Daily News: Zimbabwe

29 August, 2011

Chairman of Fools by Shimmer Chinodya,

Harare, Weaver Press, 2005, (2006 edition)

182 Pages.

ISBN: 1-77922-041-3 (Paperback)

Reviewed by Edmore Zvinonzwa

Once you come across this title and decide to read it, you will not be able to put it down.  It is a masterpiece from a master storyteller, whose style, characterisation and thematic concerns are effective given the author draws from two linguistic cultures.

The major thrusts of the narrative, which may seem individual if given a cursory glance, devolve into universal concerns. And what an odd and unusual title for a work of fiction.

Chinodya appears to be concerned about social life. In a 2010 discussion with Annie Gagiano at the Woordfees (Wordfest) at Stellenbosch, Chinodya says, “ In this part of the world, politics is imposed on you.”

His major concern is ordinary people trying to survive against a political backdrop. In the same discussion, he says about writing in English “Writing in a foreign language is a form of repossession. English imposed itself on me, now all I can do is to impose my thought process, values and beliefs on English.”

True, Shimmer emerges with an unusual but exhilarating story, despite the odd title. Chairman of Fools has the potential to startle even the modest reader with its neat intertwining of reality and hallucinations as they affect the life of the major character, Farai.

This is not the only time that Shimmer Chinodya has come up with the character Farai. The name also appears in Farai’s Girls, that book that invited criticism from feminists.

This time around Farai in Chairman of Fools is a successful academic and writer who has just returned home after a teaching stint at an overseas university.

The setting in terms of time can be told from the music the author refers to in the story. Singers like Brenda Fassie, Ray Phiri, Tina Turner, Thomas Mapfumo, Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel, Sankomota among others, were very popular mostly with Zimbabwe’s urban dwellers around the 1980s.

Bruce Springsten was one of the international stars who performed in the country in the Human Rights Concert at the National Sports Stadium in 1988.

In the story of Chairman of Fools, a film is supposed to be made about Farai as “The great writer has come home.

“Everything is in reverse. It has to be. And that is why the garden is empty, closed for the show. He has to retrace every step. It must start with him at the airport leaving, his family waving for him from the balcony and cheering him off…” (p. 28)

The protagonist begins to fathom the possible contents of the script of the film as he retraces his life from birth. Implicitly, the book sounds autobiographical because the reference to “It must start with the journeys into the past and forgotten beginnings” must be with reference to Strife, one of Chinodya’s novels.

The reader moves with Farai from birth, through reminiscences of his past works. “Of the vast little four-roomed house with innumerable nooks and insistent ghosts shivering in the bananas, and voices crackling in alien languages inside the radio….Of hunger and crowded, stinking classrooms and toilets awash with filth, of dew in the morning in miles of grass and frivolous impossible girls.” (p. 29)

This is clear reference to the writer’s past and his writing career. Here one can see traces of Dew In the Morning (1982) and Farai’s Girls. (1984)

It does not end there. The narrator goes on to talk about “Thorny wars between black and white, black and black, wrangles between fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and couples who can’t talk”. (p. 29)

The author further refers to strife especially on “wrangles between fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters”. Chinodya’s book on the war written under the pen name Ben Chirasha, Child of War (1985) is the obvious reference on the “wars between black and white”.

These wars are “thorny” and the reader is reminded about Harvest of Thorns (1989) while the “couples who can’t talk can be linked to the short story anthology Can We Talk and Other Stories. (1998)

“This will be a great big film that will include everything; a film to end all films. (p. 29)

All this happens when the narrator has slid into the world of hallucinations but in reality, he is standing before the barman. The narrator has turned to alcohol for solutions after finding his family changed on his return from abroad.

In fact he goes to the bar well before it has opened for the day and the staff let him in.

“He leans back with his hands on the table and confronts his favourite barman. ‘Why Mr Chari? You’ve only just arrived. We let you in because you were outside and we hadn’t opened. We’re not open yet but we served you. That’s only your first beer.”

The drinking hole suddenly becomes a forum where the employees there and the first two patrons, Farai and the old white man engage in honest and revealing conversation about life.

They talk about what they do for a living and the issue of small houses comes up. The old white man admits that his several conflicts with his wife have been over small houses and the last time remains in his mind.

“Don’t know who told her, but when I didn’t show up for a week she drove over in her squeaky Datsun 120Y and beat me up with her walking stick. I don’t know how but she bundled me up onto the back seat and drove off like an ambulance. You ain’t seen an angrier woman than that. I still have bruises to show for it.” (p. 30)

This is when Farai reveals a bit about himself too; that he is a writer and “They are going to make a film of me.” But apparently his drinking habits have invited more questions than answers.

