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Abstract

In this article I examine how, in their novels The Boy Next Door and The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, Irene Sabatini and Andrea Eames, respectively, allow us to reflect on questions of whiteness, home, and belonging in Zimbabwe. I argue that in these novels the experiences, behaviours, and attitudes of whites towards Africa and black people contest and subvert their belonging to Zimbabwe and highlight their failure to accept the end of Rhodesia. White people’s resistance to integration into Zimbabwe, their continued racializing of space, and their attempts to maintain white power and privilege bring whiteness sharply before the scrutiny of the black gaze and provoke anti-white rhetoric as well as a discourse on white unbelonging to Zimbabwe that becomes more strident and violent from the late 1990s.

Keywords

home belonging Zimbabwe white supremacy settler colonialism subversion racism whiteness

Introduction

The Boy Next Door (2010) by Irene Sabatini and The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011) by Andrea Eames are recent debut novels set in postcolonial Zimbabwe. The novels deal, in their unique ways, with issues of coming of age, home and belonging, turmoil, racial prejudice, and loss, among other matters. In Sabatini’s novel, Lindiwe Bishop’s love relationship with Ian McKenzie blossoms against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s transition to independence and the ensuing Gukurahundi (“the early summer rains that sweep away the chaff”) massacres of civilians in Matabeleland and the Midlands, and the descent of the country into chaos as a result of President Robert Mugabe’s dictatorial leadership and misrule. In this volatile and unpredictable environment questions of home and belonging emerge. Transition, volatility, and chaos also form the backdrop to Elise’s experiences in Eames’ novel. Here the white girl Elise’s idyllic life at a farm in Chinhoyi is ruptured by movement to a new farm in Harare and by the land reappropriation drive by the war veterans, developments that bring in sharp focus issues of whiteness and belonging to Zimbabwe. Both novels cover a historical context and period (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s for Sabatini and the 1990s to early 2000 for Eames) marked in varying degrees by contestations of whiteness and “white fears of belonging in the […] post-colonial state” (Pilossof, 2017: 94).

In this paper I wish to examine the ways in which the two novels allow us to reflect on questions of whiteness, home, and belonging in Zimbabwe. In doing so, I add to the voices of those who have tackled the questions of whiteness and belonging in Southern Africa by focusing on recent narratives about white people’s experiences in postcolonial Zimbabwe, the country’s economic decline under the dictatorial reign of Robert Mugabe, and the consequences of the fast-track land reform programme for white farmers. While most of these voices have mainly explored white narratives, especially memoirs by such authors as Peter Godwin, Douglas Rogers, Cheryl Clary, Alexandra Fuller, Wendy Kann, Lauren St John, Lauren Liebenberg, Richard Wiles, Erick Harrison, Catherine Buckle and Bruce Vanbuskirk, among others (see Musanga, 2015; Tagwirei and de Kock, 2015; Law, 2016; Pilossof, 2009; Hove, 2009; Da Silva, 2005, 2011; Harris, 2005), my interest is in fictional works that deal with a historical moment associated with white suffering and victimhood in Zimbabwe to see how they bring forth issues of whiteness, home, and belonging. The two fictional works analysed here allow us to see how urban whites and those in farming communities respond to the discourse on white unbelonging.

I argue that in these novels the experiences, behaviours, and attitudes of whites towards Africa and black people contest and subvert the white people’s quest for belonging to Zimbabwe and highlight their failure to accept the end of Rhodesia, a place of dispossession, poverty, and servitude for blacks. White people’s resistance to integration into Zimbabwe, their continued racializing of space, and their attempts to maintain white power and privilege bring whiteness sharply before the scrutiny of the black gaze and provoke anti-white rhetoric and a discourse on white unbelonging to Zimbabwe that becomes more vociferous and violent from the late 1990s onwards.

