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Dropping coins . . . a review of books
Terence Ranger, The Zimbabwean
April 15, 2005

http://thezimbabwean.co.uk/15-april-2005/publishing-a-book.html

These books - together with others soon to be published in Zimbabwe - show that Zimbabwean studies are in very good shape. It is not that academics have gone on quietly with their research beneath the surface of political violence and upheaval - it is more that they have been writing to political violence and upheaval and contributing ideas that will help resolve them.

Publishing a book in - or about - Zimbabwe is a lonely business. As Professor Ngwabe Bhebe says, it is rather like dropping a coin into a very deep well. If you are lucky, after a long while you hear a tiny splash.

Very few newspapers review books. Bhebe's new book, ‘Simon Vengayi Muzenda and the Struggle for and Liberation of Zimbabwe' (Mambo, Gweru, 2004), was published eight months ago. It has not been reviewed in Zimbabwe at all.

Obviously, this is not because it is politically dangerous to do so, even though Bhebe is being sued by one of the big men mentioned in his book. Newspapers demand that Zimbabwean historians write the inner history of the liberation struggle and then, when one of them does so, they ignore it.

It is not good enough reviewing books about Zimbabwe in British academic journals, as I have done with Bhebe's book. They need to be reviewed for Zimbabweans and read in Zimbabwe. So I intend to write regular reviews for The Zimbabwean, drawing significant new books to the attention of its readers.

In this first review, I want to draw attention to books on Zimbabwe published outside the country - two in South Africa, and two in Scandinavia. These are even less likely to be reviewed in the Zimbabwean press or noticed by Zimbabwean readers.

Stephen Chan's ‘Citizen of Africa: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai' (Fingerprint Co-operative Ltd, Cape Town, 2005) makes for a comparison and contrast to Bhebe's portrait of that leader of an earlier generation.

Tsvangirai did not have the chance to rise by keeping calm in the middle of the frenzies of liberation war - indeed, he has often been attacked by Zanu (PF) because he is not a war hero. Still, Chan's book, too, is a study of how a humble man rose to the top while more dazzling and charismatic talents faded.

Chan, a Professor of Politics in London, makes much of Tsvangarai not being an intellectual. Tsvangarai himself offers effective criticisms of the failures of some of Zimbabwe's best-known intellectuals.

Chan's little book is full of the doubts others, and often he himself, have expressed about Tsvangarai's potential. His record of their conversations starts off with Chan very much in charge, clarifying issues, pushing points. Gradually, though, the balance changes. Tsvangarai makes assertions and adopts moral positions that surprise and shame Chan. It turns out that Tsvangarai is not only a worthy trade union leader, not only a focus of opposition. Before Chan's very eyes, he seems to be growing into something more:

"I was a little stunned by all he had said. He had opened himself both graciously and fully ... He may be closer to his hero, Mandela, than even he suspects. Discussion by discussion, Morgan Tsvangarai had become more open, more human - less cautious and, paradoxically, more obviously and naturally presidential ... Morgan Tsvangarai exemplified the virtues, the shouldering of responsibility and the growing vision of a citizen of contemporary Africa."

The other book published in South Africa has also only just appeared - Brian Raftopoulos and Tyrone Savage's collection, ‘Zimbabwe: Injustice and Political Reconciliation', (Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, Cape Town, 2004).

Raftopoulos himself certainly deserves to be excluded from Tsvangarai's plague of "so-called progressive intellectuals who have the habit of lecturing workers and peasants through journals published from their mansions in low-density suburbs". Raftopoulos speaks for, rather than at, workers; he speaks truth to power, he has put his mind and pen perpetually at the service of democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe.

His very useful introduction, and the ninth chapter, ‘Nation, race and history in Zimbabwean politics' both insist on the central importance of race in Zimbabwean history and its neglect by scholars. Other chapters continue this theme: Karin Alexander's brilliant and alarming exploration of white identity and ideology in Zimbabwe, and James Mzondidya's study of ‘invisible subject minorities'.

Nation and history is the theme too of Teresa Barnes' ‘Reconciliation, ethnicity and school history' and of Robert Muponde's typically striking study of ‘The worm and the hoe', in which the philosopher and censor, Taftaona Mahoso, is introduced to us as a very interesting poet.

Among its other riches, the book has a chapter on Gukurahundi by Shari Eppel and - best of all for an economic ignoramus like me - a dazzlingly informal discussion of Zimbabwe's economic decline, by Rob Davies.

‘Zimbabwe: Injustice and Political Reconciliation' is designed to represent the ‘insights, perspectives and proposals of Zimbabweans themselves'. It does justice to Zimbabwean intellectuals better than do the discussions in Chan. Here there is clear prose, an absence of rhetoric, a sense of urgency.

This book takes the debates on the ‘patriotic history' and ideological hegemony of Mugabe's regime that had already begun, a vital stage further. It lays down an implicit agenda for opening up spaces for the discussion of citizenship and democratisation.

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