Index

Journal of Southern African Studies Vol. 29, No. 4,
pp 995-97
December 2003
Reviewer: Ranka Primorac, Nottingham Trent University

Yvonne Vera is one of the most prolific and important creative writers to emerge from post-independence Zimbabwe. Since 1992, she has published six volumes of fiction: a short story collection (Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals, 1992) and five novels - Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002). Her texts (novels in particular) are marked by their women-centred subject matter, their ‘difficult,’ lyrical style and their deliberate breaking of thematic taboos (they deal, unflinchingly yet compassionately, with violent and traumatic events such as rape, incest, abortion and infanticide). In all of these respects, Vera’s latest novel, The Stone Virgins, is typical of her opus. However, there are also several senses in which this novel represents a new departure for its author and an important benchmark for Zimbabwean fiction in English. I would argue that The Stone Virgins is Vera’s most accomplished and powerful work so far.

Unlike any of Vera’s other novels, The Stone Virgins spans the pre- and post-independence periods of Zimbabwe’s history. (Nehanda is set in the 1890s, Butterfly Burning in the 1940s, Without a Name and Under the Tongue in the 1970s.) The novel is divided into two parts - one entitled ‘1950-1980,’ the other ‘1981-1986’ – and it starts and finishes with chapters containing descriptions of Bulawayo, the capital of Zimbabwe’s southern province of Matabeleland. The colonial Bulawayo described in chapter one is a city of sharp edges and divides, where black men and women are seen meeting literally underground, dreaming of freedoms that they do not possess: ‘All they want is to come and go as they please. At independence, they just want to go in there, and leave, as they please, not to sneak or peep, but to come, and go, as they please.’ (p. 9) In the novel’s final chapter, on the other hand, a black woman wonders freely among the city’s streets. There are flowers everywhere; there are also, after independence, black mannequins in department-store windows, ‘recently employed black bank tellers and trainee managers’ (p. 149) and black residents in apartment blocks with colonial names such as ‘Kensington Flats.’ The Stone Virgins makes it clear that independence has brought about an irreversible social advancement. It has, however, also brought suffering, tragedy and trauma.

Most of the novel’s narrative (framed by the descriptions of the city) does not take place in Bulawayo. It is set, instead, in a rural enclave called Kezi, some two hundred kilometres away, and focuses on the kind of people and places that are normally considered peripheral. ‘In truth, the bus drives from Bulawayo to Kezi, then back to Bulawayo. But (…) in the minds of the residents of Kezi, of course, Kezi comes first: the bus, therefore, is seen as driving from Kezi to Bulawayo to Kezi during the entire week.’ (p. 17) (In emphasising her narrative’s potential function as an alternative, unofficial history, as in matters of style, Vera owes a significant debt to the Zimbabwean novelist Chenjerai Hove.) The story that unfolds in Kezi comprises four narrative strands. The first is about the love between Cephas, a young man from a distant part of the country, and Thenjiwe, a Kezi woman ‘more beautiful than rain’ (p. 30). The second is the story of Sibaso, a former nationalist guerrilla who has, after independence, become one of the ‘dissidents’ – armed men unhappy with the new dispensation who roamed rural Matabeleland in the 1980s. The novel’s third narrative strand tells of how Sibaso murders Thenjiwe (spectacularly, by beheading her), then violates and mutilates her younger sister Nonceba, whom Cephas later befriends and takes to the safety of Bulawayo. The fourth strand narrates the destruction of the social centre of Kezi – the Thandabantu (literally ‘love-people’) general store, and the torture and murder of its owner Mahlathini by the soldiers of the new, independent government.

The Stone Virgins presents this narrative material with unprecedented compositional balance and clarity, and in a style that is more measured and controlled than in any of Vera’s previous novels. Her usual deluge of ‘poetic’ images and figures of speech (which has, on occasion, given free reign to less-than-disciplined critical outpourings) is here carefully restrained. Images are embedded within the text with greater precision (see, for example, the recurrence of the word ‘bone,’ or the references to the African continent); one of the most shocking events in the novel – the murder of Thenjiwe – is told with extraordinary grace and economy of language. A further dimension of the uniqueness of The Stone Virgins is the presence in it of a male character who makes no attempts to appropriate or control a woman’s body, and who is allowed access to the intimate circle of healing, reserved in Vera’s other work for women alone. In addition to that, Cephas is by profession a historian; and although he has come to Kezi from Mashonaland, he is, at the novel’s end, working on restoring kwoBulawayo, the seat of the pre-colonial Ndebele state. ‘A new nation needs to restore its past.’ (p. 165) The novel may therefore be said to associate him with the kind of nationalism that is positive and emancipatory because it is non-violent and pluralistic. Nationalism’s dark, violent and destructive face is in part embodied by Sibaso.

The Stone Virgins is not the first novel to refer to the post-independence war that ravaged Matabeleland in the 1980s. The conflict between the ‘dissidents’ (the Ndebele former guerrillas unhappy with the way they were treated after independence) and government forces is also represented in Chenjerai Hove’s 1991 novel Shadows, and Alexander Kanengoni’s Echoing Silences, published in 1997. Kanengoni’s text sees the post-independence violence in Matabeleland as an extension of the ethnic clashes between the two African nationalist armies that fought the liberation war. Hove’s novel, on the other hand, highlights the plight of rural peasants who, after all the hardships of the war of independence, find themselves at the mercy of further, dissident-inflicted violence. In as much as it does not analyse the political causes of Sibaso’s discontent, but concentrates instead on the harm he causes to civilians, Vera novel is written in Hove’s wake. (Unlike Shadows, however, The Stone Virgins enters a dissident’s psychological world: Sibaso has, during his time as a guerrilla, turned inwardly into stone. He sleeps in, and desecrates, a sacred hillside cave decorated with ancient paintings, ‘the stone virgins.’) But it also takes a step further: to my knowledge, it is the first Zimbabwean novel in English to refer to and openly condemn the violence against civilians sponsored by the government of independent Zimbabwe.

The novel draws a parallel between the destruction of Mahlathni and the Thandabantu store, and Sibaso’s act of mindless brutality. The store had functioned as the social heart of Kezi: a place where people met to trade and talk, and where, as a sign of social change brought about by independence, female freedom fighters had won the right to sit on the veranda on upturned empty crates - something previously reserved for men only. It is precisely because it was a place of meeting and dialogue that the store was destroyed, its owner accused of providing a space ‘where anything could be spoken, planned and allowed to happen.’ (p. 121) At the time of ‘dissident’ revolt, the Zimbabwean government sent to Matabeleland a specially trained military unit (the Fifth Brigade) which wiped out countless civilian families. Written in an equally violent historical moment, Vera’s text has the courage to assert that such acts were deliberately executed and planned, then just as deliberately deleted from the nation’s official memory. ‘The team of soldiers who congregated on Thandabantu store had demonstrated that anything which had happened so far had not been random or unplanned. Atrocious, yes, but purposeful.’ (p. 124) ‘Mahlathini’s death would not be registered. There would be no memory desired of it. It was such a time; such a death.’ (p. 122) After independence, rather than being liberated, the rural space of Kezi becomes ‘a naked cemetery.’ (p. 143)

When I met and interviewed her in Bulawayo in 2001, Vera was working on The Stone Virgins. Speaking of the transformative effect of writing on her life, she said:

With this brave and balanced novel, Vera has transformed the present moment of Zimbabwean fiction.

© The author/publisher

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