Reimagined rural-urban landscapes and ...

This article was downloaded by: [The Library, University of Witwatersrand] On: 29 May 2014, At: 04:37 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

African Identities Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cafi20

Reimagined rural–urban landscapes and Zimbabwean cultural identities in Zimunya's country dawns and city lights Samuel Ravengai

a

a

Department of Theatre Arts, University of Zimbabwe, PO Box MP 167, Mt Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe Published online: 27 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Samuel Ravengai (2013) Reimagined rural–urban landscapes and Zimbabwean cultural identities in Zimunya's country dawns and city lights, African Identities, 11:4, 381-394, DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2013.863142 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2013.863142

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

African Identities, 2013 Vol. 11, No. 4, 381–394, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2013.863142

Reimagined rural – urban landscapes and Zimbabwean cultural identities in Zimunya’s country dawns and city lights Samuel Ravengai*

Downloaded by [The Library, University of Witwatersrand] at 04:37 29 May 2014

Department of Theatre Arts, University of Zimbabwe, PO Box MP 167, Mt Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe (Received 18 January 2013; accepted 27 October 2013) This article seeks to explore the ways in which Zimunya constructs Zimbabwean rural and urban landscapes and cultural identities at a time when the city is making inroads into the rural terrain and the rural hinterland is encroaching into the city. I argue that even though Zimunya seems to blame the white man’s culture for ‘contaminating’ the rural landscape and cultural identities and seeks to purify his home space, the tale unfolding in the poetic narratives suggests that his society also changes with time. It might not be possible for his society to behave and relate to each other in accordance with pre-capitalist values as existing social and economic conditions have changed. Contrary to existing formalist criticism of Zimunya’s poetry such as those posited by Zhuwarara, R. (1985, Introduction. In M. Zimunya (Ed.), Country dawns and city lights. Harare: Longman) who views the rural African society as both overshadowed and threatened by city life, a place which symbolises a civilisation whose capacity to brutalise seems infinite, I argue that both the rural and urban African people have the capacity to ‘resist’ the metropole culture creating a new identity or a system of relations and representations which is not fixed, but dynamic and continually recomposes and redefines itself. Keywords: cultural identities; landscape; hybridity; indigenes; metropole

Although Zimunya’s poetry anthology Country dawns and city lights was first published in 1985, its writing began in the 1970s. Some of the poems in the anthology go back to the 1950s to capture the life and culture of the poet and his community when he was 12 years old. Zimunya is a second-generation writer, who, together with his colleagues, was ‘moulded by their upbringing and education after World War II’ (Veit-Wild, 1993, p. 8). As such, Zimunya writes as a social moralist critically scrutinising existing social structures and voicing grave concern about the influence of modernisation, technologisation and urbanisation on the spiritual and cultural development of his people. This is one of the major preoccupations of Zimunya in his anthology Country dawns and city lights (1985). Even though Zimunya can be classified as a second-generation writer, he continues to write today and some of his writings can no longer neatly fit this category. While talking about Nigerian poetry, Harry Garuba observes that literary schools ‘are as porous as they come’ and argues that ‘literary periodisation remains a messy business’ (2005, p. 51). Garuba realises that categorisation cannot be avoided and asserts that periods and literary schools ‘[a]s markers of general trends . . . retain some usefulness, more like provisional maps, open-ended rather than closed, always inviting revision; their reversibility

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] q 2013 Taylor & Francis


382

S. Ravengai

inscribed, as it were, at the heart of their making’ (2005, p. 51). It is in this sense that I have classified Zimunya as a second-generation writer. The Longman 1985 edition of Country dawns and city lights has a cover page that captures the essence of my argument. It has a beautiful painting of a naked African woman. At her marriageable age, she has an umbilical cord surrealistically stretching to her right and at the end transforms into the front view of a motor vehicle. Her vagina, which is the source of life, is under attack by a phallic creature which looks like a centipede. This creature elongates towards the left where it transforms into a shining chromium bumper of a vehicle. Ninety-five per cent of her nude body is covered in a transparent membrane and only part of her right hand is brightly lit by a setting sun. The right hand seems to be waving goodbye to the exotic and untamed sun lit rural landscape with its flora and fauna. Her left side, which is the weaker part for many Zimbabweans, is faintly lit by a yellow light radiating from a distant horizon, where the car (part of the painting) is coming from. One thinks that it is the city as captured in the second stanza of the poem, On the streets, ‘from the north/the city casts yellow flames on the village’ (p. 50). Her left breast is obscured by a star, which is a Western value to cover a body part that is embarrassing to their eyes. The right breast is uncovered. Even though the feminine figure seems to be suffocating in this dark transparent membrane, she lies in an erotic position ready to engage this creature which is making raids into her private part. The motorcar is an invention of the West and, therefore, symbolises the material culture of the metropole which has established itself on African soil in the city. What is ironic about this surreal painting is that her umbilical cord is inextricably tied to this symbol of the Western material culture. This is an image that has a visceral appeal to the African reader, more so, when the assumption is that the umbilical cord should be interned in African soil. It would look like the woman, who gives birth to generations, has lost connection with the African landscape and spaces of identity. She draws sustenance from symbols of Western culture. The bumper of the motor car, which has invaded the rural landscape, is making its way into the African woman’s vagina to (against all logical and scientific laws) (re)produce a new generation of Africans which as it negotiates and maps its way on the African landscape meets a lot of challenges. The rural and urban landscapes are the sites where the conflicts and contradictions that ensue are most evident. The image of the woman is a controversial one in the sense that she is implicated in the iniquities of the larger society. In fact, well over half of the poems in the anthology Country dawns and city lights (1985) involve women characters and most of them are at the centre of moral decadence. In the last stanza of the poem, On the Streets, a woman is portrayed as having the power to seize the whole world as long as she co-habits that world with men carrying testicles: ‘[a] man takes the city by the horns/ but a woman seizes the world by the testes’ (p. 50). It is as if she is the biblical woman sitting on a beast with seven heads and epitomising all the harlotry and abominations of the world. This is an interesting area for another study. But coming back to the cover image, it can be said to be surreal in the sense that a holistic reading of it reveals the actual functioning of thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason. In this image, there is a reconciliation of dream and reality where the most unlikely images are arbitrarily joined together to generate new realities that are both engaging and shocking. In the first part of the anthology entitled, Country dawns, Zimunya paints a beautiful landscape of the Eastern highlands much as he has done with his other poetry anthology Thought-tracks (1982). This beauty is soon juxtaposed with other foreign bodies that one wonders what will become of this bounded community. In the poem, Wet seasons, Zimunya describes the green grass and bushes

