This material originally appeared in Rino Zhuwarara, "Men and women in a colonial context: A discourse on gender and liberation in Chenjerai Hove's 1989 Noma award-winning novel -- Bones," Zambezia: The Journal of the University of Zimbabwe 21, No. i (1994): 1-20. Published by University of Zimbabwe Publications, P.O. Box MP 203, Mount Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe.

Abstract This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Bones in relation to how it portrays men and women responding to the challenges of a colonial situation which is dynamically changing. The main thrust of the article is that Hove is much more interesting when unmasking the cowardice and limitations of male characters using a style influenced by African Orature but his treatment of women characters is problematic. Consequently, his success is necessarily a controversial one and unlikely to satisfy the expectations of feminist thinkers and writers.

UNLIKE OTHER AFRICAN countries which experienced the cultural re-awakening which accompanied moves towards the att~inment of independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia, remained under a harsh colonial rule until 1980. The prolonged settler rule and the subsequent isolation of the country from the rest of Africa severely undermined the birth and growth of Zimbabwean literature in English. However, during the latter half of the 1970s three writers had come to dominate the Zimbabwe literary scene. First was the unassuming but self-assured Charles Mungoshi, with his much-acclaimed Waiting for the Rain (1975). Second was the late Dambudzo Marechera, who stunned the international audience with his controversial House of Hunger (1978) which won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Third was the steady but relentless output by Musaemura Zimunya, whose poems were consolidated in the collection entitled Thought Tracks (1982). All three writers have gone on to publish other works which have secured them a prominent position in the evolving literary tradition in Zimbabwe. In many ways Chenjerai Hove, born 9 February 1956 in a small-scale farming area near Zvishavane, belongs to the same generation, but his literary prominence became much more visible after the attainment of Zimbabwe's independence.

In Chiriseri's case, the relentless vulgarities of his diction are an index of the brutal confrontation between capital and labour. He becomes an extension of the master, a tool of a system to facilitate the process of primitive accumulation in which Manyepo is involved. Physical threats and psychological abuse contained in the foul hnguage are designed to create a permanent sense of insecurity in the workers. What seems to inspire him in his job is the illusion of belonging to the more powerful side; and, of course, the illusion of exercising authority over his less fortunate brethren. Chiriseri remains addicted to the grim and blind cruelties that go with his job and very little can be expected of him in terms of progressive consciousness�hence the contempt with which he is regarded by Marita. At best he can only be a mimic of his master. His role is somewhat sim~iar to that played by African messengers and constables in Chinua Achebe's novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of Cod.

The picture that emerges at this point is that of a generation of African males so thoroughly domesticated by the ideology of colonialism that they have come to doubt their own potential to change or influence their fate. All the three male characters, with their uneven levels of consciousness, are simply out of depth and incapable of challenging the settler order. Robbed of their self-confidence, lacking in conviction and seemingly over-awed by White invincibility, they will remain loyal to the very system which dehumanizes them. They constitute the various parts of a chain of repression which transmits violence from the topmost layer of colonial society represented by Manyepo down through the weaker layers, predominantly African and male, until it reaches the lowest rung of that hierarchical society represented by African women and children. In other words, Hove's success here lies in the manner in which he captures a rural version of a cycle of violence spawned by the colonial intrusion. The cycle of violence may appear to be not as graphic and dramatic as that in Marechera's House of Hunger, but its impact is no less debilitating. Pitted against the collaborative stance of the older generation of African males is the response registered by Marita and other female figures in the novel. First and foremost Hove is anxious to portray Marita not only as the proverbial victim of the exploitative colonial practices, but also of the patriarchal attitudes of African society. Marita's tribulations pre{iate her arrival at Manyepo's farm. As a peasant wife in the so-called "Reserves", she suffers untold miseries when she fails to conceive. She is branded a village witch�"a hen that ate its own eggs". Her dreams about marital bliss and motherhood are shattered early in her life, more so wl~en her husband is dutifully advised by the community to marry another woman who can safeguard the name of her husband by producing sons. Marita becomes a pariah in a community which, ironically, is already marginalized by the forces of history. When he ultimately succeeds in having a son, fate does not allow her to relish the joys of motherhood. Her only son leaves the farm and becomes a guerrilla fighter, thus reducing her again to a childless woman. Compounding this particularly painful and personal dilemma is the destitution which afflicts the majority of Blacks. She can only survive as a labourer on Manyepo's farm. In fact she is described as part and parcel of the exploitable natural resources for Manyepo. As readers, her plight reminds us of Granny's famous speech in Their Eyes were Watching God:

