If Someone hasn’t
written a thesis on literary representations of Harare, Someone ought to. I’m
sure there’s plenty in the socio-economic academic literature about Zimbabwe’s
urbanisation, from its colonial beginnings in the 1890s, through the depressed
first decades of the twentieth century, the halcyon years in the 1950s and ‘60s,
to the overburdened simultaneous growth and decay of the last thirty years. Though novelists and playwrights and poets
have doubtless been writing continuously about city life, and the urban
environment is frequently mentioned in the literary surveys, a cursory search
hasn’t turned up a comprehensive study.
The city has come a
very long way since 1890, when one of Cecil John Rhodes’ troopers raised the
Chartered Company flag over a patch of ground in the shadow of a prominent
kopje, and Fort Salisbury was established. The tiny colonial settlement remained
for a considerable period a pretty miserable place to be. Hugh Marshall Hole
wrote about it this way in 1894, in Old
Rhodesian Days, envying what had already developed in distant Bulawayo:
In Salisbury we heard of these things and envied. ... We still had our
dismal black swamp in the middle of the town, and our ramshackle ‘Kyas’ of wattle
and daub. By 1894, it is true, there was a sprinkling of brick stores and a few
wells had been sunk, but the majority of us lived in thatch huts and had to get
our drinking water up from the river below the camp in barrels hauled by
donkeys or perspiring natives. There was no electric light for us. Those who
were bold enough to venture out after dark had to carry a lantern to prevent
them falling into dagga-pits or the open ditches which drained the camp.
The racial
segregation of the city began right then, with a tightly controlled ‘location’
being established the far side of the Kopje; this and other townships sprawled
even as the plusher white northern suburbs did, and one of the fascinating
things to trace in the literature is the way that that racial and economic
division gets increasingly infiltrated, broken down in places and reinforced in
others, even as the white population after the 1970s dwindled to a tiny and
effectively irrelevant sliver.
In some sectors, even
a century or so after Hole, the city doesn’t sound much better. Here is the legendary bad boy of Zimbabwean
literature, Dambudzo Marechera, in an unpublished piece written in 1985:
What is it about Harare? Is it the nightlife, the hotels, the
nightclubs? Or the melancholy solitary walk back to the flat when a tawny,
almost rubescent dawn is signalling from within the dark confines of another
pent-up night? [...]
Ah, Harare. Its
mysterious method of living out of a suitcase, living in anonymously cheerless
but expensive blocks of flats, living no longer on borrowed time as in the past
but on borrowed money, hire purchase, the black market, and the small advances
one may rarely extract from the employer’s reluctant clenched fist. Harare,
where a scream in the night is the signal for all shutters to come down – it’s
none of my business who is murdering who. Harare, with her thousands of
world-wise schoolgirls tarted up for the lunch-time disco at Bretts and at
Scamps, the raucous scenes at Queens, the National Sports Stadium with its
visiting bands and its bogus Cerulloean evangelists.
(This is cited by
Marechera’s devoted literary supporter and executor, German academic Flora
Veit-Wild, in her survey of “Zim.lit”, Teachers,
Preachers, Non-Believers.) Marechera is obviously projecting his own self-destructive
angst on the city in some ways; he was well-known in his short, creative and
sad life for sitting in Cecil Square – the site of the original Fort, later
Africa Unity Square – hammering out brilliant, tortured and cynical poems on a
battered manual typewriter. Irrepressible, acidic and generally miserable,
Marechera extended his experiences of the seamy side of Salisbury/Harare life
into the phantasmagoric urban psycho-scapes of his novels House of Hunger (1978) and Black
Sunlight (1981).
Something of that
nightmarish vision of Harare’s townships occurs also in Chenjerai Hove’s
well-known novella, Bones (1988),
when his main character Marita ventures out of her already tough rural
existence into the vicious and confusing confines of (we presume) Harare. Hove also wrote a more realistic collection of
vignettes, Shebeen Tales: Messages from
Harare (1994) – these kinds of snatched impression-stories have become a
favourite form for Zimbabwean writers. Shebeen Tales, in my view, is not
especially well-written, often both clumsily repetitive and not profoundly
insightful, but Hove does capture some fundamental dynamics, accompanied by
some juicy and resonant characterisations.
I am alone now, walking down Second Street, passing near parliament,
the house of empty promises, to the national newspaper, the media of omissions.
I hear disgruntled voices, some speak of economic stomach adjustment...
One of the brief
chapters is entitled “’First World’, ‘Third World’, and ‘Fourth World’ City”;
others centre on the shebeen, on the sex shops, on the high walls and savage
dogs of the luxury suburbs. And in another chapter, entitled “Cleaning the Streets
for the Queen”, Hove reminds us that the Mugabe government’s tactic of clearing
the impoverished off the streets only when foreign visitors were due, was a
habit established long before the infamous Murambatsvina
clearances of 2008. Hove’s tone is sardonic:
The Queen of England, yes, the Queen herself, has requested to visit
one of the most run-down suburbs of Harare, Mbare. Now, there is a problem: who
can stand up and say to Her Majesty, ‘No, Your Majesty, please go to the other
places, Borrowdale, Greenside, not to the squatter-riddled Mbare.’ Mbare is chaotically
planned and everything takes care of itself. Violence, drugs, illegal vendors
selling anything you can imagine. And collapsing buildings, old ones built in
nineteen-I-don’t-know-when.