Whiteness refers to a racial category that until recently remained invisible, and non-raced in scholarship, as it was assumed to be the human norm (Dyer, 1997: 1; Bush, 2004: 6). Although it is difficult to pin down the definition of whiteness, scholars generally agree that “whiteness is a socially constructed category that is normalized within a system of privilege” (Applebaum, 2016: 3). The concept of whiteness, as Melanie E. L. Bush rightly observes, “has powerful utility as a means to critique systemic patterns of racial inequality”, revealing as it does the “ways in which whites benefit from a variety of institutional and social arrangements that often appear […] to have nothing to do with race” (Bush, 2004: 6). The emergence of a relatively new field of scholarship referred to as Critical Whiteness Studies responds to the near absence of scholarly works dealing with the dominance of the white race. The field seeks “to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege” as scholars attempt “to make explicit the ways in which whiteness is a determinant of social power and to demonstrate how whiteness works through its invisibility” (Applebaum, 2016: 3).

Like elsewhere on the globe, race in Zimbabwe has for a long time been “something applied to non-white people” and whites remained racially unnamed and invisible — they were just people. Post-independence anti-white rhetoric and the fast-track land reform programme in the country brought whiteness sharply before the black gaze and before the white people’s “own weakening […] gaze” (Misi, 2016: 102), triggering discomfort and the melancholy of white alienation and rejection. Although “not all white people are to blame for colonial or imperial legacies, […] they embody in the colour of their skin the stigmata of that history” (Da Silva, 2011: 148) and carry the privilege and burden of their whiteness (Da Silva, 2005: 476; Pilossof, 2009) with them.

A key concept often referred to in Critical Whiteness Studies, which I also find useful here, is white supremacy. Related to this, and highlighting the behaviour of whites in foreign lands, is the concept of settler colonialism. Anne Bonds and Joshua Inwood define white supremacy simply as “the presumed superiority of white racial identities, however problematically defined, in support of the cultural, political, and economic domination of non-white groups” (2016: 719−20). They also understand settler colonialism as a form of permanent settlement that follows the erasure, dispossession and exploitation of natives (2016: 716).

In Zimbabwe, the eradication of the indigenous population was not real but symbolic and imaginary: black people were uprooted from their ancestral lands and resettled in reserves as their land fell into white hands. Pieces of legislation such as the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 and the Land Tenure Act of 1969 ensured that white settlers had the best land while the black peasant farmers had the the craggy and unproductive land (Mazingi and Kamidza, 2011: 324). Ownership of vast tracts of land ensured that in Rhodesia the the colonists had a greater sense of belonging than the marginalized and alienated black majority (Fisher, 2010: 221). For the Shona people of Zimbabwe, for instance, this colonial experience of land dispossession dislocated and overturned their “autochthonous conceptualization of belonging” (Seirlis, 2004: 409) evident in their mwana wevhu (child of the soil) land philosophy, as they were alienated and uprooted from the ancestral lands that formed the core of their existence (Mthatiwa, 2016: 279). Such experiences triggered expressions like pasi papinduka (the land has been turned upside down) that in turn inspired a call to arms in the struggle for liberation.

The settlers cared little about the welfare of the blacks, except as subjects and as a source of cheap labour. Unlike in North America and Australia where whites “used violence to empty their land, [in Zimbabwe] Euro-Africans had to imagine the natives away” (Hughes, 2010: xii; emphasis in original). Barbara Applebaum rightly notes that white supremacy

presumes a conception of racism as a system of privilege that white people, often unwittingly, perpetuate in what seems to [them] as common, unremarkable, and sometimes even seemingly “good” practices and in the implementation of what seems to be racially neutral policies. (2016: 4)

However, as I seek to show in this article, the introduction of black rule (although it did not necessarily remove white privilege (Misi, 2016: 99)) and the championing of a “brand of official nationalism”, labelled patriotic history, that “celebrates the military dimensions of the [country’s] liberation war” (Kriger, 2006: 1151) in favour of blacks and leads to the “othering” of non-blacks, makes whites realize the precarious nature of their position in the postcolony. In scrambling to maintain a familiar grip on power and privilege, the whites expose the contestedness of their connectedness to and the slipperiness of their home-making in Zimbabwe. It goes without saying that Mugabe’s brutal dictatorship was reprehensible and that whiteness in Zimbabwe had shades of grey, as it was characterized by diversity (Hartnack, 2015). My analysis and conclusions here apply to whites as depicted in the two novels, a representation that in some ways is rooted in historical fact and reality.