African Identities

383

which find nourishment from the earth made soft by the rain. He describes the beauty of the rivers, the swallows and locusts and


Everywhere small springs burst out of the wet earth, water rushed to the surface in minute vortexes. (1985, p. 6)

The airspace of this beautiful landscape is ‘clean’ and full of life. It is a paradise for African birds such as Chapungu which as it flaps its wings, drums the air. This gives joy to the village children who sing after its cry ‘Eagle play the drum/for we come from the land of no drums’ (1985, p. 2). This is a village in harmony with its environment. Immediately, the tale in the poetic narratives seems to unveil images that are alien to this community. The airspace eulogised by the young villagers is ‘violated’ by ‘the exploding thunder of the jet-plane’ (1985, p. 15) which contrastingly brings panic and anguish to the selfsame children: We screamed the scream of the bible gnashed the gnashing of the end the pain of the ages the anguish of children such as could have been heard in another hundred planets beyond was felt. (1985, p. 15)

This is a powerful image of the intrusion of a foreign body in the sacred habitat of the African God – the heavens. This motif of the sanctity of the African airspace is carried further in another poetry anthology by Zimunya, Thought-tracks (1982), in the poem, Ifulaimachina. An old man is awe-stricken with a plane’s invasion of the airspace and remarks: These men of the white skin Even puffing into the face of God, I swear through Chaminuka They will finish us off. (1982, p. 22)

The bodily existence of villagers in localised space is also juxtaposed with the foreign material culture already beginning to make headway into the village. As stated by Yoshikuni (1999), the city, which in origin, functions, form and power structure is thoroughly ‘European’, has ‘many rural connections in the form of movements of people, flows of money and goods, and circulation of ideas and values’ (1999, p. 113). The seemingly bounded rural landscape and community is graced with ‘a bumpy village road’, which the persona riding on a ‘bus’ and coming home to pray to save his community will use. It is the same road that the ‘delivery vans’ from town use when they bring ‘Canada dry, cream soda, ginger ale, fanta and pepsi’ (1985, p. 25) soft drinks. In the same community as depicted in the poem, Doomsday, there is a ‘village school’ and ‘churches’ that are bursting ‘with men and women moved by terror and death to pray’ (1985, p. 14). In the poem, Let me go, other foreign bodies include the ‘saw’ and the ‘axe’ which ‘make bald heads of hills’ (1985, p. 27), although the axe is, admittedly, an invention and improvement of the Iron Age model. The poem, Chapungu, adds the ‘plough shares’ and part two of the anthology is begun with the inclusion of the ‘motor car’ and ‘the bicycle’: When the motor car came the sledge and the ox-cart began to die but for a while the bicycle made in Britain was the dream of every village boy. (1985, p. 31)

The tangible and intangible1 cultural heritage of the local community is juxtaposed with the material culture of the metropole in an arbitrary manner creating a bizarre image

384

S. Ravengai

almost similar to the one on the cover picture theorised above. In the bounded rural community like the one in Zimunya’s Country dawns and city lights (1985), cultural identities are maintained by excluding others who do not share its collective memory. The cultural identities of the indigenes are constituted through their distinctions from and oppositions to any other culture, notably the Western culture. Schlesinger offers a useful formulation in theorising the concept of identities:


Identity is as much about exclusion as it is about inclusion, and the critical factor for defining the ethnic group therefore becomes the social boundary which defines the group with respect to other groups. (1987, p. 235)

The question is: Is this now achievable in the rural community constructed in the poetry anthology? The carriers of Western culture – schools, churches, roads, buses, vans, foodstuffs and technology – are in the midst of the African village. How shall the village come to terms with their presence inside its citadel? How does the poet Zimunya respond to this surreal scenario as he constructs new landscape boundaries and identities? These are important research questions which will continue to guide the direction of this article. The rural community of the indigene seems to be electronically linked to the outside world by way of radio as can be inferred from rumour of the end of the world in the poem Doomsday. This is not out of place as chiefs and headmen were rewarded with FM radios by the colonial government. In a possible reference to the Clarion prophecy2 given in America in the mid-1950s about the end of the world, which villagers possibly got from the radio or from the city, the villagers share the news of its coming through orality. What can be deciphered from these images is that the rural community is electronically and mechanically connected to the city (European habitat) and London (the Imperial capital). Geographical proximity is no longer the sole determinant of community and identity. Other factors have been introduced, notably the electronic network and mechanical networks (road, rail and air). These networks tend to overlap what the rural community has traditionally considered its geographical boundaries. In the poem, A long journey, Zimunya underscores the shift in boundaries: With the arrival of the bus the city was brought to the village and we began to yearn for the place behind the horizons. (1985, p. 31)

