Robert Muponde

Dictatorships, disasters, and African soccer: reflections on a moment in Zimbabwean soccer

This article is a reflection on a particular moment in Zimbabwean soccer, the National Sports Stadium disaster of July 2000. Reading the soccer stadium as a dense semiotic site with many slippages of symbols and meanings, the article draws links between the game of football and that of politics. Both games offer narratives of the nation that constantly collide and merge as they share the same features. Complex rules regulate both games but there is always a potential for dictatorship, subversion, and disaster. Using the trope suggested by the novelist, poet, and cultural critic, Chenjerai Hove, on dictatorship in soccer and politics, the article attends to areas of rule bending and flouting that diminish fair play and justice. The article uses the football stadium disaster genre to argue for a redemptive politics and politics of the human in the practices and ideologies of both ZANU PF and MDC, the arch-rivals in the political struggles in Zimbabwe.

The social lives of mobile telephony in Africa: towards a research agenda

This Special Issue aims to research the multi-disciplinary ways in which a conception of the mobile phone as having more lives (than the dominant deterministic and economistic approach to mobile phone usage allows) leads us into a discourse of use and value beyond the standard and ubiquitous discourses of ‘the digital divide’, use and abuse; incomes and per capita; handsets and networks, etc. Focusing more on the ways in which the mobile phone as a thing in itself illuminates the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to and expand the scope of social relations and subjectivities (cf. Appadurai 1986) places the social at the centre of everyday innovation and creativity in determining the lifespan and utility of mobile technologies culturally, socially, morally and technologically. Such a focus suggests an invaluable appreciation of the mobile value perception and value chain framework that will point to ways of researching the sustainability of mobile technology and services for Africa. By focusing on the social lives of the mobile phone we seek to:

Pliz cal me: a fictional essay on cellffairs in cellfares

Through the genre of fictional essay, ideas to do with the personal experiencing of mobile telephony in specific situations and contexts in Africa are explored. The essay uses the trope of the much used ‘please call me’ facility as a way into a discussion of the weaponisation of calls and text messages, and the creativity around countering and subverting what should be considered the violence of mobile telephony. Beyond personal traumas associated with receiving and making calls, or texting, the essay points to the instrumentalisation of the sim card in one example of personal self-capitalisation and innovation. Above all, it is about what individuals do with mobile telephony, and how they tailor uses to needs, and needs to uses. The context in which the fictionalisation is situated is a time of rapid and traumatic change in Zimbabwe, and the specificity of particular responses to a life with mobile telephony. The neologisms cellffair and cellfare are apt characterisations of these responses to mobility.

