here now, what would you tell him?
CH: I would tell him that he should understand how traditional African power was democratically used.
RP:Who are your favourite writers?
CH:That’s a difficult question to answer… I cherish writers who renew my creative energies, and there are many. When I was a young man I just fell in love with Stanlake Samkange’s On Trial for My Country. (Unfortunately he also decided to write On Trial for that UDI in his old age, and it was badly written in comparison to the other one…) I also discovered Chinua Achebe, Okot p’Bitek, Gabriel Okara… Charles Mungoshi is a wonderful writer. Not a single writer in Zimbabwe has read more books than Charles, do you know that? He is such a voracious reader… He has read Haiku poetry, he has read Latin American, Caribbean literature, James Joyce – his life is just reading. Outside of Africa, I like Octavio Paz, and Carlos Fuentes – if you look at The Old
Gringo,or The Death of Artemio Cruz… It is about a rich man who is ill and semi-unconscious, and people are sitting by his bed-side, discussing who is going to get what part of his wealth! [Laughing.] And he can hear it, but physically he cannot do anything about it. One of my favourites is Gabriel García Márquez – especially Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In my writing, I also love to play with human memory: what it is that we choose to remember and why. People just prefer to forget certain things – what I call “selective amnesia”.You go and ask different people
about the same thing and they’ll tell you fantastic tales.And if you want to know about bureaucracy, look at No-one Writes to the Colonel.
RP: How do you see your own future and the future of your country?
CH:You’ll find that in my writing,I always use the liberation struggle as a back-drop because it gave us a new conscience.Who bore the brunt of the war? It was the peasants, the villagers. When I was a teacher in Bikita [District] during that time, we had nothing. I saw people killing
their last goat, their last chicken, to feed the guerrillas. And I saw that they had hope.They were not going to despair.They knew that the only permanent thing left was hope. That is why, when I think of the future, I see permanence. What we fought for will never be taken away by
anybody. Dictatorships, tyrannies, they are transient: they come and pass. I understand that and I will go through that.
NOTES
1 Published weekly in The Zimbabwe Standard and collected in Palaver Finish, Harare: Weaver Press, 2002.
2 Chenjerai Hove, Gibson Mandishona and Musaemura Zimunya, eds, Samora! Tribute to a Revolutionary, Harare: Zimbabwe Writers Union/Zimbabwe Newspapers, 1986.
3 This is a reference to the well-publicized torture of opposition members Grace Kwinjeh, Sekai Holland (who is Chenjerai Hove’s sister) and others in early 2007. See, for example, Grace Kwinjeh, “Aluta continua”, Mail & Guardian [South Africa], 25 June 2007, http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=305817&area=/
supzim0407_home/supzim0407_content/#. Accessed 7 October 2007.
4 Alexander Kanengoni, Echoing Silences, Harare: Baobab Books, 1997.
5 This is the linguistic blueprint of several everyday greetings in Shona.
6 Gweru: Mambo Press, 1986.
7 “‘The Place of the Woman is the Place of the Imagination’: Yvonne Vera interviewed by Ranka Primorac”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 39, 3 (2004), 157–71.
8 This is the story of Miriro, a central female character in Hove’s Ancestors.
9 The royal, rain-making ancestors of the Shona peoples. Nehanda is one such spirit, who played a prominent role in Zimbabwe’s liberation war and became a key nationalist symbol. Hove’s Bones contains a fictional recreation of her voice.
10 Mugabe was a “mission orphan” at the Jesuit-run Kutama College.
