Building bridges from broken anvils
“Lettah’s Gift” is an interesting book which deserves to be on the shelves of book lovers. The narrator, like his name, is frank but in that nonchalant frankness, you detect a sincerity born out of his desire for a Zimbabwe whose materialisation we have all worked for in the past weeks.
ON SATURDAY, that weekend when many people marched in the city in solidarity with the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, I was mesmerised by the multi-racial composition of the marchers. They looked like one family. They looked like they had always existed together. They looked like in the future they will exist together. So if they really looked like they had always existed together prior to the march, why was I mesmerised?
The truth of the matter is that for as long as the days of my adult life have so far been long, I have been under the impression that all these Zimbabweans — black, white Indian, Coloured, etc — existed on the same Zimbabwean space but in exclusive portions of that space. It is very possible to trace the racial cartography of Zimbabwe using areas of residence, shopping centres, schools, sporting activities and spaces of leisure. It is as if the prejudices of the past have kept us apart so that our sense of being Zimbabwean was cultivated by by-passing each other.
I still remember a friend of mine asking me why the representation of Indians in Zimbabwe was perfunctory, impoverished and prejudiced. She gave me the example of a shorty story in Petina Gappah’s “An Elegy for Easterly” in which the preoccupation of the Indian character is owning (your guess is as good as mine) a cloth shop!
My answer to my friend’s expression of discomfort with the under-representation, in Zimbabwean literature, of Zimbabweans of Indian origin was that if I were asked to write a novel which features an Indian character, besides the prejudices of “shop owners” that I already had, and the little bits and pieces I glean from “Zee World”, there was nothing I knew really concerning Zimbabweans of Indian origin except that they predominantly stay in the Belvedere area! As for Zimbabweans of European origin, I only interacted with a few. It’s as if we stay in the same country but outside each other’s social spaces.
But that weekend when marchers thronged the streets and Machipisa, the variegated composition of Zimbabweans I saw jolted me to an awareness of our exclusive existences and the need to move beyond such exclusivities. I was reminded of Graham Lang’s “Lettah’s Gift”.
Graham Lang is a Zimbabwean of European origin who emigrated from Zimbabwe when it was still called Rhodesia. The central character in “Lettah’s Gift”, Frank, reads like a fictional version of Graham himself. Frank emigrated with his family to South Africa and then Australia when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia. When his mother, Lydia, dies, Frank finds out that he has to embark on a journey back to Zimbabwe to fulfil one of her last, but most important, wishes — to find their former black servant, Lettah, and give her a considerable amount of money bequeathed her by Lydia.
Since her departure from Rhodesia, Lydia is assailed by an interminable sense of guilty for allowing the dictates of racialised Rhodesia to destroy the sisterly relationship she had had with Lettah. In order to assuage herself of that decades-long sense of guilt, she leaves a large sum of money for Lettah. So Frank’s journey back to post-2000 “Land Reform” Zimbabwe is occasioned by the need to fulfil his mother’s dying wish.
The Zimbabwe he comes back to is a Zimbabwe in which emotions provoked by the land redistribution exercise are at boiling point. However, in the midst of such phenomenal boiling of human emotions, Frank makes a very sober observation. This observation is made when Frank, after an automation mishap, visits the garage of Jervis. That garage is a gathering of dismantled cars and broken anvils. It would take divine intervention to re-assemble them. While touring this gathering of wrecks, Frank observes:
Ah, the dreaded broken anvil. I’d forgotten the countless times I had heard this same solemn myth when I lived in Africa. In my reckoning, if you melted down all the broken anvils that must litter the African veld you would have enough raw iron to build another Sydney Harbour Bridge.
These bridges that can be built by broken anvils, anvils broken by racialised existences in both Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, are bridges that bring people together. So as Lydia posthumously tries to build her own bridge to Lettah, Frank muses whether it is possible for us to recognise the value of bridges now and not in retrospect.
The building of bridges is not just a policy thing; it’s what we do in the practice of everyday life, in those little things of life like going to Joina City, SterKinekor, church, the Warriors Legends vs the Barcelona Legends match, shopping, school, Mbare Musika and so on. Those little things can catalyse the smelting of the broken anvils so that a bridge can be build connecting all of us who live in this our motherland.
The multi-party composition of the marchers and their recognition of each other’s value made me realise how, when push comes to shove, we are all one. The inauguration of the new President on Friday November 24 2017 saw various figureheads of the various political parties in attendance. For me, such gestures, such inclusivity, should not be cosmetic. The anvil heads of our broken relationships across political and racial divides need to be gathered together now. Our The multi-party composition of the marchers during the November 10 protesters and their recognition of each other’s value made Zimbabweans realise how, when push comes to shove, we are all one. INSET: Graham Lang vision of a new era calls for that. I liked the new President’s emphasis of that ideal and my hope is that that ideal will be the basis upon which we progress as Zimbabwe.
“Lettah’s Gift” is an interesting book which deserves to be on the shelves of book lovers. The narrator, like his name, is frank but in that nonchalant frankness, you detect a sincerity born out of his desire for a Zimbabwe whose materialisation we have all worked for in the past weeks.
Let me pen off here and pour myself a glass (or two). To the new Zimbabwe!