‘The ball is round’: ways with soccer

In moments of stalemate, unpredictability, and despair on the pitch and terraces, a seemingly platitudinous comment that inspires hope and has become a natural component of soccerlore is: ‘the ball is round’. Players and fans derive their defences against uncertainty, disappointment and loss in that phrase and observation. Unsoccerly circles are likely to be struck by the tenuousness of hope that resides in a rather slippery, round and multidirectional object. More, they are likely to be drawn to the ecologies, narrative and languages around soccer which make it more than a culture, but a system of networks and expressions that are more likely to be considered a tradition. As a tradition, it is shored up by a soccerlore, a cache of practices, gestures, symbols, and soccer-ways that regulates and enables football. According to Neil Postman, tradition is ‘nothing but the acknowledgement of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that give birth to them’ (2000, p. 520). Unlike the ‘symbol drain’ that Neil Postman says certain repeated narratives suffer, soccer is just about one narrative tradition where, contrary to what Postman observes elsewhere, the more frequently a significant symbol is used, the more potent is its meaning ( pace Postman 2000, p. 514). In soccer, certain symbols and phrases have the status of the foundational texts and direct thoughtways and behaviours. ‘The ball is round’, repeated match after match, on way to the match, and from the match gathers within it not the weightlessness of a cliché, but that of an all-purpose fetish. It is a tool with which to decipher the imponderable outcomes and goings-on on the pitch; a talisman with which to head the ball into the net, or away from the net; a magical incantation to instil hope in supporters of one’s side or fear and uncertainty in the winning opponents. In other senses, it stands in for the power of the ordinary to rise to the status of an epiphany. It is the equivalent of an inspirational text, or a comforting psalm in the shadow of defeat and despair. ‘The ball is round’ speaks to the essence of soccer: even when all the game-plans are advertised in advance, the outcome of the game is not guaranteed. ‘The ball is round’ and the ‘roundness’ is managed individually and collectively. Soccer is about the only collectively and publicly managed spectacle of human endeavour where humanity ritually and dutifully recreates itself in narratives that promise and very often provide meaning and means of survival. There is something transparent about soccer, something that admits public participation. Soccer is a republic, a communitarian venture, which sutures the various, and often diverse, aspirations of a society together. It cuts across class, race, gender, and age. It collates boundaries and focuses energies ‘on the ball’. The yelling, whistling, the phlegmy sound of the vuvuzela, the dancing, the whistling, the music, handclaps, and raw animal pleasure (‘the multiple climaxes’ as Praise Zenenga puts it in this issue) experienced at certain points when the ball is in play, underline the primal unities and energies revived in a moment of good soccer. More important, communities and individuals have ways with soccer. It could be in the ways in which a whole soccer ecosystem and its sub-systems evolves, or is evolved.

Cultural migrancies: Provisional thoughts on two song-dramas in the ‘matter of Zimbabwe’

ABSTRACT If ‘struggle’ is the foundation of the new postcolonial literature and state, ‘the matter of Zimbabwe’ secures unquestioned tenancy to literatures of the folkways of yore. In this article, this false binary is disputed in favour of fusions and continuities. The article discusses the ‘matter of Zimbabwe’ via two Shona song-dramas, whose construction and visions border on the timeless and mythopoetic. The two song-dramas, Chomtengure and Uyo Ndiani, are indeed the epitomes of the indestructibility as well as vulnerability of master narratives of history. The two songs represent the creative possibilities of this tension that ripples through the rather viscous content of the ‘matter of Zimbabwe’.

Ngugi's Gandhi: Resisting India

ABSTRACT Ngugis novel Weep Not, Child has gained canonical status. One trope that has remained largely unexamined is that of Gandhi and the depiction of Indians in the novel. Gandhi appears briefly in the opening pages of the novel and the remainder of the narrative is punctuated with passing depictions of and comments on Indian traders. This article argues that Ngugi does not consciously harness the figure of Gandhi as a symbolic resource in the African anti-colonial struggle because of three interrelated reasons. First, Ngugis own version of orientalism forces him to author the Indian as an absolute other located several frontiers from the African struggles. Second, the Manichean order of colonial mythology as depicted by Ngugi reproduces two broadly limned stock figures in mortal combat: one black, one white. In this conflict, the Indian occupies a liminal space of uneasy conviviality. Third, the struggle itself between black and white is billed as a struggle between two sets of masculinities: white versus black. The article suggests ways in which Gandhis more significant symbolism finds an uncertain avatar in the boy child Njoroge. In doing so, it is hoped that the article will contribute to a dialogue on the place of Gandhi and Afro-Indians in Africas development.