Race, spatiality, social isolationism, and colonial nostalgia in Zimbabwe

Julia Seirlis observes that research by scholars working on space, power, and identity “has emphasized space as producing and reproducing particular social relations and processes of signification” (2004: 406). She goes on to note that

[i]n Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, race and spatial sensibilities worked together to polarize whiteness and blackness, effectively restricting the struggle for power and the land to those two poles. Those not easily fitting into the categories of “black” or “white” were — and continue to be — excluded from power and from any substantive connection to the land and the nation as home. (2004: 408)

This may well have been the case in the past, for in the Zimbabwe of the late 1990s and 2000s, exclusionary politics ensured that only black people have a genuine claim to Zimbabwe as home. Whiteness in Rhodesia claimed both the city and the farm as islands “of white in a sea of black” (Seirlis, 2004: 412) and identified the countryside (which was equated with savagery and backwardness) with blackness. The city was associated with whiteness as it symbolised white power and progress although for white farmers especially (men in particular) it was “the site of a ‘soft’ and impractical white identity” for the “ideal white man was a man of the soil, hardened by harsh conditions and unused to luxury” (Seirlis, 2004: 408). For such men, working with the soil and a love of nature meant in part that “the farmer could claim a ‘better’ knowledge of the Native than his urban fellows because not only did he work with the ‘real’ rural black but, unlike the majority of city whites, he spoke ‘their’ language” (Seirlis, 2004: 408). Uncle Pieter and Mark Cooper in The Cry of the Go-Away Bird typify this idea. Uncle Pieter, who had dirt under his fingernails that defied any amount of washing, whose “skin had been burnt by forty African summers to the consistency of horse-hide”, and “spoke Shona more readily than he spoke English” was, according to Elise, “rooted in the soil like a baobab tree” (Eames, 2011: 242).¹

The tendency to racialize space and invest various spaces with meanings associated with power, knowledge, civilization, and barbarism continues into the postcolonial period in Zimbabwe. As such race and (de)colonization result in making “people foreigners in their own land” (Seirlis, 2004: 410). Although the white islands have shrunk to the point of nonexistence over the post-independence years, a continued racializing of space destabilizes white claims of belonging and home-making in Zimbabwe.

Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door exposes how space relates to race in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, where black people, “coloureds”, and whites occupy different locations. Whites who are on top of the racial hierarchy belong to the city, coloureds who come second in the hierarchy occupy medium density locations on the edges of the cities, and blacks stay in overcrowded townships or in rural areas. In the novel, whites see black people — who can no longer be kept in their place in the run-up to independence and its aftermath — as a threat to whiteness. When the legislation restricting different races to specific locations is relaxed during the dying days of Rhodesia, black people infiltrate formerly whites-only locations, challenging whiteness, white belonging and home-making.

In reaction to this black invasion of white space, some white people flee to private spaces in an attempt at social isolation. Lindiwe tells us that when black people joined the whites in the suburbs, “the whites started going all the way up to Burnside in the kopjes to try and find a place where they would be left to Rest in Peace” (Sabatini, 2010: 27);² that is, without interference by blacks. Others like Craig, Heather, and Duncan decide to migrate, either to South Africa or New Zealand, as Zimbabwe no longer feels like home. For Craig the high visibility of black people in society destabilizes his idea of Zimbabwe as home, for he complains that “there were too many Affs [Africans] now [and] the atmosphere had all changed” (11). Such behaviour and attitudes of whites reveals that whiteness and white space are challenged and threatened by blackness.