The cultural identities of the rural community of the indigene and its landscape has become semi-permeable, an osmotic membrane through which the culture of the coloniser can either flow/be resisted and/or appropriated in projects of counter-colonial resistance. Morley and Robins (1995), while talking about the power of the media, make a statement that is equally true to the cultural and spatial boundaries of the rural community in Zimunya’s Country dawns and city lights. They argue: What the new technologies make possible is a new kind of relationship between place and space: through their capacity to transgress frontiers and subvert territories, they are implicated in a complex interplay of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. What is particularly significant is the transformed relationship between boundary and space that this entails. Things are no longer defined and distinguished in the ways they once were, by their boundaries, borders or frontiers . . . we can say that the very idea of boundary . . . has been rendered problematical. (1995, p. 75)

The continuity of identity seems to be threatened in this rural community. With the rural communal frontiers and boundaries eroded, this provokes immediate confrontations of culture and identity. Older certainties and foundations of identity are being undermined.

African Identities

385


How does Zimunya respond to this scenario which he has aptly represented in his poetry anthology Country dawns and city lights? While his age mates are fighting in frontline positions he is murmuring with his pen. He takes the position of a social moralist complaining about the negative effects of colonialism in the rural and urban landscapes but without pinning down the issues to the very source of the moral and social decadence. He is ambivalent and is a careful and sensitive cultural nationalist. For this reason, his poetry cannot be called resistance poetry, but more appropriately protest poetry. Mutsvairo notices this subtlety and ambivalence in Zimunya’s other anthology Thought-tracks (1982) when he argues: Many of Zimunya’s poems are passionate political protests but nowhere does he write to incite his people to take up arms against the colonial power . . . As many of these poems were written in England where the poet need not have feared intimidation for his views, it is reasonable to assume that he chose to explore the spiritual rather than mere militaristic aspect of the struggle . . . . (1996, pp. 118, 119)

As a protest poet, Zimunya makes a statement of disagreement with the rural indigenes, urbanites and (not so explicitly) the coloniser. He wants to unveil the ugly things that are done under the cover of darkness and behind sanitary lanes – baby dumping, prostitution, murder and pillage – and appeal to the conscience of the culprits as well as the coloniser who is responsible for creating economic conditions that force town dwellers to live that kind of life. He writes poetry of murmuring, weeping, self-pity and hopelessness. He offers no solution to the sad situation which the rural community and the urban dwellers find themselves in. He is a lamenter and a great celebrator of old landscapes and African culture. As a cultural nationalist murmuring with his pen, he together with other cultural nationalists of his generation is understood by J. Plamenartz as having a desire to preserve or enhance a people’s national or cultural identity when that identity is threatened, or the desire to transform or even create it where it is felt to be inadequate or lacking. (cited in Lawson, 1995, p. 168)

The rural community in his poetry anthology is imagined/constructed in terms of an idealised wholeness and plenitude. It is also imagined in terms of boundedness and containment. Zimunya comes across strongly to defend the rural community against any foreign (Other) infiltration. In the poem, Let me go, Zimunya mourns the depletion of the landscape of his cradle: I will return to the mountains of home turned skeletons where fires of August hunters swept the darkness sky once and I will mourn that where once musasa blew blossoms of red now shades of ring worms and clouds of whirlwind disturb the earth . . . . (1985, p. 27)

In the same poem, Zimunya takes a stand to conserve and sustain the coherence and integrity of his community and its landscape against forces of disintegration and dissolution. That stand will take him home where he wants to worship his African god to intercede for his community. Let me kneel down again, my dear citizens, and worship the gods of my forefathers before the saw and the axe make bald the heads of hills laying naked the spirits of the land as never before . . . . (1985, p. 27)

There is a moral and spiritual panic in Zimunya’s poetry which is motivated by a positivist philosophy to life whose important principle is that of causality. According to Fourie (1988, p. 2), human experience indicates that one phenomenon is consistently followed by another, that the first phenomenon causes the second and that this sequence can, therefore, be predicted. As carriers of Western culture are already positioned in the village, Zimunya fears that his very source of sustenance – the spirit world – will be


386

S. Ravengai

desecrated. In the poem, O Harare! that sense of moral panic is evident. He laments over the inhuman side of the city for causing the moral decadence in school girls, fathers, mothers and infants. Nothing is spared. He is in a state of anomie, an advanced degree of moral panic where he feels that the accepted values, norms and culture that nurtured him are threatened. One can understand this developed sense of moral panic as his society, during and after World War II, was experiencing a lot of change due to technologisation, modernisation and urbanisation. These agents of change are perceived by Zimunya as seriously subverting the mores and interests of his culture. This state of anomie makes him even doubt his own character as he is a product of the village school which makes him fight with his father for not proposing love to a woman because ‘ . . . [he] must concentrate on [his] books’ (1985, p. 3). Because he has read books and has been to the city, he considers coming back home as a renewal of self, a rebirth ‘in a baptism of the last ancient sunset’ (1985, p. 27). In that way, he can be the authentic citizen of his rural community. He is also sceptical of some of the writers of his generation who have received Western education like him and seem to borrow writing styles from Europe. Even where other commentators find Marechera’s borrowing positive, The intensity, the apocalyptic images, the incantatory rhythms, the eclectic sensibility of Charles (Dambudzo) Marechera’s poetry echo Blake, Ezra, Pound, the poets of the 40s. Marechera manages to make the borrowing his own . . . his poetry promises a new beginning: a Rhodesian Christopher Okigbo in the making. (cited in Veit-Wild, 1993, p. 236)

