AFTRE over 40 book reviews in 2014, our conclusion is that gone is the era of writers that were patriotic and defended the liberation cause.
Until the year 2000 writers were proud to defend the black cause in Zimbabwe.
There was no shame in trying to preserve the values of the liberation struggle or in identifying with the principles of ZANU PF.
Post 2000 which is the land reform, there is shame.
The writers seem to push the white and Western agenda.
One writer walked up to me and said until the Government begins to sponsor the writer, our discourse will greatly be influenced by publishers like Weaver Press or Amabooks whose agenda has always been to undermine black empowerment programmes.
This year we juxtaposed books like Dr Ireen Mahamba’s Woman of the Struggle and Chiedza Musengezi and Ireen Staunton’s : The voice of women ex-combatants.
In Staunton and Musengezi’s, Women Of Resilience written at the height of the Land Reform Programme, the book’s aim is clearly to feature voices that undermine the programme to address land imbalances.
They rope in female combatants and ‘encourage’ them to tell their story.
On the other hand, we looked at Dr Mahamba’s story of how, unlike in many narrations in Staunton’s edition, she willingly wanted to participate in the emancipation of her country.
In Women Of Resilience, one female combatant Maureen Moyo a combatant interviewed by Ireen says, “Every girl was supposed to sleep with them, a comrade.
“Not in the sense of sex: they touch your breasts, and kiss you.
“You were supposed to just take anybody that came.”
In Woman of the Struggle, Mahamba, however, draws attention to the one scenario during a pungwe where she witnesses freedom fighters resolving a dispute between Maureen the village prostitute and the married women who were blaming her for wrecking their homes.
In their judgment the freedom fighters said that both the guilty husbands and Maureen had to be punished.
Dr Mahamba thus shows the other side to the comrades.
We have writers like Charles Mungoshi pitted against Catherine Kanhema-Bliston.
Mungoshi’s timeless 1981 novel Waiting for the Rain writes about how the colonial education alienated the black man.
“I am Lucifer Mandengu. I was born here against my will. I should have been born elsewhere- of some parents,”
the protagonist in Mungoshi’s book says.
“I have never liked it here, and I never shall and if ever I leave this place, I am not going to come back here.
“It is the failure’s junk heap.”
Lucifer pines for America.
More than thirty years after independence, Kanhema-Blinston’s book My father before me resonates with Lucifer’s thinking.
In the biography the writer appears to have little understanding of what the liberation struggle to which her father participated was all about that she even calls him a terrorist.
The answer is in Blinston’s introduction.
The book was a result of her white friend whom she fondly calls ‘Biscuit’ who lost a farm during the land reform urging her to tell her story about growing up with a father who was an ‘activist’.
“As for my friend, I hope she will write a book for people like me who thought white people had a good life during our civil war,” she writes.
Although she grew up in the rural areas, her thinking is entirely Western although she claims to tell an African story where she compares the smell of dung used to decorate the hut to a French collection perfume.
We also have the likes of Claude Maredza who seem not to understand African politics in his book Barrack Hussein Onyango Obama: The first president of the world.
Such writers are quick to assume that just because the American president is black they therefore share a common ideology.
Maredza tries to bring together Uhuru Kenyatta and Barrack Obama as having the same ideals.
“So just like me, he is also the son of a revolutionary against British oppressive rule,” Maredza’s fictional Obama says.
Yet there is an increase of racially targeted murder by the white police in black areas in America today although Obama is black, he cannot protect his kith and kin because the system is white.
In fact 40 years after the ‘end’ of the Black Panther movement Obama has put a US$2 million bounty on Assata Shakur, one of its prominent members.
The challenge for 2015 is for the Government to provide funds to enable young writers to tell our story or we lose them to publishers who will ‘dictate’ to us how to tell our story.