While I do not focus on “coloureds” and their belonging to Zimbabwe in this paper, I need to mention that they too try to exclude themselves from the black majority, preferring to create a sense of home away from the blacks but at least in contact with whites. In The Boy Next Door Lindiwe’s mother, a black woman who is in denial of her blackness and aspires for colouredness, pesters her coloured husband to move to a better suburb. By “better” she means a locality “where there are higher quality white people and no apostolics” (47). She makes this demand of her husband when the formerly whites only suburb of Baysview becomes full of black people after independence. The idea of staying in a better suburb here is related to efforts to break links with the rural areas and blacks. For Mrs Bishop, breaking the link with the rural areas through residence in suburbs is a step towards the construction and maintenance of a coloured identity for herself and for her daughter. In her study on colouredness conducted between 2004 and 2008 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and between 2009 and 2010 in Cape Town, South Africa, Kelly Nims observed that many of her Zimbabwean participants “linked living in the major cities of Harare and Bulawayo to being Coloured” (2013: 159). She also observed that coloureds culturally align themselves with whites, and that many of them would like to escape into white society (2013: 76). It is in light of this wish to escape into white society that Lindiwe’s relationship with Ian and the older man Jean should be considered. For her friend Cynthia and her black relative Maphosa, Lindiwe’s dating whites amounts to being a sell-out. It is not clear, however, why the foulmouthed, racist, and racially confused Ian falls in love with Lindiwe.

In Sabatini’s novel, the post-independence condition creates a sense of alienation for young whites in the city, like Ian who struggles to find a job in Harare and has to travel between Zimbabwe and South Africa in search of a place to call home. While looking for a job in Harare he falls victim to a crude racially-charged joke from a black would-be boss who takes off his expensive shoes made from crocodile leather and asks him to polish them in the toilets (200). In grappling to belong and make Zimbabwe a home like Rhodesia once was, young whites create Rhodie hangouts and enclaves such as Sarah’s Nightclub and the Keg and Sable. Such establishments are no-go zones for blacks, since they would risk being beaten up if they went there. Here the words of Tony Simoes da Silva in a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s White Writing ring true: “In this estranged and alienating relationship to place and time, the white African balances the desire to belong and to be embraced by this new place with a nostalgic, frequently sorrowful, longing for another place and another time” (2011: 147). For the young white people in Sabatini’s novel, that other place and time is Rhodesia.

In the countryside, as Andrea Eames shows in her The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, the farmer’s house and the residences of the white workers are polarized against the khaya (servants’ quarters) or the black workers’ compound. The white people’s habitations with their beautiful lawns and gardens represent civilization and culture, while those of the black people with their red dirt and lack of grass or flowers stand for savagery and backwardness. Here, a black person who ventures into the white man’s home, the “island of white”, is perceived as a threat to whiteness and its conceptions of home, as black people are viewed as not to be trusted. In this novel, no black man is beyond suspicion of being a thief, from gardeners, to farm workers, to medicine men. Jonah’s encroachment into white space when Elise alleges to have seen him in her mother’s bedroom on the day the mother’s jewellery went missing costs Jonah his job at Cooper’s farm. In Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door, Ian gives the impression that blacks of a particular ethnicity are worse than others when he says: “You can trust a Ndebele; the Shonas now, as slippery as hell” (68). Old tropes in white perception of and writing on Africa emerge from these novels: images of bad and good, savage, uncivilized, and barbaric, blacks.

The exclusionary residential, even recreational, practices in the novels show how space not only produces and reproduces, but also maintains particular social relations and processes of signification in Zimbabwe, thereby complicating white people’s quest for belonging to the postcolony. It is significant that people who claim Zimbabwe as home also live in fear of the majority of the population. White people’s sense of belonging is undermined by the mistrust and fear of blacks. The fact that white people’s negative perception of blacks persists in Zimbabwe poses challenges “to their belonging, particularly to post-2000 Zimbabwe where official whiteness is reconfigured as oppressive, exploitative and violent” (Misi, 2016: 102).