Zimunya is in a state of panic and cannot afford to accept such levels of hybridisation to his culture threatened by Europe: In Marechera, Zimbabwean literature achieves confirmation of birth. Unfortunately, the vision is preponderantly private and indulgent . . . masochistic artistic engagement overwhelms the social and moral intent. Pleading for admission into the neurotic twentieth contrary is the worst way to go about revitalising a culture depleted by the self-same Europe . . . the “eclectic babble” does not, as a rule, enrich one’s own culture, and it certainly chokes the artist himself. (1982, p. 128)

Zimunya then prescribes what Zimbabwean literature needs to do in order to ensure the continuity of culture: Zimbabwe needs a literature that reflects its people’s heroic efforts to re-discover themselves, literature that is imbued with local colour and perspective. This is the sacred duty of Zimbabwe’s writers. (ibid., p. 10)

Inevitably and ironically, Zimunya is implicated in the writing device of hybridity which he attacks when it occurs in other writers’ works. His poem, Like sugar in tea, is a typical example of the mechanical construction of a poem following European models. Zimunya creates semantic indirection through distortion. Distortion occurs when there is ambiguity, contradiction or simply nonsense in a poem. According to Riffaterre, the poet is creative: When textual space serves as a principle of organisation for making signs out of linguistic items that may not be meaningful otherwise (for instance, symmetry, rhyme, or semantic equivalences between positional homologues in a stanza). (1978, p. 2)

In the poem, Like sugar in tea, Zimunya gets carried away with the alliterative rhyme and musicality of the beginning of each verse. While he gains on the beauty and music of the poem, he loses on the meaning. This kind of writing threatens the literary representation of reality or mimesis which Zhuwarara rewards him with in his introductory note ‘ . . . the romantic streak in Zimunya is checked by his sense of realism’ (1985, p. v).


African Identities

387

Realism or mimesis can be achieved when representation is founded on the referentiality of language; when words have a direct relationship to things. Apparently, Zimunya has apportioned realism as a creative method to be used by those who want to genuinely represent the depth and weight of African culture, which he seems to contradict in this poem. Mutsvairo notices the same hybrid tendencies in Zimunya’s works. He states that ‘his very craftsmanship alienates him from the Shona poetry’ and that it is ‘too Anglocentred’ for the ‘average Zimbabwean to understand the poetry of Musaemura Zimunya’ (1996, p. 119). Taking a holistic approach to these arguments and counter-arguments, one thing is very clear. An indigenous culture, as the one constructed by Zimunya in Country dawns and city lights, which has had contact with a European culture is inevitably hybridised, involving a dialectical relationship between European ontology and epistemology. The indigenous culture is not a passive culture at the mercy of Europe. It has the impulse to create and/ or recreate independent local identity which defies and sometimes supplants the imperial culture as will be theorised below. Zimunya’s anthology is preoccupied with retrieving the past and protesting against the state of things during the colonial period. This is what motivates the moral and social panic that permeates his poetry. Zimunya symbolically portrays the mediums of European culture as a hypodermic needle injection capable of injecting certain values, ideas and attitudes into the occupied society resulting in a particular behaviour change. The assumptions of this positivist approach are that the indigene is helplessly exposed to and at the mercy of European culture; the indigene is helplessly caught up in a behaviourist stimulus – response relationship with European culture. To view the white man’s culture, symbolised by a European city (in Africa), as the active and determining force, is to assume too great a power on it. It is tantamount to demeaning the African people’s culture and identities as this line of thinking assumes that the indigenous culture and identity is passive and reactive. It can only be shaped and modified by Europe without creating its own sites of resistance to contain the exogenous forces. The positivist philosophy is fraught with difficulties as the power of European culture is assumed and not demonstrated. The indigene’s personal values, norms, human relations and cultural background, all of which mediate the effects of European culture on him/her are not taken into account. The fact that the indigene’s eventual behaviour, his/her attitudes and notions of the world are codetermined by several other variables such as intelligence, opinion leaders like parents and spiritual leaders is also not adequately theorised. What can be stressed, which is the basis of my argument, is that the ‘city’ as depicted in Country dawns and city lights is capable of contributing to cultural change of the rural indigenes, but is not, on its own, a sufficient cause of cultural change. It operates in conjunction with other mediating factors that are already in the rural community. With the foregoing factors in mind, it becomes pertinent to unravel the rural indigenes’ response to the presence of Western culture inside his citadel. Zimunya’s tone of voice is that of doom and hopelessness. However, the direction given by a hackneyed phrase ‘trust the tale and not the teller’ can help us with regard to theory. This is what other critics call ‘alternative reading’. An alternative reading of Zimunya’s poetry reveals that they are three kinds of responses to Western presence in the village – self peasantisation, controlled appropriation and blind appropriation. The response of the rural community is moderated by two factors, namely – how to position itself in local space, that is, bodily existence and how to position itself in metropole space – that is, existence in mediated space. With regard to the first response, the rural community refuses to leave its natal community and to work in the city. Historically, the Whiteman’s policy was to encourage


