Out of Shadows
By Jason Wallace
Publisher: Vintage 2012
ISBN 9780099575269
By Tatenda Gapa

OUT OF SHADOWS is a work of desperation and the unrepentant nature of the white man.
The book is set in the newly liberated Zimbabwe after a bitter liberation struggle.
The war had been centred on grievances which included land ownership and the eradication of racist ideologies and minority rule.
The book is set during the period when the country had been liberated, but the resources were still owned by the white minority.
Ill-treatment, prejudice and racism still lingered in some settings including schools and farms.
The book is candid enough to show how Rhodesians had not ‘repented’ of their ways despite an olive branch being extended to them and no punitive action being taken for the genocide that they committed.
The story begins in the newly independent Zimbabwe with Robert Mugabe as the new Prime Minister in 1983.
And protagonist Robert Jacklin has just moved to Zimbabwe with his parents from the United Kingdom.
For his father a failed man who is due to take up a civil service job in Zimbabwe pins hope of success in the newly independent African nation.
Robert was definitely not in favour of the move as highlighted by the very first line of this book.
“Go ahead and shoot, I thought, because I was 13 and desperate and anything, absolutely anything was better than the fate (life in Zimbabwe) to which my parents are leading me.”
Obviously he could not have wanted to live in a country ruled by blacks.
At school Robert’s father insists that he befriends Nelson one of the very few blacks at a largely white boys boarding school.
The ‘bond’ between the two grows quickly to an extent that Robert and Nelson promise to look out for each other, like brothers.
“Looks like it’s just us then. Maybe we should look out for each other, hey … like brothers…we shook hands to cement the deal,” writes Robert.
As expected, the friendship does not last.
It is a friendship that had been initiated by Robert’s father and not Robert himself.
Nelson, later gravitates towards his kith and kin, he was desperate to fit in with other whites.
He felt he was an outsider because he was not a Rhodesian and desperately wanted to belong not to Zimbabwe, but to the white clique.
Nelson, the black guy, is betrayed.
Clearly there can never be brotherhood between blacks and whites, no matter how much the black component of the relationship was sincere.
Robert soon rebuffs his friendship with Nelson so that he is accepted by the rabid white racist Ivan.
Robert joins Ivan’s gang which believes that ‘his country’ has been stolen from him.
Ivan’s father who owned a farm was also clearly against blacks owning land.
“If one ‘kaffir’ steps onto my farm screaming land rights I’ll slot him with a bullet,” says Ivan’s father.
“This farm will stay in this family for another 100 years,
“I can promise you that.”
The whites have a low opinion of Africans as Ivan insists that the headmaster gave Nelson special treatment not because he was a good athlete, but because he feared the new government.
“Have you ever thought about how he (Nelson) gets to go home all the bloody time?
“He is black.
“Bully’s paranoid that if he refuses permission then the government will come after him and accuse him of being racist, maybe put him in prison.”
Robert callously ends his friendship with Nelson because Nelson is black.
Then the book takes an interesting twist at the end as the writer shifts from the 1983 setting to the present day Zimbabwe.
He suggests that Zimbabwe has been run into the ground and its leader is an oppressor.
“Prime Minister, then President, then Tyrant and Oppressor,” writes Robert.
This part of the book shows how whites never thought that one day they would lose ‘their’ land and this is an attempt to rubbish the Land Reform Programme and the President who ensured that aspirations of the liberation struggle were fulfilled.
“Has everyone forgotten that we have got a gook running our country?,” says Robert.
“A terrorist. And terrorism is all a terrorist knows.”
But the ‘terrorist’ has empowered his people by ensuring that the means of production are firmly in the hands of the indigenes.
And the ‘terrorist’ is also respected Chairman of both the Southern African Development Community and the African Union.