Rude political awakening
LIKE SODIUM IN WATER Hayden Eastwood Loot.co.za (R216) Jonathan Ball
THIS self-study by a Zimbabwean writer – Hayden Eastwood – titled Like Sodium in Water is a most original piece of southern African literature. At first glance such might not appear so: there is a familiar autobiographical pattern of a conventional, in some ways ideal, white African boyhood of the mid 1980s-90s; of a sporty, practical child, happily obsessed with flying model planes and part of a large, initially happy family.
Highly introspective and questioning, amid boyhood pleasures and angsts, Hayden discovers, navigates and rigorously interrogates adolescent pains and the unfolding social environment; not least the growing traumatic complexities of his own family. Hayden is nonchalant and humorous in describing his often draconian, eccentric schooling at a prestigious Harare establishment, where the boys form their own Lord of the Flies-type hierarchies, with staff oblivious to the resultant physical bullying, but quick to cane with abandon.
But this book has another almost unique political theme: that of a highly intelligent youth whose father and to a lesser extent his mother, are (not common among whites in the old Rhodesia) on the political Left. Anthony Eastwood is a lawyer related to Bram Fischer’s wife through marriage, who self-indulgently preaches to his children about his own grossly inflated role in Zimbabwean independence. Anthony Eastwood contemptuously dismisses the outdoor-orientated, conservative and “religiously charismatic” white “Rhodie” community. But such scorn contrasts with a dark reality; his appalling emotional and occasionally physical abuse of his wife; disregard of his own children’s needs; and his enslavement to alcohol and tranquillisers.
The author’s own political awakening comes as he questions these contradictions: A father seemingly immersed in hypocrisy – a champion of a supposed higher morality, yet the cause of such pain within his own home. Ultimately there is a shocking family tragedy resulting in the author finally turning his back, not necessarily on all of his father’s political views, but on Anthony Eastwood’s culpability regarding the chaos and agony inflicted upon those closest to him.
For Hayden to describe all this must have been very difficult; surely where an autobiography gets to its most sensitive core.
Against these grim events is the omnipresent macro-background of the Zimbabwean state becoming more dysfunctional and tyrannical. Like Peter Goodwin’s books, this one also examines post-independence white Zim society. When work by such writers become setworks in SA schools and universities, our own society will be politically maturing. This is a must-read.