388

S. Ravengai

and sometimes force (chibharo) the Blackman to leave his village and work in town. However, in the poem, Let me go, the response seems to be a refusal to be proletarianised by the city. There is a move to what Ranger (1985) calls ‘self-peasantisation’ (p. 20) as evidenced by booming peasant agriculture. The pastures have been turned into ‘villages’ and ‘fields’, which is evidence of peasant population explosion and booming agriculture. What is ironic in this ‘resistance’ is that the peasant farmers are using the white man’s instruments – the ‘plough shares’ and the ‘saw and the axe make bald heads of hills laying naked the spirits of the land as never before’ (1985, p. 27). In that act of resistance, there is a very important part of the indigene’s culture that suffers. They lose connection with their ancestral spirits as they have defiled their shrines by cutting down forests. While trying to do a collective action to correct a wrong, they are transformed in the process. Thus, in talking about identity, Schlesinger sums it up: [T]he maintenance of an agent’s identity is . . . a continual process of recomposition rather than a given one, in which the two constitutive dimensions of self-identification and affirmation are continually locked . . . . Identity is seen as dynamic, emergent aspect of collective action. (1987, pp. 236 and 237)

The second type of response is a realisation that not all of the Western culture is bad and dangerous. The opinion leaders of the village, the parents, have allowed their children to go to school. In the poem, Love Portion, the persona is concentrating on his books. The poem, Doomsday, describes a reasonable number of school children taking part in classes with monitors, prefects, teachers and the school master. This is an open admission by the villagers that education is important to their culture. In the poem, On the streets, the rural indigenes also accept that an educated son can become more useful in the city. However, there is inherent fear of the city and its new ways. Its new ways must be resisted by dedicating the son to the African god through holding a traditional ceremony: You go to the sayer who throws a few bones Your mother brews beer there is a feast and with the slaughter of the bull they say you can take the new ways by the horns. (1985, p. 50)

Once there is a spiritual connection, the new African man can handle the ‘demon’ in the city. He can take ‘the city by the horns’ (ibid.). The third type of response is that of blind appropriation of Western culture. Such persons are already dissatisfied with their own culture at the point of encounter. Tito, for example, in the poem ‘Coke’, is a social misfit in the sense that he is a thief. He does not appreciate the censure administered by his mother to inculcate good values. He decides to run away from the vindictive home to gain ‘freedom’ in the city. However, if the rural African does not have strong African values as the ones given during a traditional ceremony, the city has the propensity to: Thrust demon roots down a village soul and like a fig tree split the original in turgid growth. (1985, p. 33)

This kind of resistance is unfortunate in the sense that, once the African loses connection with his local identity, he becomes dangerous. The city is synonymous with a ‘rubbish-hole’ with a lid on it. If one makes it his/her permanent dwelling place forgetting one’s mother and father ‘[y]ou get hot’ and become ‘a rotten egg bombshell’ (p. 54). Those without skills and who run to the city for the strange appetites it provokes are dangerous.

African Identities

389


After seeing the van delivering the Whiteman’s soft drinks, ‘Tito’s appetite was drawn to the city’ and his ‘appetite was bewitched by the city’ (p. 25). In the same poem, Coke, a married village woman throws her pots down, charms her husband to sleep during daytime and escapes to the city. For all we know, she becomes a ‘Fanta-face’, a derogatory phrase to describe black women who apply skin bleaching creams to their faces. No social or cultural reasons are given for her escape, but nonetheless, she gains her ‘freedom’. Her ‘freedom’ becomes a threat to men in the city as ‘a woman seizes the world by the testes’ (1985, p. 50). At this point, we notice that the rural boundary is encroaching into the European city. Yoshikuni, the urban historian, notices the same trend fictionalised by Zimunya: Plainly, in origin, functions, form and power structure the Southern African town was thoroughly ‘European’. Yet it did have some interactions with African societies from the beginning, as these societies came under colonial rule and provided labour for the colonial economy. Before long, large numbers of Africans congregated in the town, a few even making the town a permanent home, and created a new type of society there. (1999, p. 113)

As has been noted above, the Shona indigene’s response to European penetration into the rural areas is self-peasantisation where the indigene pursues the option of agriculture to keep him aloof from wage employment in the city. This labour vacuum in the city was filled by migrant labourers from the then Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This trend began to change after 1945. According to Yoshikuni (1999) for the first time after 1945, the city developed socio-economic and cultural links with the broader Shona society as large numbers of Shona migrants settled in town. This is an important historical preamble to the discussion of spatial boundaries and cultural identities in Zimunya’s Country dawns and city lights. The Shona, which is the ethnic group of the persona in Zimunya’s poems, is coming to the city to find it already occupied by two other groups – ethnic groups from the north whose lingua franca is ChiNyanja and British Europeans. The latter group, despite its numerical inferiority, was the dominant fundamental ruling class administering both the city and the whole country through a process of persuasion and coercion. The immediate surroundings of the city (Harare – then Salisbury) were occupied by Shona chiefs – some of the reserves assuming the character of dormitory settlements. The question is who exercises ownership of the city landscape? Where are its boundaries, now that it resembles the ‘dual city’ possessing within itself both European and indigenous elements? What started as an essentially European settlement is no longer monolithic and homogeneous. Where do the immediate rural boundaries end? By the time the persona gets into the city in the poem, A long journey, the urban landscape is a contested space. As most of the poems about the city deal with women and immorality, a note on women and urban landscape would provide a valuable context. The colonial city was historically male. Certain groups of women were not wanted in the city by both African male patriarchs and white colonial authorities. Many spaces were designated ‘male only’ and this included Mbare Hostels. Police officers physically checked the compliance of this order as in Katiyo’s A son of the soil. Other spaces were free for women as long as they were married to men. Independent women – whether morally upright or not, including young girls – were not allowed in the city and this was enforced through invoking the 1936 Natives Registration Act and the 1946 Natives (Urban Areas) Accommodation and Registration Act. The women we find in Zimunya’s poems like Loveness, Angy and the woman who runs away from her rural husband are all free independent women who have ‘resisted’, rural and urban African patriarchs and the colonial authorities to establish an important presence in the city where they are not wanted. From that dimension, the urban landscape is a contested space. Whose space is it? Urban African patriarchs do not like

