Seeking the real Chimurenga
The author unravels a history of Zimbabwe that’s been twisted for centuries and continues today
Chigumadzi pulls us to a lesser known song lamenting a struggle unacknowledged, swept under the rug of patriotic history. She imagines the young Lilian Chigumadzi listening to Dorothy Masuka’s 1956 song, Nolishwa, and wonders if that song resonated with her.
“In the song, concerned townsfolk report the surprising behaviour of Nolishwa, whom they have seen just yesterday — with another man, wearing trousers!”
Sixty-two years later, in an independent Zimbabwe, the woman who dares to stand outside subservient roles, who dares to be first human and then a woman, is still ostracised and labelled “a hure, a prostitute”. As with Nolishwa, in Nzenza, a current hit song by ExQ, a suitor comes to the errant woman’s defence by saying that “he loves her just as she is”. Once again, a man is the arbiter of a woman’s autonomy.
Inventing history
And yet the silences persist and Chigumadzi researches, interviews, ponders over, imagines and then writes in the lost narratives. It is delicate work and as she interviews her Mbuya Chiganze, her elder cautions: “Zvimwe hazvibvunzwi [Some things are just not asked about].”
This refrain, the suppression of painful memories, is adopted and abused in the framing of patriotic history. Where the previous president brushed off six years of state atrocities as a “moment of madness”, the new president says “let bygones be bygones”. But the erasure does not include events further back, reframed for the purpose of presenting the current regime as a “new dispensation”.
Chigumadzi criticises the main opposition, the Movement For Democratic Change (MDC), for not challenging the ruling party’s revisioning of national history. A few days after the Harare launch of this book, the military shot dead six civilians (the seventh died two days later) during MDC Alliance-led election protests and initiated beatings and arrests mostly in the townships. The state machinery is framing this surge of violence as either the work of some mysterious rogue soldiers or the fault of the MDC Alliance.
The book challenges the nation to resist this ownership of the present and the recreation of history.
At her Harare launch Chigumadzi mentions Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, who lives in Britain, as an artist doing similar work to her — of connecting with her past, her spiritual connection with the land and imagining our present and futures.
In their work, Chigumadzi and Hwami signify art looking inwards, in contrast to the emigrations the country has undergone for decades. The author refers to a bastardised spiritual relationship in which the historic alliances between the military, the political and the spiritual — the many Chimurenga — have regressed to politicians seeking individual miracles, prophecies and electoral endorsements from charismatic church leaders.
These Bones Will Rise charts Chigumadzi’s journey in understanding how her people, outside of national party politics, have abdicated their responsibility to be “continuously drawing on Chimurenga’s intergenerational spirit to make and remake themselves after the military and spiritual conquest of the 1890s”.