Abstract
PICTURED: Tsitsi Dangarembga (centre) is applauded as the 2021 winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on 24 October 2021 in Hessen, Frankfurt
CREDIT: (main) Thomas Lohnes/epd-Pool/dpa picture alliance/Alamy; (portrait) Hannah Mentz
A new writer’s drawer has been added every year. In this imagined future, a century since the start of the Future Library project, the stories are printed on paper harvested from 1,000 specially grown trees in the Nordmarka forest, facing the library. Art, sustainability and free expression meet.
“I wish you could see the big smile on my face, because it is one of the most liberating pieces of writing that I have done," said Dangarembga, the Zimbabwean filmmaker and author who was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and was a founding member of PEN Zimbabwe. “There’s no one to tell me, ’No, you represent a certain group’, or someone to tell me that it’s uninteresting, the names are unpronounceable… things that I come up against again and again.”
Short of leaps in medical science, most readers of this issue of Index will never read any of these works. The story is a complete secret. Dangarembga does divulge that “narini” means “forever” in what is known as Shona – a language of colonial convenience harking back to the 19th century, when people were “just lumped together for the convenience of the British colonial enterprise”. In reality, there are many different dialects.
It might be difficult to imagine what the world will look like in a century’s time. Dangarembga herself has a theory, having come freshly out of a seminar about global warming before speaking to Index. She heard about strategies being researched to solve the problem, including one idea funded by Bill Gates in which particles are released into the stratosphere to reduce global warming, known as solar geo-engineering.
“But one of the problems with that is that what you send up comes down,” she said. “And so one of the questions that I asked is, ’Is every part of the world equally capable of dealing with those particles when they descend?’ And of course, the answer is ’No’.”
For the sake of argument, she imagines that global warming has indeed been reduced by solar geo-engineering.
“By the time that these books are read in 2114, I imagine that the most vulnerable people in the world would have been made more vulnerable. I imagine that those areas of vulnerability will have been taken over completely by the system of white supremacist capitalism that we live in,” she said, whilst hoping that increased migration will at least lead to more tolerance.
In her imagined future, when people open Narini and her Donkey they will ask “Was it really like that?” Just, she said, as young Zimbabweans today ask their parents the same question when they discover her 1988 debut novel Nervous Conditions, which has threads of her early life running through the book’s protagonist, Tambu.
In writing Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga became the first Black woman from Zimbabwe to publish a novel in English. As a child, she discovered that words had power. Unsure of why she had been sent to live with a foster family whilst in England, she witnessed the action that resulted from talk amongst adults.
“I realised I was powerless, which meant I needed power, which in turn meant I needed words,” she writes in her latest book, Black and Female – an essay collection which deals with the intersection of race and gender that have informed, but not constrained, her writing.
She writes: “There are wounds that burst open as I write. I write to raise mountains, hills, escarpments and rocky outcrops over the gouges in my history, my societies and their attendant spirits.”
In 2020, Dangarembga was arrested for six words on a placard: “We want better. Reform our institutions.”
“I had disobeyed a presidential decree,” she said, describing her protest that so infuriated Zimbabwe’s authorities.
In the midst of an economic crisis that Zimbabweans have been feeling for decades, Dangarembga describes life as being “practically unliveable”, despite her relative privilege. “If I am in such a position, what about the ordinary person in Zimbabwe?” she said.
In the days before a planned demonstration calling for political reform, interest in it grew, she explained. This worried the authorities. A political decree, under the guise of Covid-19 restrictions, banned the demonstration.
“We had been forbidden to go out onto the street and we had been told to stay at home,” she said. “Apparently, they said that if anybody is out demonstrating, whatever happens to them will be their own fault.”
Despite the decree, Dangarembga stood by the wording of the constitution that states Zimbabweans have the right to demonstrate peacefully. She even had the relevant paragraph saved on her phone while she protested. If the police challenged her, she’d show it to them.
“I had to have a conversation with myself about what I was going to do,” she said. “I felt that, as I had been vocal publicly, to then allow myself to be intimidated by an unlawful decree really would take us back to systems like medieval Europe.”
Dangarembga never intended to do anything illegal. She wanted to meet other Zimbabweans and publicly express an opinion. Meanwhile, the treatment of critical voices in the country was firmly in her mind. Ahead of protests in 2019, unknown men with AK-47s abducted and attacked activists while the internet was simultaneously shutdown.
Just a week before the 2020 protest where Dangarembga was arrested, security forces broke into the home of Hopewell Chin’ono, a journalist accused of planning the protests, and arrested him without producing a warrant. Dangarembga had called for his release. (By January 2021, he had been arrested for the third time in six months.)
“We had this idea that we would demonstrate in small groups so that we could not be called a crowd or a meeting,” she said. “What I did not know at the time, which I found out afterwards, was that in Zimbabwean law, a meeting is more than one person.”
She and journalist Julie Barnes took their peaceful protest down the Harare streets.
“For me, it was to show my reliance on the constitution and to show how important it is for citizens to have agency and be able to express their opinions in public,” she said.
But flying in the face of the decree meant they were descended on “with a sledgehammer”. Dangarembga and Barnes were arrested and herded onto an imposing grey police truck.
When the trial started, Dangarembga was glad to be outside Zimbabwe, after being offered a fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. A writer’s job is to sit and think all day, she said, and that would have been very uncomfortable.
In September 2022, both women were convicted of inciting violence and given custodial sentences. Dangarembga paid a fine to avoid one part of the sentence, and will face a six-month sentence if she reoffends within the next five years.
The ruling Zanu PF party has been in power since the country’s independence in 1980, when colonial rule ended but left a deep mark. In summer 2023, Zimbabwe will head to the polls. Ahead of this, president Emmerson Mnangagwa is planning to sign the Private Voluntary Organisation Bill into law, which would mean NGOs could have their registrations cancelled if they are deemed to have political affiliation.
Dangarembga – who also runs a trust, the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa – believes there is a political strategy at play, with several tactics operating simultaneously.
One of them is propaganda. Due to expensive data, she explained, many people cannot access social media and instead rely on traditional media – outlets which have to buy licences from the government.
“People are not really able to get much information about a different point of view from the government’s point of view,” she said. “If the government tells them that these private voluntary organisations are puppets of the West, and they’re here to destroy the liberation that we fought so hard for, people will tend to believe it.”
But even more concerning for Dangarembga is the power that this law would give the government. She compares it to land reform, where the government seized private property.
“It is a very logical consequence of the position that Zanu PF has taken of total control, and they say it very openly – they say ’Zanu PF will rule forever’.”
With the election looming, Dangarembga believes that people can make choices according only to what they know. If they are told that failure to comply will result in a lack of seeds for the planting season, they can make a decision based only on the welfare of their families.
“When one looks at the reality on the ground in Zimbabwe, it’s easy to think ’Well, why don’t the citizens vote them out?’” she told Index. “But one has to know what they’re dealing with.”
Dangarembga’s words, whether fiction, nonfiction or scribed on a placard, go a long way to scratching at the wounds inflicted on Zimbabweans.