390

S. Ravengai


independent women in the city. In the poem, Grace, they are seen admiring an elegantly dressed woman but they begrudge the proprietor of the business for not throwing out ‘an unaccompanied woman’ (p. 57). This patriarchal insistence that women must be accompanied is repeated in the poem, I wouldn’t ‘How could a woman/any woman walk the evening streets unaccompanied?’ (p. 58). Every woman must move with a man to show that she is married, or she will risk the reproach of men or the colonial authorities. In the poem, Loveness, men mock and molest Loveness as she is identified as an independent woman by her looks – ‘long finger nails’, ‘high heels’, ‘fanta-face’ and ‘coca-cola legs’. Men mock in the crowd but beneath their laughter lie whistle-trains of desire. (1985, p. 37)

This group of independent women with a laissez-faire approach to life has established, in an act of resistance, a new feminist urban culture characterised by a subversion of colonial laws and African patriarchal culture. In the rural areas, as portrayed in the poem, She danced, there is a woman with a gift for dancing to traditional rhythms to such an extent that men thought ‘she had inherited the genius of her ancestors beyond any doubt’ (p. 35). However, when she migrates to the city she transforms her dressing code and puts on ‘a dress one sparkling dress of scales of fish’ (ibid.). Her dancing genius is transformed to suit the new instruments – the wailing guitar. The aspect of the dress code is carried further in the poem, You haven’t met her, where ‘the white mini-skirt clung to her (Loveness) figure like icing on a cake’ (p. 38). This group of independent women exercises control over men as it is not living under their control – as wives. It has the power to ‘seize the world by the testes’. In the poem, Mouth-end, a man takes one of these independent women home. The woman ‘cleaned his pockets’ (p. 39). As all the money had been taken by the woman, the man does not have any reserves to settle his debts and so: The credit van backed up to the entrance of his house and collected the bed, radiogram and furniture. (p. 39)

In another bizarre incident, a woman takes a man to a dark lane in the poem, I couldn’t believe it. Even if the man is not interested the woman insists ‘No, don’t say you have lost interest’ (p. 51). In no time: [H]er hands double pythoned around me and she reduced me to jerrymunglum: for two dollars. (1985, p. 51)

What is evident in these poems is that African women, of the independent type, who come to stay in the city present patriarchy and colonial authorities with a set of initiatives that both try to resist. With regard to men and women’s roles, the city encompassing and representing all the sins of life, functions or offers an alternative to the traditional patterns of gender relations. Kurtz, while talking about the city and Kenyan novels, makes a statement that is equally applicable to the city of colonial Zimbabwe: . . . the city, because it disrupts traditional social patterns, and despite its customary nature as a male environment, can be a place where women are able to create some measure of emancipation. Women can free themselves from dependence on fathers, husbands, or other men . . . the city may be historically male, but it is a complex enough place to allow some manoeuvring room for women. (1998, p. 137)

However, this ‘freedom/emancipation’ enjoyed by independent women is not without contest and repercussions. We have already noted the reproach by men towards independent


African Identities

391

women, although some of the men are also implicated in the moral decadence that pervades the poems. The independent women are aware that they are a threat to the ‘normal’ society resident in the townships and the rural landscape. Their behaviour, prostitution, which has become their identity, is contested by both rural and urban patriarchs as evidenced by the fact that their socially unacceptable behaviour is done, usually under the cover of darkness and away from the landscape controlled by men. The prostitution is exercised in ‘delivery lanes’ away from the glare of the urban patriarchs who enforce the unwritten standards and values. Violation of the shared beliefs, values and social standards produces moral revulsion and indignation and even justifies the use of penalties, which has forced some of the independent women to run away from the rural areas and from spaces controlled by men in the city. It can be noted that these independent women do not have any fixed abode as their only place to violate standards is not even the township, but the delivery lane in the city. The only woman who tries to violate the social standards of urban patriarchs by taking her man to the township in the poem, Month-end, is censured by the people: ‘she took him home . . . to the hum of the township’ (p. 39). The urban landscape is imagined as contested space. Even in the delivery lanes, the freedom of independent women is contested. Where they go to enjoy their freedom is a space often occupied by knife-wielding robbers who way-lay both men and women to rob them and rape women as in the poems, I may, Robbery and Wonder. The delivery lanes are also occupied by mangy dogs which claim ownership of them as they are chased away from the townships. Zimunya aptly describes the lane: The lane is a place of flesh dog flesh human flesh female flesh male flesh human blood and infant flesh blood of the mangy’s penis the red raw of the bitch’s vagina when darkness comes. (1985, p. 52)