Another aspect that contests and subverts white people’s claim to Zimbabwe as home is their colonial nostalgia — for Rhodesia or the good old days of Ian Smith. In the two novels white people wish Rhodesia never died and Smith remained in power. In Sabatini’s novel, Ian McKenzie feels let down by Smith for acquiescing to black rule. Reacting to warnings by Mugabe to the Ndebele and members of Zimbabwe African People’s Union who are allegedly planning to “destabilize the democratically elected government of Zimbabwe”, Ian says “Old Smithie should have been smarter. If he’d played his cards right, he’d still be top dog here” (94−95). Ian’s wish for a continued reign of Ian Smith, the white supremacist who supported “the continuation of white minority rule and black suppression” (“Situation in Southern Rhodesia”, n.d.: 6), reveals nostalgia for Rhodesia and for the privileges he thinks he, as a white person, has lost with the handover of power to black people. Ian McKenzie’s evocation of an idealized picture of the past is also clear when he observes that “no one starved under Smith” (295). He is clearly referring to whites here. So far as black people are concerned, this claim is absurd. Malnutrition and starvation characterized the lives of black people in Rhodesia, where doctors blandly admitted that “malnutrition is a normal condition among our Africans” (Danaher, 1981: 33).

When the farm invasions intensify and the occupation of Mark Cooper’s farm is imminent in The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, an inebriated Ian, a farm manager, tells fellow whites he had invited to his house for drinks that he will leave Zimbabwe, but before doing so he plans to stuff his house full of explosives, “hang the Rhodesian flag on the roof and set up a radio to play the Rhodesia national anthem over and over”. He goes on to reveal why: “Then when the bloody War Vets come to possess the land they’ll fire at the house and blow themselves up. […] Bang! Bits of black everywhere!” (258). Although Ian claims this as a joke, his racist rhetoric and references to the symbols of Rhodesia — flag and national anthem — reveal that he is still stuck in the past, aligning himself “broadly with pre-independent (colonial) Rhodesia” (Fitzmaurice, 2015: 201) and not with Zimbabwe. His reference to Rhodesia here evokes and mobilizes white people’s “particular myths and memories” (Fitzmaurice, 2015: 206).

Affluence, injustice, and uncertainty

White people’s claim of belonging to Zimbabwe in the two novels is also subverted by their unwillingness to adjust their lifestyle and attitude following the change from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. Instead, they are bent on maintaining a life of affluence, economic control, and exploitation of black workers. In the novels we see that white people’s love of Zimbabwe has to do with the good life they are able to lead at the expense of black people. In Zimbabwe, they are surrounded by servants, live in big houses with lush lawns and get addressed as Baas or Medem. This is a lifestyle most of them would not enjoy elsewhere, say in Britain, as Bridgette in The Boy Next Door tells Lindiwe when Geraldine Ainsley’s family reclaim their British citizenship and prepare to emigrate to England. Bridgette says:

Just wait […]. They’ll come back running when they get a dose of reality. No servants, no gardens, just some horrible poky little flat in east London, where they will have to rub shoulders with so many Indians they will think they are in India. (57)

These words highlight the fact that whites live a life of luxury in Zimbabwe that they would not enjoy in London, where they would have no gardens, no servants, and would have to live alongside non-white migrants. In Africa, as Elise in Eames’ novel observes, “all whites had nice gardens” (63). For whites in Rhodesia as in Zimbabwe these gardens represented their mastery, taming, and ordering of chaos, which resonates “with Christian notions of Eden and neo-classical references to Arcadia” (Seirlis, 2004: 414). It therefore comes as little surprise that when in The Boy Next Door the Zimbabwean Army appropriates chunks of the Botanical Gardens, “hacking down rare species of trees”, irate letters from white Zimbabweans appear in the Independent newspaper under pseudonyms such as “Nature Lover” and “Concerned Citizen” (140). The army’s behaviour ruffles white cultural sensibilities.

True to Bridgette’s observations, above, life for the Ainsleys is not as grand in England as it was in Zimbabwe. Coming from the market, Bridgette bumps into a haggard-looking Geraldine at Tooting Bec tube station. Bridgette later tells Lindiwe that Geraldine “lives in Tooting, and I’m telling you, Lindiwe, Tooting is no Matsheumlope, a long way away from swimming pools, gazebos, and whatever else they had going down there” (311−12). The life that Geraldine leads in England contrasts sharply with her refined existence in Zimbabwe where she lived in the topmost room of a house that was “right on top of a hill in Matsheumlope carved into stones” (60), and from her room could see most of Bulawayo. The house had three fountains, two pools, 14 rooms, fireplaces, a game room with a pool table, and other trappings of a luxurious life.

