reviews
Strife Encounters with ghosts: An African family gets
caught between modernity and tradition As tantalising as titles and covers go, I can’t remember one that comes close to Shimmer Chinodya’s Strife . When I saw the cover of silhouetted people, arms flailing in the air, and a yellow flame, I thought of the oppressed getting fed up with the dictatorship and rising up in anger. But it turns out that the novel, Chinodya’s seventh, has nothing
to do with the meltdown in Zimbabwe at all. Strife.is about
a family, the Gwanangaras, and goes back in time to the mid-1800s, around
the time that Mzilikazi – fleeing Shaka’s wrath – arrived
in what is now Zimbabwe with thousands of his Ndebele subjects. Godfrey relieves the tragedies of the past in the moment, the unease in the 19th century mirroring the family’s present sense of helplessness and fatalistic desperation, coming through quite effusively. This technique works, especially at the beginning, when the settings are distinctly disparate – in the 19th and in the recent past. But, as the events and people narrated become more and more recent and recognisable, it feels somewhat like two disjointed stories. Strife could be encapsulated as a struggle between modernity and the past. The soul of the story is how an upwardly mobile family – who all go to university – negotiate an aggrieved past. Their predicament is that they believe traditional modes of atonement are not becoming of people of their station. The family is helpless and at a loss to what to do about the schizophrenia affecting Kelvin, the family outcast. Should they go to the inyanga/sangoma? Or should the mysterious deaths, the suicides, the divorces and the chronic illnesses bedevilling them be seen as mere happenstance, not occurrences that can be fixed only by Pentecostal Christianity, the traditional healer’s bones or herbalists? The novel ends on a preachy note, the narrator, in a way, summing up what he has been telling us over the 200 or so pages. He encounters, on stage, in this order, tradition, patriarchy, fatalism, modernity, education and medicine. In this dialogue with medicine he is told, ‘there are some cases medicine can’t cure’. The book, for better or worse chooses to be oblivious of the larger strife that has rocked the country. The arrival of Mzilikazi and the destabilisation of local tribes, Cecil Rhodes and his Rhodesia, the killings of Gukurahundi and the present crisis receive the most cursory of allusions; ‘… this is the time of dissidents’ is all the author says about Gukurahundi. This reminded me of Chinua Achebe’s argument that ‘an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant – like the absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames’. Perhaps anticipating this, early enough in the story the narrator puts out a disclaimer: ‘but this is not a story about that war. The story about that bitter conflict has been told elsewhere, many times before.’ It is a compelling and disturbing read nevertheless, in which the horrors of the past are lived in the moment. © The author/publisher |