Anthony Chennells

The Authority of Presence: Reading Judith Todd's Through the Darkness as Diary

Summary Judith Todds Through the Darkness (2007) is an account of her life in Zimbabwe since independence and is constructed from notes and letters written over the years. The article addresses the implications of Todds narrative method which at times reads like a diary with the disjunctions, passing references, and more considered observations that characterise the diary as a narrative form. The article argues that these disjunctions convey something of the details of the lived life with its often random thoughts, expected and unexpected encounters, setbacks and achievements and that these slowly begin to be set against the growth of totalitarianism in Zimbabwean politics. Todds narrative allows her to record slowly, becoming aware of how ruthlessly the party will enforce its authority and how totally it will contain and then eliminate everything that it regards as dissidence. Only by using the narrative method that she has used is Todd able to convey not only her slow disillusionment but to speak with authority about what is happening. Her authority derives from her presence, from the fact that she records nothing that she has not directly experienced.

Inculturated Catholicisms in Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

When African nationalist writers of the mid-twentieth century refer to Christianity they almost invariably represent it as being implicated in colonialism. Writers like Beti and Ngugi evidence this, and Ngugi in particular employs Christian mythology in order to displace it with a nationalism that is given spiritual dimensions. Adichies Purple Hibiscus ([2005] 2006. Harare: Weaver) belongs to a new generation of novels that take for granted Christianity as part of contemporary African culture and although the novel criticises the Eurocentric and exclusive Catholicism of previous generations, and demands respect for Igbo spirituality, no attempt is made to recover traditional religion in everyday life or to inculturate Catholicism in religious practices that are no longer central to the majority of the people. Christianity can never be separate from the cultures in which it seeks to express itself, however, and the novel suggests that the Church should be inculturated in a post-modern Nigeria. The post-modernity of the novel is characterised by the migrations of people, a mistrust of large intellectual systems, and a recognition that intellectual life can hope only for local revelations and tentative conclusions.

Representing Africa: Revisiting African Realism of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract The originality and energy of African fiction in the 1960s and 1970s derived in part from the fusion of the allegory and symbolism of indigenous narratives with the modes of European bourgeois and socialist realisms. Pan-Africanism, Marxism, and the cultural retrieval of nationalist nostalgia and aspiration all constructed competing accounts of what Africa meant. Each position claimed for itself a correct representation of Africas reality and opposing versions of that reality and their corresponding realisms were designated as utopian or naïve or non-African and therefore false and falsifying. Implicit in each mode was a claim that it represented a continental experience, which derived from a coherent black experience. Although these modes were very different, the novels that make up the canon of those decades constitute a highly politicized literature. This has created a habit of assuming that the duty of African literature is to discover in the particular and the local what is typical of the continent. Was the politically engaged literature of the 1960s and 1970s a phase in Africas decolonization or is it inherent in a subject called African literature? Within the canon of those decades is another African reality discernible that is not serving some continental polemic and yet is true to an African reality?

Imagining and living the exotic : a context for early Rhodesian novels

Summary The paper discusses some early Rhodesian novels within the context of nineteenth‐century debates about the exotic and recent theories about exoticism. The exotic has various temporal and spatial locations that are always sites of desire constructed from what is perceived to be absent in the present. Technological developments and radical social changes created different and competing absences in Victorian England and the paper compares responses to these by Tennyson and Ruskin. Pater, by contrast, rejects social contingency and celebrates instead the power of the individual imagination to create alternative and pleasurable realities. The competing demands of the lived and the imagined exotic can be seen in early Rhodesian writing. In Haggards novels, written before Rhodess occupation of Mashonaland, the interior of Africa is a landscape of romance. After Haggard had met Rhodes the interior is written as a potential colony and the colony denies the exotic its discrete existence. Early settler writers often claim that Rhodesia has given their characters a liberating individuality but this claim is never sustained within the novels as the expectations of the settler collective are given precedence over the individual. Invariably the novels turn away from the esoteric in favour of realist negotiations of public and private meanings.

Savages and Settlers in Dickens: Reading Multiple Centres

How does one read Dickens from a centre as removed in space and time as Zimbabwe is from nineteenth-century London? A centre complicated for me by being, for much of my life, Southern Rhodesian?

Just a story: Wilbur Smith's Ballantyne trilogy∗ and the problems of a Rhodesian historical romance

Wilbur Smiths Ballantyne trilogy begins in romance, moves into satire and concludes with a reflexive narrative. This essay explores the basis for Smiths stylistic decisions in Rhodesian history. Events in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe during the period of the composition of these novels cloud the clarity of the authors few moral certainties: his narrative can register the whole bloody business of the Zimbabwean war only with scepticism, and the narrative mode of scepticism is satire. Smith was once a Rhodesian, and the trilogy provides ample evidence that he saw Rhodesia as most Rhodesians once saw it, and was forced to re‐see it in the same way that many Rhodesians have been forced to do.