It is clear in The Cry of the Go-Away Bird that Mugabe’s entrenchment of power and support of the farm invasions lead to the destruction of a life of affluence that whites lived in Zimbabwe, as Elise laments: “We had a perfect life here, in this perfect weather, with our servants and sunshine and silver teapots, and we were determined to make the most of it while we could” (188). This confirms Catherine Woodard’s observation that although the country’s leadership and name had changed whites remained “enormously powerful economically” and preferred to “retreat to predominantly white enclaves, soothed by servants and swimming pools […]. In Zimbabwe, the whites lost the war but not their lifestyles” (Woodard, 1986: n.p.). Sean, Mark Cooper’s son, also confirms this lack of change in the lifestyle of farmers out in the country, when he tells Elise: “The cities might be Zimbabwe, but out here, things haven’t changed” (192). The implication here is that many years after independence the farms had remained Rhodesia, where white supremacy and settler colonialism reigned supreme. Thus, while life on the farm equalled perfection for whites such as Elise and Mark Cooper, for black people the farm itself represented conquest, dispossession, oppression, servitude, and violation.

White people’s uncertainty about their Zimbabwean citizenship is another aspect that contests and subverts their claim to Zimbabwe and indeed Africa as home. In an interview given five years after independence, one white man had this to say: “Being a white in Zimbabwe is like riding first-class on the Titanic […]. The glasses clink. The party’s going on. But, every now and then, there’s a whiff of the iceberg” (Woodard, 1986: n.p.). Sentiments like these, which continued into the second decade of independence and can be seen reflected in the novels, are indicative of white people’s uncertainty in the country. For them “this Africa is a nurturing mother [that is] only too ready and willing to betray her offspring” (Da Silva, 2011: 146). In the novels, whites also demonstrate an ambivalent attitude towards Zimbabwe. One indication of white people’s sense of insecurity and their uncertainty about citizenship in Zimbabwe is the tendency to have multiple (dual or even triple) citizenship. In The Cry of the Go-Away Bird we encounter whites agonizing over which passport to surrender when the government tells them to surrender their foreign passports or lose their Zimbabwean ones and be declared foreigners. As it turns out, only Mark Cooper surrenders his British and South African passports. In their analysis of Douglas Rogers’ memoir, The Last Resort, Cuthbeth Tagwirei and Leon de Kock observe that “[t]o Rogers, white farmers defended their farms as symbolic acts to safeguard their Zimbabwean citizenship” (2015: 491). Cooper’s surrendering of his British and South African passports and his fatal defence of his farm can and should be understood this way.

Elise’s views about her British passport and her attitude to Zimbabwe and Africa in general contradict her claim to a Zimbabwean identity. In the novel she tells us:

I had not realized how much I relied on our ability to escape. Even though I had been telling everyone in my loudest voice that we would never leave, some secret part of me relied on my British passport and the fact that we had enough money to jump on a plane if things got really bad. (217)

Later she goes further, remarking: “Our passports represent civilization, freedom, the possibility of a future somewhere else […]. The thought of Steve just handing his over made me feel sick” (221). While this is partly a result of genuine fear of what was happening to white people in the country, the reference to civilization evokes a Conradian (read white) representation of Africa as uncivilized, barbaric, and a dark continent. Besides, her views resonate with what J. M. Coetzee, according to (Da Silva, 2011: 147), “identifies in the white South African writer [as] a quasipsychotic ‘burden of consciousness’, the phrase used to convey the difficulties associated with articulating belonging to and in Africa while forever haunted by the memory of another place, generally Europe”.

