White Gods Black Demons by Daniel Mandishona
Published by Weaver Press, 2009
Reviewed by Charles Mungoshi
These ten short stories at times pithy and acerbic, ironic and humorous, cut right across the troubled human landscape of Zimbabwe today. They look at Zimbabwean life, at home and in the diaspora, through the unblinking eye of a formidable new talent on the literary scene. The scintillating polish to the stories could easily fool the uniformed reader to believe that Mandishona is in the presence of a past-master of the genre.
The stories depict the ordinary (or, as of now, extraordinary) everyday life of a people caught in the deep miasma of a political nightmare and reeling under an economy nose-diving pell-mell hellwards amid the ridiculously diabolic kaleidoscopic changing prices of consumer goods on the market and the escalating cost of living in a land where inflation has broken world records. Whoever you are, an ordinary working housewife who has gone AWOL from work to join an already incredibly long queue for the rumour a sugar delivery at one of the city supermarkets – only to be told, hours later, that only dog food has been delivered; or, you maybe a government minister, a high-ranking official in the ruling party whose daughter has expressly asked you, her mother and siblings to be with her at her wedding in the UK, and when you are raring to go, air tickets and passports in hand, you realize that not a member of your family can step on English soil, you are on the blacklist of ‘bad guys’ – you are surprised and wonder at the ignorance of your wife and children when they ask, in all innocence, ‘But why, whatever wrong did we do them? They don’t even know us!’; or you could be the young parent assisting his primary school son over the sudden appearance of zeros in dealing with money in his maths homework and the child asks: ‘Dad, what does one dollar look like? Is it paper or coin like the USA or the Rand? Can you truly buy anything with it?’ Your son is naturally puzzled when in Zimbabwe a billionaire can’t afford the price of an ice-cream cone.
Whoever you are, one way or the other, life will get at you. It can even stretch out the long hand of the past and throttle you – like your uncle who committed suicide leaving your father to inherit his pre-independence debts; debts which only increase and also drive your father to suicide – after independence, imagine! Or you could be the war vet with the special license from the party to take over a white farm and with pride you drive your family to the farm with your family and they roar with laughter as you gleefully tell them, how you shook the rattled Mr Bradford and kicked him off his farm! But imagine your surprise and humiliation as you approach the contested farm, to find another black Zimbabwean family has already occupied the main building and the outhouses. When you tell them the farm belongs to you they say no, it is their land. And when you show them your claim and tell them your story, these new ‘invaders’ ask, ‘When did you fight Bradford off the land?’ And the ‘invaders’ shake their heads and say, ‘Sorry, we fought the white man off this our father’s piece of land in 1896!’ Or you may have decided to stick it out (while others flee to seek asylum in the enemy’s camp!) like the man who works for the bank, daily doling out the useless paper they call Zimdollars to a furious but paralytic populace congested on the sewage-swamped streets, waiting, hoping that maybe in the next elections the Right man will win. You even drive your friend, Venus, who has come all the way from her exile in the USA, to cast this one last vote for her two-time losing father. And when her father finally and completely loses, Venus offers you an invitation to go and live in the USA and you say no. You face the future like the married couple who can’t have a child – fighting each other for control of the remote. He loves to watch sport programmes on TV. She is into Jerry Springer and Oprah. There is a reprieve when they discover that they both like the sermons of Pastor Johannes Dollar and a brief peace between them ensues – brief, because not long after they have discovered him, Pastor Dollar is dragged into the law courts, accused of sexually abusing some female members of his congregation. The sermons turn into a real life soap opera as event follows event until the Pastor is given a nine-year jail sentence for rape.
Mandishona’s stories read deceptively smoothly with the pungent urgency of a fresh news item in the daily paper, but you can sense the staying power of these stories in the silent undertow of the deeply-lived human experience both spelt out or implied in-between the lines. A kind of almost tangible melancholic aura of ghostly sepia, seems to hover over them like the just-slightly-audible distant hum of a dirge. They should offer satisfying and interesting reading for the thoughtful reader and those interested in what is happening in literature in Zimbabwe.
