/ 8 September 2009

Weaving the mythical and the real

We Are All Zimbabweans Now by James Kilgore (Umuzi)

Randomly ask Zimbabweans two things they would most like to know. “When will Robert Mugabe leave office?” they might ask. Some might want to know what really happened to Josiah Magama Tongogara, the head of Zanu’s military wing, Zanla, who died in a mysterious car crash on the eve of independence in 1979.

The legend of Tongo, as he was affectionately known, has travelled beyond Zimbabwe. In South Africa there’s a hip-hop act and producer known as Tongogara and an editor of a major weekly newspaper has named his son after this Zimbabwean bush-war hero. Even in London, the imperial centre, the legend exists. Breakfast With Mugabe, a political play by Fraser Grace, came out a few years ago, in which a crazed Mugabe is haunted by the ghost of Tongogara.

The legend of Tongogara that hovers in other spheres is the subject of James Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now. It is a story about Ben Dabner, an American historian beguiled by the revolution led by the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu).

Kilgore is an American who spent decades working in Zimbabwe and South Africa to evade legal persecution in the United States. Apprehended in South Africa (where he went as John Pape), Kilgore subsequently served a prison term in the US during which he wrote this book.

Because it draws heavily on Zimbabwe’s history and features Mugabe, I found its disclaimer slightly disingenuous: “All characters, except those identified by their names as persons in real life, are fictitious.”

Dabner gets to Zimbabwe, which he has abbreviated in his index cards as LOF (Land of Forgiveness), to write its history and examine its much-lauded policy of reconciliation. In his first few days in Harare, he meets some white people packing for South Africa, “where there is still some sense”. The black population, on the other hand, seems to have embraced the new dispensation and is more accepting of whites.

“We are all Zimbabweans now,” a man in a street café tells Dabner.

But he’s soon disillusioned with the way the local press treats his hero, Mugabe, who always seems to hog page one of the state-owned daily, The Herald. “Even for someone who admires the man as much as I do, this treatment is a little excessive,” he observes.

When Dabner starts asking questions, the bearded figure of Elias Tichasara — a thinly disguised character that draws heavily on the historical figure of Tongogara — surfaces. Nobody really wants to probe the death, or people are just too scared to find out what really happened. He meets a Rolls Royce-driving history professor who wants him to dig and unearth the truth.

“He supposedly died in a car accident. We Zimbabweans don’t believe in accidents,” the professor tells him.

Dabner baulks at the commission. “Why me? I know so little about this. I am an American.” The professor replies: “Precisely. No one will suspect you. If I go around asking questions, the authorities will start wondering what this crazy old man is up to…”

The professor continues: “If someone in Zanu did kill him, they might be amongst the leadership. They have a lot to lose. History is not an academic exercise in Zimbabwe … Whoever controls the past controls the future.”

This reminded me of what Terence Ranger, a British-born historian, described as “patriotic history” at a Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research lecture in 2004. Ranger said this “is intended to proclaim the continuity of the Zimbabwean revolutionary tradition … It repudiates academic historiography with its attempts to complicate and question.”

I wonder how I would have reacted to the novel without knowledge of Tongogara and Zimbabwe’s immediate history. I wonder whether it works as a work of fiction.

To an extent, I guess it does. Written in a clipped style, the novel has its own centripetal forces that power the narrative. It’s cleverly written, not overly sentimental and manages to capture the vibe of Zimbabwe in the early 1980s. Most Zimbabweans will recognise themselves in the novel; their mannerisms, their quirkiness and, well, their “Zimbabweanness” pour out from the pages.

The author has not resorted to easy commentary (always easy and convenient when the subject matter seems starkly black and white, as in Zimbabwe) and the novel has the textures of a work by both a historian and a journalist. There’s the historian’s awareness of a wider significance, but there are also minute details and the stamp of the individual. Yet I still felt a bit deflated because the murder of Tichasara isn’t convincingly resolved, like one or two other things, but it could be, because I was expecting Kilgore to use fictional licence to help solve one of Zimbabwe’s biggest mysteries.

I am weaving in and out of Kilgore’s text because the subject of Tongogara (or Tichasara as Kilgore calls him) is bigger than fiction. By that I don’t mean to belittle fiction, because, after all, the legend that has grown around Tongogara is itself the stuff of fiction. He was far from perfect and was fingered in other Zanu machinations.

“Zimbabwe would be different if he was still with us,” someone says. “What if he had lived? Could the presence of one man have turned the tide of this newly independent country’s history?” one scholar wonders.

These questions remain unanswered and perhaps they should. After the travails of the past decades, Zimbabweans need to hang on to the myth of an alternative history. The myth might be based on fact, for Tongogara wanted Zanu and Zapu to unite and, as a military leader, he had the backing of the guerillas to realise his wishes.

We Are All Zimbabweans Now is a fascinating book.