In some ways Eames’ novel shares similarities with relatively recent memoirs by white Zimbabweans as analysed by Ashleigh Harris (2005) and Rory Pilossof (2009). I will only signal three similarities here. One of these similarities is the deracialization, dehistoricization, and depoliticization of memory of childhood. Here the memoirs nostalgically construct a depoliticized past, thereby ignoring the “profound racial tensions throughout Zimbabwe’s history” (Harris, 2005: 106). The black war veterans and their accomplices who occupy white-owned farms are dismissed as ignorant, illiterate people, “gullible fools swayed by Mugabe’s rhetoric” (Pilossof, 2009: 626). As such, the writers fail to acknowledge the centrality of the land question in Zimbabwean politics and to “admit that white farmers attracted a great deal of hostility because of [&] their wealth and [&] their real or perceived racial prejudices” (Pilossof, 2009: 626). In The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, Steve sees the War Vets as unreasonable people high on dagga whose interest was to get “the whites off the land” for racial reasons — whites were the wrong colour (266−77). Steve also thinks black Zimbabweans are ungrateful, waiting for an opportunity to stick a knife in the backs of whites (179). What Steve engages with here is a public rehearsal of white innocence in Africa that sweeps away the decades of violence and exploitation of indigenous people. Later in the novel Mark Cooper deludes himself with the belief that his workers cared for him so much so that they would not allow the War Vets to take his farm, while Elise continuously “attempt[s] to inhabit the world of the majority Shona in Zimbabwe and identify with their culture” (Misi, 2016: 102), even naively referring to Beauty, a disposable nanny, as her real mother.

The second similarity between Eames’ novel and white Zimbabwean memoirs is the idealization and romanticization of memory, childhood, and the Zimbabwean landscape in these narratives. The fauna-filled Zimbabwean landscape is variously referred to as a “little piece of heaven” (Pilossof, 2009: 629), paradise, and the Garden of Eden. This holds true for Elise and Mark Cooper who see the Zimbabwean landscape as paradise. Both of these characters from Eames’ novel believe there was nowhere on earth like Zimbabwe and they would not change the beautiful landscape of that country for anything (180). In the Epilogue, Elise inscribes her identity onto Africa when she compares herself to the mongoose: “I was as African as the chittering mongoose that lives in a world of snakes” (297). There is tension, however, between Elise’s romanticization of memory, childhood, and the Zimbabwean landscape and her fear of the African Bush. Commenting on her mother’s warnings about the dangers in Africa, she states: “I knew that we were not welcome here. Too many things could kill us: snakes, leopards, hippos, hyenas, charging elephants, spiders. Potential death or pain in every step. Even the plants were out to get us” (11). These words show that although she attempts to engrave her identity onto Africa, she feels alienated and is not really at home. Africa, represented by the Bush, with a capital B in the novel, is mysterious and fraught with danger. Even her family’s house at Cooper’s farm is haunted by spirits that make her feel insecure and vulnerable; this home is not so homely after all. As an aspect of a novel by a white person, this fear is not unexpected considering that, as Da Silva noted in relation to Coetzee and Alexander McCall Smith, constant fear characterizes much white writing where Mother Africa is depicted as unpredictable, loving and treacherous (2011: 146).

The third similarity is the use of “nostalgic representations of white childhood in Zimbabwe” to imbue white Zimbabwean identity with legitimacy and authenticity (Harris, 2005: 108). Alexandra Fuller and Peter Godwin do this in their memoirs, as does Elise in The Cry of the Go-Away Bird. From early on in the novel Elise presents a nostalgic depiction of her life on the farm in Chinhoyi, detailing how she loved to sit and listen to the women servants talk. She tries to carve out an environmental identity by mentioning that she spent her days in Chinhoyi playing with little animals such as antlions, chameleons, and black beetles. This sentimentality about a Zimbabwean childhood allows Elise “to imagine a space of political and racial innocence and naïveté; a prelapsarian state of unquestioned belonging as a white child in Zimbabwe” (Harris, 2005: 108).