Ownership of the urban landscape and the boundaries of specified spaces are continually contested by different social groups and animals that inhabit the city. The cultural identities of each social group, independent women and urban patriarchs, are a result of the interaction of these groups. Each one of them is implicated in the final result. This is even confirmed historically. In 1935, the Matabeleland Home Society wrote a letter to the colonial police also implicating urban African men in urban immorality by ‘taking a girl or woman deserted from her parents or her husbands (sic) to town . . . and simply stay together as wife and husband without consult (sic)’ (Barnes, 1999, p. 95). The urban landscape is a site where various social groups with distinct cultural identities encounter one another with results that are often explosive, but more often than not left in uneasy and unresolved state. While the township is for life as evidenced by: its dwellers wrestling babies thrown away by independent women in delivery lanes, from the mouths of mangy dogs; married women fainting on realising their husbands were cheating on them (Python); and barren women waiting upon God to bless them with children as opposed to dumping/killing them, (Lost and found) the delivery lane and its independent women are against life. However, both of them are implicated. The colonial authorities are also implicated in the resultant urban culture. Even if they are empowered on paper to deal with urban prostitution, they are either unwilling or unable to deal with the problem: . . . the police? Which police? No policeman goes to the lane at night. It is so familiar it is funny. Not a problem. You think it’s funny? (1985, p. 67)

392

S. Ravengai

Angry voices like this taken from the poem, Robbery, were quite familiar during the colonial period. They came from both urban African patriarchs and rural traditionalists. Barnes (1999) recounts that towards the end of 1938, Chief Chinamora sent an urgent request to colonial police to repatriate migrating women from his chiefdom. A group of men from Shurungwi (formerly Selukwe) wrote a letter to the Native Department in 1944:


We are afraid to command our children that adultery is unworthy (sic) and strongly bad, and they reply saying you have nothing to do with us never weary us of it, (sic) now if you decide to get a stick to command her she at once stands strongly and she cries that my father has killed me in the forcement (sic) of refusing my husband. (Barnes, 1999, p. 105)

This is the reason why the urban African men from Bulawayo ‘strongly asked that the “gates into towns” be shut to women . . . as at the moment our native race are (sic) ruined’ (Ibid., p. 95). As Zimunya is a mourner and not an inciter, he does not provide reasons why the police are complacent in this act of complicity. It is possible that the police were afraid of African reactions to the forced removals of women3 as indicated by one location superintendent ‘the effect may be far-reaching’ and the Council should ‘be most careful in what it does in regard to the matter’ (Barnes, 1999, p. 104). The other possible reason is that the colonial state was electronically and mechanically connected to the imperial capital, London, which approved or censured actions by its colony – Southern Rhodesia. The British Commonwealth League and the Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection society often voiced their concern on how the colonial authorities were handling black people. Barnes (1999, p. 104) recounts how in 1938 the Commissioner of Police in Southern Rhodesia lamented the perception that police work was being indirectly hampered by British groups which found ‘any interference’ with urban women to be abhorrent. What can be noted from this available evidence is that inasmuch as the rural village in the anthology Country dawns and city lights is electronically and mechanically linked to the city, Salisbury (Harare), the city is in turn connected to the imperial capital – London. The rural – urban landscapes and boundaries are experiencing an expansionist tendency brought about by technology, urbanisation and industrialisation. The old boundaries and frontiers are collapsing creating cultural identities that are symbolic of the interaction between the metropole, satellite city and the rural village. This transaction, which involves the presence of British culture in the midst of African culture, is not a one-way process in which the metropole culture obliterates the culture of the Zimbabwean indigenes. The culture of the indigene is an integral part of the new formations which arise from the contestations, conflictions and contradictions of the encounter of cultures. Although no Marxist criticism of Zimunya’s poems is insinuated here, Engels gives a statement that explains the dynamics theorised in this chapter: History makes itself in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life . . . . What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed . . . . (Yet) each contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it. (cited in Brink, 1992, p. 5)

As mentioned earlier on, the Shona indigene in the anthology comes to settle in the city to find the space already occupied by northern ethnic groups from Zambia and Malawi as well as the white people. How does the Shona indigene negotiate his space and cultural boundary? Zimunya does not dwell much on the issue of ethnicity, owing probably, to his cultural nationalism which, at times, papers over obvious cracks to create a mythical pan-African unity. His poem, City voices in delivery lane, is closer to revealing the conflicts and contradictions between the various ethnic groups resident in the city.


African Identities

393

It describes the somewhat unethical business practice of an Indian trader who way-lays customers and harasses them into buying his/her merchandise. It also describes a bag snatcher, who is possibly black, pouncing on a white British woman leaving her sprawled on the ground. She is ‘cursing’ at the black thief and making a resolve to go back to Britain. The motif of the city as contested space is underscored. The cultural and spatial contest between the Shona indigene and the Nyanja indigenes is, however, elaborated in other works of literature. Genius Runyowa’s Shona novel Akada Wokure (She Loved a Foreigner) and Regis Nhunduma’s Wazvaremhaka (You Have Created Trouble) are examples of novels that reveal the fight over the city landscape and its cultural boundaries. Musiyiwa and Ndlovu (2005) reveal that in, Akada Wokure, Aleke Phiri of Malawian origin falls in love with, Wadzanai, a Shona daughter of Aleke’s employees. This is contested by Wadzanai’s parents and other Shona characters in the novel. In Nhunduma’s Wazvaremhaka, another man of Malawian origin, Chandafira, is murdered by his friend’s Shona sons and his wealth is seized by his Shona in-laws. According to Musiyiwa and Ndlovu, these two novels: Represent the attitude of the Shona towards people of Malawian origin as xenophobic. The conflicts over intermarriage between Malawians and the Shona lead to intense human suffering and death . . . . In both novels the Shona characters depict Malawians as socially inferior. Disparaging names are used to ridicule them. (2005, pp. 81 and 82)