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything so far as Ah been able to flnd out. May be its some place way off in de ocean where de black man Is ln power but we don"t know nothing but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell the nigger man to pick it up. He pick it up because he have to but he don"t tote it. He hands it to his womenfolk. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.l�

There is no doubt that the author's intention is to portray through Marita's life-experiences a character whose capacity to suffer seems infinite. Apart from being a lonely and isolated figure labelled a witch for her apparent barrenness, Marita is subjected pitilessly to back-breaking toil, only to receive derisory food rations since she does not have children on the farm. The grave and persistent deprivations allotted her in life amount to an affliction which is worsened by the tensions and anxieties brought about by her son's disappearance. Unfortunately, her husband's indifference to her overriding emotions about her son almost amount to a callousness which she has to suffer. lt is not surprising that she can only share her tormented and tortured existence with a fellow woman, Janifa. Murume is too timid, too brutalized by history to be able to offer comfort to anyone.

Interesting to note, however, is that her singular misfortunes do not succeed in undermining her self-respect and dignity as happens to most characters on the farm. lt is as if her capacity to endure hardships related to gruelling manual labour has been enhanced by her earlier personal tribulations in the Reserves. She even has the guts to challenge the slave- driving foreman at whom she lashes mercilessly with her blunt but truth- telltng tongue: "What is the white man's loin cloth saying today? Has the wblte man wetted his loin cloth so much that it has the courage to drip its wetness on us? Go away and listen to your baas's insults."~l As a result of her defiant and persistent efforts, the workers are granted respite from the merciless toil. Indeed Marita becomes an unofficial spokesperson for all the workers and she does that at the risk of losing her job!

What seems to account for Marita's courageous disposition is a kind of radical innocence, an inviolable spirit in her which refuses to be overwhelmed by the brutal pervasions associated with colonialism. She possesses a simple, down-to-earth but unassailable sense of what is right and wrong and, as such, she has a certain raw strength which can be identified as an aspect of the rock-like integrity of the self that is sometimes associated with the peasantry. Marita enjoys a certain rugged moral authority which is conspicuously absent in all the male characters on the farm. Consequently, her husband remains in his own insecure and self- interested manner attached to her; even Chisaga, in his childlike, self- centred and predatory manner, gravitates towards her. She also radiates a certain warmth and passionate sincerity, so much that she becomes a mother-substitute-cum-sister to Janifa. In other words, Marita is an embodiment of the kind of spirit which most of the Black people unconsciously come to admire.

Closely related to Marita's moral authority is, of course, her allotted role as the outstanding underdog of history to whom anything that can go wrong in a lifetime happens. It is as if Hove sets out to create a singular woman character in African fiction, an African version of the legendary Sisyphus who is forever carrying the burdens of history with all the pain and suffering which that role entails. Certainly the raping of Marita by government soldiers amounts to a gratuitous abuse which exacerbates the plight of her overworked body and tormented spirit. Yet what remains of Marita after all the ravages of history have left their mark on her is that defiant spirit, that which is essential, the Bones which metonymically are the bedrock and which cannot be destroyed.

For all her singular attributes, however, Marita's role is as outstanding as it is problematic. Our admiration for her is savagely qualified by the all too real problem that her defiance remains a gesture: it is part of the potential which is not allowed by the author to develop so that she can outgrow the crippling limitations of her environment. In a book in which feelings and emotions are the touchstone, Marita's consciousness, advanced as it is in relation to that of other workers, remains painfully inadequate for her to cope with the demands of a colonial situation which is dynamically changing.