Finally, for my purpose here, the failure of white people in the novels to acknowledge their injustices to black Africans, preferring to inscribe “victimhood on white identities” (Law, 2016: 299), also contests their Zimbabwean identity and reveals how much they are steeped in white supremacy and settler colonialist inclinations which belong to a bygone era. As Kevin Danaher points out, during the colonial period in Zimbabwe the government’s land and labour policies were meant

to guarantee a steady supply of labor to white farms and industry at very low prices. [T]he goal was to allow the Africans a standard of living sufficient to reproduce the workforce but not so high as to allow them to escape dependence on wage labor. (1981: 34)

This injustice continued after independence. As a young girl, Elise observed the shabby dressing of blacks and their grubby houses, skinny dogs, and malnourished children. The black men she saw in Chinhoyi “wore overalls of thick, scratchy fabric over a bare chest, and usually had no shoes” (8). She also observed that while houses for whites had lawns, the homes of black people were surrounded by no grass or flowers, just red dirt. Most of these poor black people work on white farms where white supremacy and a settler colonialist mindset ensure that they are exploited so that they do not escape poverty and remain dependent on whites.

Jonah and his wife Mercy, Mark Cooper’s gardener and maid, respectively, are good examples of exploited black workers in Eames’ novel. After working faithfully for the Coopers for years, they have nothing to their names when they leave the farm after being fired because of allegations that Jonah stole jewellery belonging to Elise’s mother. Reporting what she saw when the family was moving out of Cooper’s farm, Elise says: “He [Jonah] had his arm around Mercy’s waist, and they looked small and shabby as they walked out of the iron gates. All their possessions fitted in one suitcase. It had Mr Cooper’s name printed on the side” (162). In spite of this clear evidence of exploitation and abuse of loyal servants, Mark Cooper falls back on the “whiteness of ‘social amnesia’” (Law, 2016: 299) by claiming innocence and expressing the belief that whites had tried to be fair to black people (179). It is not entirely surprising that Jonah joins the war veterans who come to Cooper’s farm to occupy it; he is clearly a frustrated man.

In Eames’ novel only Elise and her mother think that the land should be redistributed, as whites indeed took it away from black people. Others, such as Steve, think that the idea of land redistribution is ridiculous since the farmers of the day were not the ones “who took the land. They inherited it or bought it legally and they shouldn’t have to give it up” (136). Steve ignores “[t]he land appropriation laws, policies and practices during the colonial era” that led to “gross inequities with respect to distribution of and access to key life supporting resources such as land and forests” in Zimbabwe (Hill and Katarere, 2002: 255, 251). Steve’s failure to acknowledge colonial injustices towards black people as regards access to land highlights his settler colonialist inclinations.

Conclusion

In the foregoing discussion, I have attempted to show that although whites claim belonging to Zimbabwe and Africa in the two novels, their experiences, behaviour, and attitudes towards Africa and black people contest and subvert their belonging and highlight their colonial nostalgia. In the novels white people resist integration by emigrating from Zimbabwe or preferring to live away from black people, they show ambivalence towards Zimbabwe and are uncertain about their citizenship in that country, they are nostalgic for Rhodesia, and maintain their life of privilege and economic control at the expense of blacks. All this is contrary to the spirit of reconciliation, unity, and non-racialism championed by the new Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe, at independence in 1980. Instead, the behaviour of white people shows that they reify whiteness and continue to be attracted to a white supremacist philosophy and settler colonialist attitudes.

The novels also demonstrate that “[t]he various inequalities inherited from the colonial era had [not been] dealt with on attaining independence in 1980 in order to create a democratic and egalitarian society” (Mazingi and Kamidza, 2011: 328). The attempt “to reclaim white selfhood through narrative” (Tagwirei, 2016: 3) in The Cry of the Go-Away Bird and Sabatini’s depiction of white Zimbabweans in The Boy Next Door throws off issues of ambivalence, subversion, uncertainty, insularity, and nostalgia. Shamiso Misi rightly observes that “the message Eames seems to be sending is [that whites] are partly to blame for the problems they face in post-2000 Zimbabwe. Their arrogance, preventing them from familiarizing themselves with blacks, has maintained and even increased, the racial separation between the two races” (Misi, 2016: 104). In the two novels, then, we see a reversal of Rhodesian nationalism, for in Zimbabwe it is white people who are in search of a home. This is a search characterized by behaviour and attitudes that take whites back to the dead, yet familiar, world of Rhodesia.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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