Short Writings from Bulawayo

Writing in Zimbabwe seems to be experiencing an upsurge. There are obviously huge problems for publishers – few people have any spare cash to buy anything but the bare essentials for survival, and few bookshops in Zimbabwe stock any books that are not set school texts. Writers too are affected by the struggle for survival – paper and pens are expensive, let alone computers, which are beyond the reach of the majority, and there are few outlets for their work. But writers are writing, and publishers publishing.

Over the last three years, five collections of short writings have been published by two publishers: Short Writings from Bulawayo I, II and III from amaBooks and Writing Still and Writing Now from Weaver Press. This piece focuses on the Short Writings from Bulawayo series.

Many pieces in these anthologies document the effects of the crisis in Zimbabwe in stories and poetry. Writers are reflecting what they see happening around them day after day - the human suffering resulting from government policies. This is particularly pronounced in the most recent of these collections, Short Writings from Bulawayo III.

The effects of Operation Murambatsvina or ‘clear out rubbish’, where hundreds of thousands of people were made homeless, are seen through the eyes of those at the receiving end of the destruction in the work of Diana Charsley, in her short story Forgiveness, as their homes are razed to the ground.

It is not only the newer writers who record the present moment. Established writers like John Eppel and Albert Nyathi document, through poetry, record the destruction of communities and vendors losing their livelihoods. John Eppel in Sonnet with One Unstated Line:

‘Hear the cry of hornbills lost in yards
of rubble and rags, to split the ears
of those who stand and watch; and the guards
unguarded, hammering, hammering.’

and Albert Nyathi in Ode to Departed Writers:

‘Operation Murambatsvina came
With a large broom called bulldozer
And the new townships which were blessed
With the cutting of ribbons were all gone
Africa Unity Square had roses
And now it is clean again’

Writers are looking at issues hitherto largely avoided in fiction. In Thabisani Ndlovu’s powerful story The Boy with a Crooked Head, the violence inflicted on the people of Matabeleland during Gukurahundi is seen through the eyes of a child – ‘I wonder why Uncle Vikitha, a useless person, was made to disappear … by soldiers who looked like us but spoke our language in a funny way.’

Christopher Mlalazi’s id i weaves together, in a nightmare township landscape, the realities of Murambatsvina and the present hardships with the effects on a family of the atrocities committed in 1980’s Matabeleland: ‘My brother’s problem is not hereditary, it’s the army and what they did out there that did that to his head.’

Mlalazi again turns to Murambatsvina in his piece The Bulldozers are Coming, published in the 14 December 2006 edition of The Zimbabwean, where he documents the effects of the ‘clean up’ on a woman who miscarries.

The land issue appears in several stories. Catherine Buckle’s Full Circle in Short Writings from Bulawayo II shows the pain of dislocation experienced by both a white farmer thrown off her farm and a black woman subsequently thrown off her small plot on the same farm. Masimba Manyonga’s A Seed of Hope in the first Short Writings from Bulawayo details the hopes and the despair of an impoverished ex-combatant farmer as he journeys from his rural home to the streets of Bulawayo, where his finds evidence of economic breakdown wherever he looks. Fiction that documents what the writer sees happening around them is often more accessible than history and is able to capture the human story.

Even in the midst of the tragedy of Zimbabwe, there is still humour in the collections, in some of the township characters of Christopher Mlalazi and in the protagonist in Godfrey Sibanda’s The Coming. In The Coming, the narrator is unable to attend the Great Leader’s rally because of diarrhoea; his excuse is mocked by one of the youths who has the task of rounding up everyone to attend the rally: ‘The Great Leader is coming and you want me to believe there’s suddenly an epidemic in this town. And the epidemic only affects members of the Opposition Party.’ Mzana Mthimkhulu’s writings can always be relied upon to bring a touch of humour, such as in his depiction of an eager young boy in a school choir competition in The Concert.

However, poverty, despair, hopelessness, AIDS, loss, queues – the suffering of the people - are recurring themes in much of the writing. Juba, in Farai Mpofu’s story Whirlwinds, in Short Writings from Bulawayo II, walks the streets looking for, and failing to find, permanent employment, despite his qualifications. In the end, he decides to ‘rob three or four of those township dwellers, raise enough money to go to Johannesburg, and graduate into the world of crime.’

Ignatius Mabasa’s character in Paying to Die has ‘never had the guts to go and get tested.’ Instead, he seems ‘to have decided to help the disease he believes is there, by living carelessly.’ The mother, in Judy Maposa’s One by One My Leaves Fall, loses all four of her children. ‘One by one my leaves withered and fell. All dead. All gone.’

In Pentecost Mate’s Pay Day the people in queues ‘are mostly quiet because there is nothing left to talk about. They have talked about price rises, about shortages of basic commodities, about the changing laws and rules that govern them, about the taxes they pay…. They have talked about the fuel crisis … about power cuts, water cuts…. And about salaries below the poverty line, about the huge sums of money they owe….’

As would be expected, queues have become a ubiquitous topic. In John Eppel’s My Dustbin, poverty and hunger drive children to rifle through dustbins:

'These children have acquired the patience of queueing;
children of the neighbourhood; suburban;
queueing at my bin for a lucky dip.’

Phillip Chidavaenzi writing in the Sunday Mirror comments, ‘the economic hardships in Zimbabwe today continue to offer a fertile template for literary works. … (These collections of short writings) have given a whole new generation of Zimbabwean writers that could have remained in the wilderness the space to display their wares and in the process make their claim on Zimbabwe’s literary space.’

Many of the writers whose work was first featured in the Short Writings from Bulawayo series have gone on to ‘claim the space’: Christopher Mlalazi has had short stories published in the Edinburgh Review and in the Caine Prize anthology, The Obituary Tango, Deon Marcus’s poetry collection Sonatas has won first prize for poetry and drama at the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association awards and for Best First Book at the National Arts Merit Awads, and several writers have had stories published in Writing Now and in other collections.

There will be more writing from many of the authors featured in the Short Writings from Bulawayo series to look forward to. Bryony Rheam, Christopher Mlalazi and Raisedon Baya have novels either completed or at the finishing stages, Thabisani Ndlovu and Mzana Mthimkhulu, amongst others, have collections of short stories awaiting publication. John Eppel has a new short writings collection, White Man Crawling, due to be published in 2007.

The writing of now is naturally a reflection of our times. A unifying theme in many of the stories and poems is loss – of livelihood, of innocence, of purpose, of freedom, of love, of belonging, of culture, of home, of country, of life. A reflection of our times. ‘Dreams shattered beyond repair.’ (Tawanda Chipato, from Hope, Short Writings from Bulawayo II)

• Jane Morris is an editor with amaBooks, publishers of Short Writings from Bulawayo I, II and III.

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org