Abstract
For Chenjerai Hove, the internationally-acclaimed Zimbabwean writer who died of liver failure in Norway on 12 July, the many kinds of violence that had come to dominate public life in his native Zimbabwe in the twenty-first century could ultimately be traced back to the corruption of language. Hove was the author of a large and diverse body of work: in a long and distinguished career, he produced poetry, novels, plays, and essayistic prose in English and in Shona. But if there is a single theme to which he kept returning throughout his writing career and across textual forms and political contexts, it was the manner in which meanings of words can be distorted by those who wield political power.
In the early 2000s, in a newspaper column entitled “Collapse of Law: Collapse of Conscience”, Hove wrote: I believe that corruption begins with the corruption of language. If a senior politician uses vulgar language in public, that is the beginning of corruption (and I am not talking about the other senior politician who likened the people of Zimbabwe to baboons). Once language degenerates into a vehicle of untruth, people are engulfed in a form of corruption. (2002: 5)
He enlarged on this sentiment, and on the implied parallel between Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe and the country’s former prime minister, Ian Smith (i.e. the political propaganda regimes of the Zimbabwean postcolony and colonial Rhodesia), in an extended interview published in this journal in 2008 (see Primorac, 2008).
By that time, Hove — one of Zimbabwe’s most-respected and best-loved authors, who had won the prestigious Noma Award for his 1988 novel Bones — had left his country of birth, citing repeated incidents of political harrasment by the ruling party during the period when he published a regular column in The Zimbabwe Standard at the outset of Zimbabwe’s land nationalization campaign. In response to my question on the relationship between language and violence, he said: Look at people talking about “American interests”, or Mugabe talking about “sovereignty” and “patriotism”. All of a sudden there is a new definition of patriotism. Suddenly, some of us who are critical of the system are no longer patriots or nationalists. Of course, the person who is in political power — [former information minister] Jonathan Moyo, for example — is in charge of defining who is a patriot, who is a nationalist and what is sovereignty. All of a sudden these words are being given a new meaning. So the corruption of language, for me, psychologically and emotionally, is the beginning of a multiplicity of other corruptions. You can see, for example, how language was manipulated during our liberation war. I was teaching in the countryside and the guerrillas were called the magandanga by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information. In Shona, a gandanga means […] a most vicious and terrible person. And the guerrillas would come to us and say, hello, we are the magandanga. So the word was turned and became positive! […] The villagers said, the magandanga are actually good! (Primorac, 2008: 139–40)
Hove started his writing career as a poet. His poetry begins to address the violence engendered by the process of forced re/assignation of meanings in his first single-authored collection, Up in Arms (1982), which deals with Zimbabwe’s liberation war and in which a memorable poem comments on the propaganda vocabulary of the Rhodesian state. His final book of poetry, the pared-down, grief-stricken Blind Moon (published in 2003) articulates the moral outrage at the crimes commited by Mugabe’s regime by repeatedly retreating into silence: as Caroline Rooney (2005) has noted, the linguistic performance of a withdrawal of speech returns repeatedly and poignantly in its pages.
Hove’s novels Bones (1988), Shadows (1991), and Ancestors (1996), in contrast, counter the excesses and brutalities of political double-speak by constructing their own poetic inter-language: a stylistic register of English which, in some ways, bridges the linguistic divide between English and Shona and which helps to endow Hove’s fictional representations of rural lives with new and unexpected complexities. In his final publication, the 2011 memoir of a soujurn in Miami entitled Homeless Sweet Home, Hove returns to the ideologically-charged intersection between notions of “reality”, language, and the law. He ends a brief essayistic sketch titled “Wrinkles of Unreality” with the words: “An old dictator with wrinkles is a dangerous piece of reality. The law is clear: Those who give proper names to things will perish in the dungeons of prisons without mercy for years” (2011: 41).
Chenjerai Hove was born in 1956 in the Mazvihwa communal area in southern Zimbabwe, near the mining town of Zvishavane. He worked as a teacher and editor and was the last Writer-in-Residence at the University of Zimbabwe in the late 1980s. He left Zimbabwe in November 2001 amid the escalating violence triggered by state appropriation of agricultural farmland and led a migrant’s life in the West, refusing to return home while Mugabe was in power. In the final years of his life, he was based mainly in Norway. His works have been translated into many languages, including Danish, Dutch, German, Japanese, Norwegian, and Swedish. His fictional works include novels: Masimba Avanhu? (1986), Bones (1988; winner of the Zimbabwe Literary Award and the Noma Award for publishing in Africa), Shadows (1991), and Ancestors (1996). He also published the poetry collections Up in Arms (1982), Swimming in Floods of Tears (with Lyamba wa Kabika, 1983), Red Hills of Home (1985), Rainbows in the Dust (1997), and Blind Moon (2003); the journalistic collections Shebeen Tales (1994) and Palaver Finish (2002); the illustrated monograph Guardians of the Soil (with Iliya Trojanow, 1997); and a collection of miscellaneous pieces, Homeless Sweet Home: A Memoir of Miami (2011). For most readers, however, and certainly for those outside Zimbabwe, Hove will be remembered mainly for his lyrical and moving first novel Bones.
Bones was published near the end of the period marked by the official policy of racial and ethnic reconciliation during the first decade of Zimbabwe’s independence. It interrogates the meaning and feasibility of the notions of “reconciliation” and “independence” at a time when the national unfinished business of redistributing agricultural land had not been comprehensively addressed. Today, the possible readings of Bones have been complicated and enriched by the intervening historical events. Following the violence of Zimbabwe’s much-needed but controversial fast-track land redistribution, the refusal of the novel’s peasant heroine, Marita, to enact revenge for the cruelties of the racist white farmer, Manyepo, resonates with the themes, problems, and standpoints foregrounded by the later generations of Zimbabwe’s authors — especially Yvonne Vera, Brian Chikwava, and NoViolet Bulawayo.
Hove’s love of Shona languages and cultures was palpable: he could talk about them for hours, as he sniffed his favourite ground tobacco. Yet he refused to allow his understanding of the concepts associated with rural and pre-colonial African life to become reified or fixed. In the 2008 JCL interview, he spoke of ancestral spirits as a dialogic ontological instance, and of “land” as the location of a certain set of cultural and linguistic attitudes, rather than a source of political capital. It was no secret that prolonged exile had caused him much loneliness and pain. But the ultimate riposte to those who would query the cultural and personal integrity inherent in Hove’s choice to leave home forever (as the writer Ignatius Mabasa [2015] has done in Zimbabwe’s Herald newspaper recently) was articulated long ago. Without sentimentality or ostentation, in Blind Moon, in a short poem titled “one day”, the poet writes his own death as a final repudiation of political manipulation: one day when i shall die only spare a secret tear for me in a secret place without a shadow.