In fact, one can argue that she is never meant to attain the higher level of critical consciousness which can enable her to interrogate fully ~he nature of her relationship with history. For example, at a critical juncture in her life, when those forces which oppress her, and which are symbolized by Manyepo, are about to be removed by the guerrillas, she refuses to testify against him. She asks: "Child, what do you think his mother will say when she hears that another woman sent her son to his death?" Lan White commends her for displaying "the bedrock of rural charity" and for instinctively recognizing that the death of one's enemy is tragedy too. Obviously White is correct in so far as his interpretation is the one intended by the author, but is one which, in the actual struggle, betrays Marita's imperfect grasp of history and its demands. Her gospel of "do unto others as you would like them to do unto you" is admittedly admirable and reassuringly Christian but, in the prevailing circumstances, misdirected and self-defeating. It is no wonder that Manyepo remains arrogant and morally blind, even after Independence. Also, at this particular point the novel offers us a sentimental version of the war, one which is kind enough to allow Marita to uphold her conscience as a mother�as if motherhood as a vocation is something above revaluation.

It is quite within Hove's rights to claim that as an author he is entirely free to create a character whose subjective experiences are consonant with the peasant-cum-worker he has in mind. But the only problem here is that Hove is dealing with a specific phase of Zimbabwean history at a time when his generation is privileged enough to assess the extent to which Marita, as an artistic creation, typifies the essential features related to the experience of the liberation war. Such an evaluative exercise would seem to be expressly invited by Hove's dedication in the first pages of the book:

For the women whose children did not return, those sons and daughters who gave their Bones to the making of a new conscience, a conscience of Bones, blood andfootsteps dreaming of coming home some day in vain.

Furthermore, in Irene Staunton's Mothers of the Revolution, readers are impressed by the fact that rural women who start off being relatively self-centred and narrow in outlook go through the kind of war experience which broadens and deepens their horizon so much that they attain a higher level of critical consciousness. More importantly, they achieve a sense of solidarity and commitment which transforms them from being mere victims of history into women who actively participate in the shaping of their future. Even the language of their dreams is specific and concrete: they dream about having more land, schools, clinics, jobs and, ultimately, a dignified role in society which fulfils their lives materially and spiritually.

As for Marita, alas she remains the proverbial "victim" especially when her" ision about the future does not go beyond the return of her son. Even her views about the war of liberation are as limited as her horizon is. She views the war as being against the bad things the white man has in his palms. If a child has dirt in his palm, do we

cut away his palm in order to get the dirt off it? No, we take the child, spank his bottom a little bit. If the child wants to eat dirt, we take a stick to punish the child harder . . . Now, the white man has refused to remove the dirt in his clenched fist. So we have to take a stick and whip the white man. One day the white man will say . . . come my friends, you are not evil people. You are people who know the difference between dirt and cleanliness . 12

In a sense Marita regards the liberation war as a crusade against the moral dirt which the settlers have accumulated through their exploitation and ill-treatment of Blacks, rather than being against the economic system which they have created for their exclusive material benefit. Further, Marita sees the war as a means to reconclle Blacks and Whites at the level of human relations. Thus her vision is reformist rather than revolutionary and very influenced by her moralistic outlook. Incidentally, a similar vision is reflected in one of Hove's poems titled "A Masquerade" where the guerrilla fighters are seen as agents bent to "cure" the ills of settler societies and to bring about a morally superior social order. In this respect Hove, like Chipamaunga in A Fighter for Freedom and Mutasa in Contact, seems more keen to underline the humanity of the subjugated African than to project a more viable social vision.

Without wishing to take away any credit to which Marita is entitled as the long-suffering mother Africa, it is only fair to point out that her role in Bones does not do full justice to the Zimbabwean peasants and workers who, as is well-documented in Mothers of the Revolution, Peasant Consciousness and Cuerrilla War in Zimbabwe and The Women of Zimbabwe, played a decisive role which ensured the success of the guerrilla war in Zimbabwe. Peasants constituted the backbone of the revolutionary war and did not have the luxury to equivocate at critical moments as Marita does in this novel. And their participation was not a once-off affair forced upon them by the more radical generation. Rather, they are the ones who kept the issues burning and memories about the past alive. We are told:

It was the rural women, the ordinary uneducated women who took the lead in the 1960s . . . The women were talking about land, about the fact that their children had no schools to go to . . . Educated women felt threatened. They had been brainwashed. 13 In a crucial sense what is implicitly at stake in Bones is the way the role of the peasant is likely to be partially vindicated and at the same ~;me distorted to a considerable degree. Ultimately the issue boils down to how one understands history and the manner in which it is created, especially in societies such as ours.

