Weaver Press

The African Book Publishing Record (34)


Title: Strife,

Author: Shimmer Chinodya

Publisher: Weaver Press, Harare, 2006. 223 pp. £12.95 pap.

ISBN: 13: 978-21-77922- 058-5

Reviewer: African Books Collective


Strife is the most recent novel from the Zimbabwean writer Shimmer Chinodya, who has also produced short stories, children’s books and secondary school texts, as well as the script for an award-winning film. Strife adds to Chinodya’s accomplishments by having won the 2007 Noma Award for Publishing, an annual competition for books published by African writers in Africa.

Strife explores problems of history, destiny and disease – metaphorical and literal – by relating the multi-generational tale of the Gwanangara family through a complicated plot structure that toggles back and forth between the present (from 1980 onward) and the past (from the mid-1800s on). As the flashbacks catch up to the present, the storylines merge.

The Gwanangara family hails from Gweru, today Zimbabwe’s third-largest city and a centrally located railway hub. In the present-day narrative strand, the protagonist Godfrey (Godi) is one of seven children in a family cursed with maladies of all types. One brother is epileptic (his first fit seizes him on his wedding night), while another is schizophrenic. Their parents pursue both modern and traditional cures to the family’s troubles, trying hospitals as well as ‘alternative’ treatments. The father reluctantly going along with his wife, the ‘moon huntress,’ who ‘believes in the Holy Ghost and in medicines, but she is convinced that some cases are best left to the traditional healer’s bones’ (p.28). Through narrative flashbacks, we learn more about the family history, dating back to the era of Godi’s great-grandfather, where we find a number of unresolved conflicts and troubles.

Given its title, some might expect Strife to focus on politics and especially on recent conflicts in Zimbabwe. After all, one of Chinodya’s earlier novels, Harvest of Thorns (1989), which won a Commonwealth Writers Prize, has become the definitive literary portrayal of the independence struggle in Zimbabwe. Those expectations are not fulfilled in this book, which seems to be more about trauma on a personal and family level. Reference to the independence struggle is dismissive and almost selfmocking: ‘The story of that bitter conflict has been told elsewhere, many times before,’ the narrator asserts (p.7). And later: ‘Zimbabwe is newly independent; the war of liberation is over and a black government is in power; there is celebration in the air but we’re already beginning to harvest thorns, blah, blah, blah.’


Still, the Gwanangara family quest for healing takes place within a larger political context, and as the story progresses the narrative moves through the major upheavals in the past 150 years of Zimbabwe’s history. Godi, the narrator, is a writer by trade, ‘in love with languages’ (p.7), and in some sense the novel is an exploration of the dilemmas of the contemporary African writer in coming to terms with a troubled past. Experimental, slightly difficult, and sometimes too didactic, the story ends with an allegorical stagescript in which Godi encounters the characters of Tradition, Patriarchy, Shame, Modernity, and Education. He concludes that ‘human nature hardly changes, only its material form does’ (p.220) and that ‘there are some cases which medicine can’t cure’ (p.223). Strife should be in any library that maintains a collection of major works of fiction from southern Africa.



J. Roger Kurtz

The College at Brockport, State University of New York