“I don’t know where my wife is with the children and my car is at the garage.” (p. 30) Other issues that have caused the narrator’s restlessness emerge. He has come home late “a couple of times”, the phones at home have been disconnected and the unpaid bills as well as tenants who have been allowed to skip rents and the fridge and pantry that have gone dry.

Farai’s mother, like the author’s, died at fifty-three inviting the reader to think that he is the author who has dressed himself in the robes of the fictional character.

A number of afflictions that have hit Zimbabwean society are touched on at this point.

Farai badly needs his vehicle back from the garage but unfortunately he cannot. He goes to the extent of paying whatever amount as long as he gets his car back that day. “It depends if we can get the parts, and there is a long queue of other cars.

“Monday mornings are always bad, Sir, with everybody bringing in their cars bashed up over the weekend. People are driving like crazy these days, you know, and some of them are drunk or going around with fake licences.” (p. 35)

Farai also lashes out at the manner in which Asians have dominated the economy.

“Damn it, he thinks, in the days of Ian Douglas Smith these Indians used to squeeze us of our pennies in their wholesale shops, supermarkets and take-aways, but now with Esap and this newfangled liberalisation creeping in they are digging up those billions stashed away in ceilings and walls and investing in garages, real estate and even banks.” (p. 36)

The Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (Esap) is no new phenomenon in Africa and the Third World, Zimbabwe included and it has had far-reaching implications on the economies of recipient countries as well as the general lives of the people in those communities. Implicit in the comment on the Asians’  grip on the economy is what role those blacks who were milked by “Indians”  are playing in the economy of their motherland.

The narrator also touches on the squalor that has become characteristic of the country’s urban areas. When Farai boards a kombi he comes face to face with the behaviour of touts, an issue that has become perennial even today.

Note that the reference to squalor and filth is compounded in “The combi disgorges its passengers right in front of the public toilets at the western terminus….

A foul stink blows out from the wretched toilets. In the large sinks on the back walls of the latrines women strapped up in zambias rinse fist-sized tomatoes, fat carrots and rich green spinach.

“Tables are loaded with oranges, bananas, apples and pears. Over the open gas fires enterprising vendors serve sadza, chicken, matumbu, guru to jacketed and suited young bureaucrats with bright impatient ties while municipal police look on.” (p. 37)

This sounds like a graphic rendition of the scenes around major termini Harare and other major urban centres in Zimbabwe. Places like Charge Office, Market Square and Fourth Street in Harare, where the public toilets and market stalls are virtual permanent neighbours.

The word disgorge refers to vomiting and the picture of filth and dirt could not have been expressed any better.

Chairman of Fools, in tracing the protagonist’s slide into paranoia, explores the life of Farai, buoyed by professional comfort but cannot be happy finding that he has drifted further away from his wife Veronica, who has become more involved in the church while his children are distant and he has withdrawn himself deeper into alcohol.

All the same, tradition binds him to his wife. Alcohol and prostitution culminate in an accident.

Drinking worsens his mental illness and towards the end his condition, described as bipolar disorder, leads to mood swings, mania and depression and often turns delusional.

This results in Farai being put into a mental institution, where he meets other patients with different manifestations of mental illness. It is here that he is crowned Chairman of Fools.

As the male head of the family he is supposed to wield power, have success and manage to handle his responsibilities. The pressures that come with failure to satisfy these expectations have taken their toll on Farai and it is this despair that has the potential to eat into a person that has put him permanently on drugs.

The mugging that he encounters in Johannesburg is not a plain act but seems to comment on deeper issues of xenophobia that continue to affect foreigners in South Africa, especially Zimbabweans, Mozambicans and Malawians, among other nationalities.

The end of the book sounds positive with the reunion of the family but nothing much has changed. He has just been discharged from hospital, presumably fit to return to his teaching in the US.

However, “They lecture him about the importance of taking his pills everyday, getting enough sleep and having a regular check up... and, of course, on the hazards of alcohol.” (p. 155)

Both Farai and Veronica grown to learn and become aware of each other’s shortcomings now, with Veronica admitting in the concluding letter: “..while you were away in the States and at the annexe, I’ve grown as a woman, a mother and your friend. I hope you can forgive my shortcomings”. (p. 182)

Shimmer Chinodya, a past winner of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa with Strife, was born in Gweru in 1957 and was educated in Zimbabwe.

After his first degree, he went to the University of Iowa where he did an MA in Creative Writing. Chinodya has published several titles, fiction, educational and children’s books. He is one of the few professional writers that Zimbabwe has produced.