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An Africa-centred critique of Walking Still …a close analysis of ‘The Empty House’

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THE short story ‘The Empty House’ is one of Mungoshi’s satiric attacks on Western standards of development. The main character, Gwizo Maneto, is the main target of Mungoshi’s satire. The story begins with the derisive statement: “Gwizo Maneto had gained some notoriety, but not a lot of money, with his paintings.” What this means is that he had gained spite from his people over and above not profiting much from his art. One would have expected some form of gain to compensate for the lack of popularity so that people would say ‘at least he got some money from it’. It is in this double loss that the theme of emptiness which runs throughout the story is captured. The double loss Gwizo Maneto suffers is a result, not of a poor choice of career as he thinks, but perhaps of lack of relevance of his paintings to his people. The author points out that: “Art, among Maneto’s people, was a foreign thing, a disease, something you didn’t want to be associated with. “It was like syphilis or some mental aberration.” When you look at this observation closely, you discover one thing: that our painter is not painting for our people. They do not see themselves reflected in his art. His art is to satisfy some foreign taste; not a vehicle through which their hopes and aspirations are expressed. But this is not to say that Africans had no sense of art. They have it in abundance. Remember the rock paintings that flourished in pre-colonial Africa which carried the history of the communities of the time for posterity. Those painters were the people’s artists, but Gwizo is the quintessential example of voucher artists who paint, carve, draw or write for money, for other people than their own. These are sponsored writers and the topicality of their works is not informed by their people, but by their sponsors or those who set agendas such as ‘HIV and AIDS’, ‘climate change’, ‘gender’ and ‘human rights’ and not more pressing issues such as ‘poverty alleviation’, ‘indigenisation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘beneficiation of local raw materials’. Yes, Gwizo is one such voucher artists. That is why his paintings are appealing to the whites who profit from it more than Gwizo himself. Such artists fall short of African consciousness. They work for the wrong master. Achebe reminds us of the missing dimension in such artists when he teaches: “The (African) writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact he should march right in front . . . The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost. There is a saying in Ibo that a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them. After all, the entire novelist’s duty is not to beat this morning’s headline in topicality, it is to explore in depth the human condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of history (The Novelist as Teacher)” 1965). The bottom-line is that Gwizo is not the people’s painter. He is not their poet and therefore he is an ‘empty house’. To the people he is barren because his art is not relevant to them. The theme of emptiness is illustrated in several ways in the short story. In one vein Gwizo, being the only son to the Maneto family, is expected to fulfil certain social expectations as the heir apparent, but fails in all of them. His father is disappointed understandably because the son who should carry the Maneto family into the future is anything, but promising. His sisters, Sinikiwe and Synodia do better instead. Synodia is a civil engineer. And to make matters worse, Gwizo soon makes himself a prisoner of a white woman, Agatha MacFarlane. Typical of white parasites, Agatha dominates Gwizo’s life, commodifying his creative genius for her singular gain. Gwizo is this exploitable because colonial education has created inferiority complex in him already. That is why he cannot take his new ‘love’ to African traditional dishes, preferring to share with her a hamburger which she is already fed up with anyway. He thinks Western dish is more civilised food. On the contrary, Agatha is not pleased. She would prefer something more ‘African’, of course not out of genuine curiosity, but to make more money out of novelty in the true fashion of most cultural parasites. Agatha squeezes Gwizo’s creativity dry, pocketing all the money, until his creative mind is nothing, but an ‘empty house’. As with all people who have lost any clue about their future, Gwizo sinks into alcoholism and subsequently pathology. Meanwhile, Agatha, now his wife fakes concern at the turn of things, but her behaviour encourages his descent into the abyss of irrelevance and death. When she discovers no more milk issues from Gwizo’s tits, she has no patience, but to flirt with the new artists on the block. She is able to switch sexual slaves very easily because their white wedding is in fact a fake arrangement. Not involving community at all, it is far from enduring. The author confesses this point: “It wasn’t quite a marriage, people said, although there was a priest, a wedding ceremony and a party. “People had come more out of curiosity to see the bride than to celebrate the beginning and addition of yet one more family to the Maneto clan. “How could it be called a marriage when there had been no bride price paid to the bride’s people? “And who had ever heard of a woman who got married in the absence of her parents? … It was really a joke and people had come to Gwizo and Agatha’s wedding to laugh.” Yes, white weddings are for whites and when blacks adopt these while abandoning their own; they make themselves laughing stocks indeed. Then as is if by cue, this marriage yields no child. It is another ‘empty house’. Agatha herself is not fussy about having one. When she says she yearns for one, she is only playing the wiser. In reality she is a merciless money-hunter. And gets it by any means necessary including cuckolding Gwizo with Ranga, the new painting genius and with Gwizo’s own father whose transport company she has joined as his secretary. And to cap it all, she has the guts to tell the dying Gwizo that she is pregnant, by his father. While the reader may pick quarrel with Gwizo’s father’s daring, surely there is logic behind his decision to find a son because he had no son anyway. The empty house has to be filled with life. The final message to our young is simple: if you choose a path away from your people’s path you will die a Gwizo.

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