What can be noticed from this discussion is that the urban landscape is contested. The culture and subcultures obtaining in the city are not homogenous. Collective cultural identities are also contested. Conclusion In this article, I hope to have demonstrated that, despite authorial desire to purify the rural space and identity and to maintain its cohesion, integrity, boundedness and containment, the rural landscape has been affected by patterns of movement, flows of people, culture, goods and information to an extent that its natural frontiers have been blurred. I have criticised positivist and/or neo-positivist theories which tend to give colonialism such immense powers so as to render the rural indigene vulnerable, passive, uncreative and at the mercy of the coloniser. Positivist and/or neo-positivist theories assume that the spiritual and cultural loss of the indigene is so absolute that any notions of survival or emergence of a resistant indigene are neglected – thus the cynicism and hopelessness in Zimunya’s poetry as he freezes himself in the prison of protest. Through a re-reading of Zimunya’s poetry, I have tried to demonstrate that the rural and urban African indigene is capable of resisting, appropriating and sometimes supplanting the metropole culture. This is an ongoing process, not arrival. It invokes an ongoing dialectic between metropole culture and African subversion of it. I argue for a model which emphasises the active, dynamic and contested nature of collective identities. In that regard, this article has tried to demonstrate that the urban landscape is as contested as the rural terrain. The various cultures and sub-cultures that have conglomerated in the city engage with each other creating fissures, conflictions, contestations and contradictions that are more often than not left unresolved like the surreal image on the cover page. Despite the few weaknesses inherent in Zimunya’s poetry, I think that it is one of few works that is capable of provoking debate on the relationship between the rural and urban landscapes and cultural identities. Zimunya’s poetry is capable of revealing the character and composition of the city as it is continually shaped and reshaped by the nature and intensity of rural –urban interaction.

394

S. Ravengai

Notes 1.

2.


3.

The intangible cultural heritage is used here to mean the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. See article 2.1 of UNESCO International Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. A headline on the end of the world appeared on 23 September in 1950s in an American city newspaper. Beings from the planet Clarion were using a suburban housewife’s hand to write their messages. Besides warning of earthquake, flooding and general calamity, the Clarion beings also described a complete belief system (see Dooley, 1995, p. 258). Even if the colonial police were largely complacent in dealing with urban prostitution, sometimes they conducted raids in the city and repatriated a good number of women. Chief Chinamora’s request, for example, was followed by an operation which cleaned the city of the young independent women. These operations, sometimes, take place even now.

References Barnes, T. (1999). We are afraid to command our children: Responses to the urbanization of African women in colonial Zimbabwe 1930– 1944. In B. Raftopoulos & T. Yoshikuni (Eds.), Sites of struggle: Essays in Zimbabwe’s urban history (pp. 95 – 112). Harare: Weaver Press. Brink, A. (1992). A chain of voices. Oxford: University Press. Dooley, D. (1995). Social research methods. New Delhi: Prentice-Hall. Fourie, P. J. (1988). Aspects of film and television communication. Cape Town: Juta. Garuba, H. (2005). The unbearable lightness of being: Re-figuring trends in recent Nigerian poetry. English in Africa, 32, 51 – 72. Katiyo, W. (1976). A son of the soil. London: Collins. Kurtz, J. R. (1998). Urban obsessions, urban fears: The post colonial Kenyan novel. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Lawson, A. (1995). The discovery of nationality in Australian and Canadian literature. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 167– 169). London: Routledge. Morley, D., & Robins, K. (1995). Spaces of identity: Global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries. London: Routledge. Musiyiwa, M., & Ndlovu, T. M. (2005). Ethnicity in literature of Shona and Ndebele expression. In R. Muponde & R. Primorac (Eds.), Versions of Zimbabwe: New approaches to literature and culture (pp. 75 –88). Harare: Weaver Press. Mutsvairo, S. (1996). The poetry of Musaemura Zimunya. In E. Ngara (Ed.), New writing from Southern Africa (pp. 108– 119). London: James Currey. Ranger, T. (1985). Peasant consciousness and Guerrilla war in Zimbabwe. London: James Currey. Riffaterre, M. (1978). Semiotics of poetry. London: Methuen. Schlesinger, P. (1987). On national identity: Some conceptions and misconceptions criticised. Social Science Information, 26, 219–264. Veit-Wild, F. (1993). Teachers, preachers, non-believers: A social history of Zimbabwean literature. Harare: Baobab Books. Yoshikuni, T. (1999). Notes on the influence of town-country relations on African urban history before 1957: Experiences of Salisbury and Bulawayo. In B. Raftopoulos & T. Yoshikuni (Eds.), Sites of struggle (pp. 113– 128). Harare: Weaver Press. Zhuwarara, R. (1985). Introduction. In M. Zimunya (Ed.), Country dawns and city lights (pp. v – vii). Harare: Longman. Zimunya, M. (1982). Those years of drought and hunger: The birth of African fiction in English in Zimbabwe. Gweru: Mambo Press. Zimunya, M. (1985). Country dawns and city lights. Harare: Longman Zimbabwe.