Harare in the year
of Murambatsvina, 2008, is the
setting for Valerie Tagwira’s first and solitary novel, The Uncertainty of Hope – the title is symptomatic. The novel is a
very creditable one, and it’s a pity that Tagwira has published nothing further,
apart from a short story or two; an obstetrician-gynaecologist, she is
presumably too busy saving lives. Her intimate – not to mention medical – knowledge
of Harare shows in her portrayal. The city remains severely split between rich
and poor areas, the latter a perpetual embarrassment to a government that
promised so much and delivered so little: this is a city plagued by AIDS, water
and electricity cuts, rampant inflation (a loaf of bread costs millions), and
chronic shortages of fuel and medical supplies. However, what Tagwira shows
especially finely is how the city divides are in fact (have always been) porous,
as the lives of disparate characters like Onai, the marginal Mbare marketplace
vendor with the abusive husband, and Tom, a jet-setting would-be tycoon with a
farm dodgily acquired under the Land Reform frenzy, become strangely yet
entirely authentically intertwined through family and employment connections. The
various personal crises come to a head in conjunction with, indeed inseparably
from, the destructive clearances of Murambatsvina.
Boundary-crossings
also occur in the occasional white person appearing in Mbare or other
townships: a displaced farmer shebeen-crawler in Bones; a white army man taking up a rather nice house in Mbare in
Christopher Mlalazi’s story “Eeish!”, from Dancing
With Life: Tales from the township (2008). Mlalazi’s title reminds us that,
for all the penury and dissolution, there is always vigorous life, creativity
and humour to be found in the townships, a tribute to the people’s
extraordinary resilience. And in between
the plush suburbs and Mbare and Chitungwiza are “the Avenues”, the
geometrically-arranged flat-lands so disparaged by Marechera. Here small
businesses can be set up in the corners of residential blocks, such as the somewhat
dishevelled salon in Tendai Huchu’s The
Hairdresser of Harare (2010), a very funny little novel in which a white
woman features in a condition of clientship and equality, rather than as the
more usual remote and paternalistic employer. A sign of the times, even as some
colonial institutions (quite mystifying to the novel’s narrator), such as a
rugby match between Churchill and Prince Edward schools, complete with bagpipe
band, persist in their strange bubble of privilege. The novel’s treatment of
homosexuality is a bold intervention into a locally controversial area, another
sign of the city’s shifting social undercurrents.
The critique of
Mugabe’s governance underpinning many of these works has sent any number of
Zimbabwe’s best writers out of the country; Hove himself died recently in exile
in Norway. So voluminous has the diaspora been that Brian Chikwava can
characterise part of London as Harare
North – his novel of that title constituting a brave, if not quite
successful, experiment in inventing a kind of ‘Shonglish’ for a
ZANU-PF-supporting main character.
Another writer who
has elected to live elsewhere, but continues to write about the homeland, is
Petina Gappah. Gappah’s first novel, An Elegy for Easterly, I thought very
good but which, in the way of a number of first novels published elsewhere, I felt
had had the pithy individuality edited out of it; it was so polished that a
true ‘voice’ hadn’t been allowed to emerge. However, unlike too many young African
writers who don’t survive the exaggerated accolades accorded to them by an
apparently guilt-stricken international media, Gappah has gone on to write
more, and to really find herself. The Book of Memory (2015) relates
perhaps the strangest of all crossovers between Harare’s adjacent worlds – an albino
Shona girl named Memory who (so she thinks) has been sold by her father to a
white man, who raises her devotedly; but she is in the infamous Chikurubi prison,
having been accused of murdering her benefactor. In her story, as she recalls it, are
lingering residues of the entrenched divides of the more and the less
privileged, the residents of Umwinsidale at one end of the scale, the Jo’burg
Lines of Mbare at the other.
And what of the
future of Harare? One can only imagine – as did Nancy Farmer, a multiple award-winning
American writer who lived for a time in Harare with her husband Harold, himself
an accomplished poet. Nancy Farmer wrote several Zimbabwe-set novels for teens (Young
Adults, we call them nowadays), including The
Warm Place (1996) and A Girl named
Disaster (1998). The Ear, the Eye and
the Arm (1995) is set in a fantasial Harare of the twenty-second century.
The Ear, the Eye and the Arm are three bizarre characters comprising a
detective agency, who are set by a certain General to find his missing
children; we are led on a charming helter-skelter adventure through the various
districts of the city. We begin with the suffocatingly securitised rich suburbs
in which the General, appropriately, lives; through the bawdy and dangerous
chaos of Mbare; vast, tunnel-riddled trash-lands ruled by a woman no less
tyrannical than the General himself; the Mile-High city, which is a luxurious (very)
high-rise complex, a kind of extension/combination of the boutiques of First
Street, the gold-and-glass Sheraton hotel, and ZANU-PF headquarters; and Resthaven,
which bears the name of an actual old-age home but in the novel is a walled-off
enclave attempting to restore age-old traditional rural Shona values.
A wonderful
story.
I have already gone
on rather long – and have only scratched the surface of a rich lode of
imaginings of a multi-faceted, turbulent yet attractive city just bursting with
artistic talent and possibility.
*****