The Sweetest Dream: Lessing, Zimbabwe and Catholicism

In her later work, Lessing refers frequently, if in passing, to Roman Catholicism, often as part of her growing interest in spirituality, which began while she was writing The Golden Notebook. Some of these references are in the accounts of her travels in Zimbabwe, but they are also to be found in her autobiographies, reviews and occasional journalism. Because of their frequency, she cannot be regarded as entirely indifferent to the church. A valid line of enquiry into Lessing’s work asks whether her dislike for the church, formed during her traumatic four years as a young child in the Salisbury convent, remained her dominant impression, or whether in later life she found in Catholicism, particularly in Zimbabwe, an institution that invited more complex responses. An answer is provided in The Sweetest Dream, her last long novel that deals directly with Africa. The novel is partly set in Zimlia, a country that clearly suggests Zimbabwe. It avoids representing Catholicism and traditional spirituality as antagonistic; the complex plotting at its end rejects a confident division between the sacred and the secular, and suggests that, although Catholicism is on the whole a force for good, its powers in Zimlia are limited, confronted as the church is by the literal epidemic of AIDS and the power of traditional spirituality. One possible reading suggests that this latter power prevails.

Doris Lessing's versions of Zimbabwe from The Golden Notebook to Alfred and Emily

Throughout her long career, Doris Lessing frequently wrote about Rhodesia or Zimbabwe, often giving the country fictional names, including Anna Wulfs Central Africa in The Golden Notebook. Anna dismisses her account of the country as falsified by nostalgia, but her Black Notebook contains energetic debates about what the country would be like if blacks emerged victorious from an anti-colonial war. African Laughter, her account of her visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s and early 1990s, allows Lessing to consider how accurately these debates anticipated what the country became. Her narrative moves through delight at the new nation to disillusionment with the opportunities that are being wasted. Disillusionment is also the dominant mood of The Sweetest Dream, a novel partly set in the newly independent Zimlia, and Zimbabwe is explicitly discussed in an influential article called ‘The Tragedy of Zimbabwe’. In the 1990s Lessing wrote the two volumes of her autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade; several episodes of the Rhodesian section of the first of these are re-worked in sketches in her final book, Alfred and Emily, part novella and part memoir of a Rhodesia that her parents experienced as an extension of the trauma of the First World War. In each of these different types of narrative Lessing assumes a different subjective point of view, and there is no single objective account of the country. Her narrative choices require that Lessings versions of Zimbabwe are nearly always provisional.

Inculurated Catholicisms in Chmamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

When African nationalist writers of the mid-twentieth century refer to Christianity they almost invariably represent it as being implicated in colonialism. Writers like Beti and Ngugi evidence this, and Ngugi in particular employs Christian mythology in order to displace it with a nationalism that is given spiritual dimensions. Adichies Purple Hibiscus ([2005] 2006. Harare: Weaver) belongs to a new generation of novels that take for granted Christianity as part of contemporary African culture and although the novel criticises the Eurocentric and exclusive Catholicism of previous generations, and demands respect for Igbo spirituality, no attempt is made to recover traditional religion in everyday life or to inculturate Catholicism in religious practices that are no longer central to the majority of the people. Christianity can never be separate from the cultures in which it seeks to express itself, however, and the novel suggests that the Church should be inculturated in a post-modern Nigeria. The post-modernity of the novel is characterised by the migrations of people, a mistrust of large intellectual systems, and a recognition that intellectual life can hope only for local revelations and tentative conclusions.

Historical Novel or Novel History? Michael Cawood Green's For the Sake of Silence

Michael Greens novel For the Sake of Silence narrates how the Trappists who arrived in Natal in 1882 transformed themselves from an enclosed monastic order bound by its Rule to silence, worship and labour into an active missionary order, the Congregation of Missionaries of Mariannhill. In his theoretical work, Novel Histories, Green (1997. Johannesburg: Wits) argues a novel about the past should be more than fictionalised history. Like history it is a discourse but it is an alternative discourse that has as its disposal multiple ways of interpreting both present and past. This article shows how, while evidencing a historians dependence on documents and chronologies as a fiction, Greens novel acquires an authority that that rivals that of the historical record. By using different narrative genres and tropes of silence and words spoken and written, the novel becomes more than a record of the past. The novel is principally the autobiography of Father Joseph Cupertino who in creating his narrative is committing himself to identifying causes and effects and creating patterns of meaning that run counter to an unquestioning acceptance of Gods direction of human affairs which the Trappist Rule requires of him. Ironically he has submitted himself to the secular and how the secular speaks about itself.