Childhood, space and belonging: Shimmer Chinodya's Dew in the Morning

Shimmer Chinodya’s novel Dew in the Morning is a counter-pastoral to Jikinya. The novel’s recession into history is not meant to animate and authenticate an exclusive cultural and historical space, but to subvert a stable timelessness and nostalgia associated with the rural past. It brings into question the images that structure the topoi of the rural, the artefactual authenticity of pre-colonial and anti-colonial values in nationalist rhetoric in Zimbabwe. Shimmer Chinodya questions the basis of the perceptual unity of a pastoral romance such as Jikinya, and suggests, through the evolving consciousness of a child called Godi, a picture of the past and the present in which landscapes are held in the individual’s psyche in tension and space is multiply layered. The child in the novel embodies these complex tensions subsumed in the evolving rural world. Childhood becomes a nodal site on which the ‘retrospective radicalism’ (Williams 1973, p. 36) of pastoral narrative is balanced with an introspective critique of processes of a lived space. Childhood in Dew in the Morning is shorn of the trappings of a prelapsarian ‘golden age’, while it remains a defence of some kind of emerging order in which childhood as retrospect assumes the capacity of aspiration. Dew in the Morning is an evocation of a richly detailed, rural childhood, which captures aspects of life and change in rural Zimbabwe during the 1960s and 1970s. The story is told from the point of view of a young boy called Godi (Godfrey), from the time when he is 8 to about the time when he turns 17. His family relocates from the city to a rural area under the headmanship of Jairosi, a corrupt and bribe-seeking ne’er-do-well. The father remains in the city, working as a clothes salesman, while the mother settles and builds a home in the rural area. Many other families are also moving into headman Jairosi’s area, but the reasons for this mass migration are not explored. As Rino Zhuwarara notes:

Folklorising the Newsman: The Memoirs of Geoffrey Nyarota

Summary Geoffrey Nyarota, the author of Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman (2006) is well known in Zimbabwes media and political circles as a troubling and troubled, and now self-exiled journalist. His name is controversially folklorised as synonymous with the growth, tensions, and fate of the Zimbabwean story as told by newsmen. He is not known as a writer of books. His memoirs, advertised as long-awaited, and their arrival coinciding with the much-hyped long “winter of discontent” for Robert Mugabes political party, is uncannily in active conjunction with the politics of the times. Nyarotas memoirs are not an ordinary collation of life histories, recollections and musings, but are in many ways an attempt at self-folklorisation. This places him in direct competition for authorial resources with the metanarratives of the nation, along which he writes his story, and against whose grain he also writes. What then should we learn about this newsman? While his memoirs help us to understand some of the ways Zimbabwean nationalism has congealed into a frightening narrative and space, Nyarotas story is a metanarrative of some sort, which should be undone to reveal the figure that hides behind it as a truth-seeking, but forgetful and compromised newsman. This essay traces not only the conflictual relationship between the personal of the memoir-writer and the public histories, but the very similarities – however they are established in conflict – between the narrativised histories of the nation and of the person. It is not just the notion of the self-in-society in autobiography, nor its susceptibility to chronology and multiple lives that is of interest to this essay, but its similarities to what it disavows. Is the nation therefore a sum total of its memoirs?

Singing history makes it lyrical: The poem-song in the music of Chirikure Chirikure

ABSTRACT There is a unifying aesthetic at work in the poem-songs of Chirikure Chirikure, the Zimbabwean writer and musician. This aesthetic is distilled from from the mingling, hybridization of other kinds of music, poetry and folk forms emerging in Zimbabwe. Chirikure helps us to understand the poem-song as a multi-sited genre. It is a uniquely poetic and dramatic genre which is capable of adopting other artistic forms without losing its own founding coherence. Chirikure exits the more established understandings of Shona resistance poetry and music while still working within the highly developed thematic ambience of what is known as the “Zimbabwean crisis”. His poem-songs offer a creative rereading of the work of the past and the present.

Opinion, Dialogue, Review Unhappy family, unhappy children and the end of childhood in Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera mobilizes recollections of childhood not only as an event in his adult life, but as a way of articulating a longing for new forms of social consciousness. Childhood itself is recalled both as narrative and source of narrative. As such it is a place and time of memory. It is not just a construct of writing, but a way of coming to terms with an enormous social experience. This article discusses the nature of childhood and its uses in Marecheras dystopian fiction. It demonstrates the ways in which Marecheras fiction revises sets of concepts that constitute ‘the child’ by portraying childhoods that point to the dissolution and reinvention of a symbolic order in a post-national African space.