One can actually argue that it is because Marita's role is so narrowly conceived that when she tries to hug the contours of the larger history of the land, especially on her journey to the city, she sounds unconvincing. In other words her politicization comes too late to sound credible and substantial enough to command the admiration and loyalty of the unknown woman. It is precisely because of her limitations that a more advanced historical consciousness has been conscripted, deus ex machina-like into the story, with all the oppressive arbitrariness which such an ad hoc measure entails. This is what is meant to establish a link, fragile though it remains, between Marita's defiance and Mbuya Nehanda's historic significance.

Also related to Marita's historical role in the novel is the sub-text centred on the status and function of women in African society. Marita's barrenness and subsequent isolation and suffering raise critical issues in regard to how social attitudes can inflict havoc on the unfortunate women. These are some of the issues which have been vigorously pursued in such founding texts on African feminist discourse such as Fiora Nwapa's Efum and Buchi Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood. Indeed the role of women has also come to the fore in the work of male writers involving no less than Sembene Ousmane in God's Bits of Wood, Chinua Achebe in Anthills of the Savannah, Ngugi wa Thiongo in Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross. Regrettably Marita's preoccupation with her thwarted motherhood unnecessarily precludes her from questioning in a refreshingly fundamental way the nature of her marital relationship with Murume as well as her relationship with the larger society. Even when she seems conscious of the importance of her body as a woman and advises Janifa accordingly, such consciousness remains rudimentary.

Furthermore, Marita's dreams about marriage remain conventional, particularly when she cannot perceive how the war can alter her status. Those issues pertaining to women's rights covering the social, legal and economic spheres, issues which commanded the attention of legislators immediately after the war of liberation, remain far above Marita's head.

Thus when Marita sets out for the city to look for her son immediately after the attainment of Independence, she is severely handicapped in understanding the forces pitted against her. She dies at the hands of an impassive and menacingly blind bureaucracy which has recently succeeded the colonial one. The implications are clear: the new neo-colonial era is part of a cyclical pattern of history in which the majority of Africans, especially women, are doomed to live out the miseries and injustices of the past. The narrative would have us believe, however, that Marita's martyrdom will inspire other women such as the unknown woman and Janifa to hold on to their principles and ideas, and, if necessary, die for them.

It can also be argued that the significance of Marita's death is never fully underlined in the narrative: notwithstanding the fact that Marita's martyrdom inspires her disciples, these do not constitute a movement dedicated to the realization of her ideals. Her returned son is maimed by the struggle and rejected as a marriage partner by Janifa. The latter has also been mentally crippled by her suffering at the hands of Manyepo and Chisaga and is determined to remain single. The unknown woman dies anyway trying to retrieve Marita's body for a proper burial. In any case all of them remain individuals, with no suggestion at all that they could constitute the nucleus of an alternative society. Thus when Janifa, as Marita's disciple, says,

But I will take the broken chains with my own hands and say . . . Do not worry yourselves, I have already removed them myself. I have been removing them from my heart for many years, now my legs and hands are free . . . 14

we are left with the impression that Janifa is referring to her spiritual condition rather than to the socio-economic conditions which have ferociously impinged upon her life. Put another way, her situation is such that she withdraws from the more demanding external world into an inner world where her soul seems to be at home with itself. As readers we cannot help feeling that the author is simply removing the discourse about women from the concrete and therefore changeable world and placing it into the realm of the abstract.

What we have, therefore, is a novel in which Hove raises fundamental issues pertaining to the role of men and women in a colonial context which is about to change to a neo-colonial one. The role of African males in such a society is far from flattering, especially when men are depicted as historical sell-outs. Their perception of themselves as oppressed is, according to Paul Freire, "impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression". But of course this is not to suggest that they betray the interests of their society because of their gender. Indeed the role of the more radical generation represented by Marita's son belies such an interpretation. It is a pity that Hove does not bother to dramatize how that generation becomes radical and different from the older and more timid one. More important, perhaps, is that Hove creates an assembly of male characters who come across as memorable caricatures who are meant to be a severe antidote to male chauvinism. His artistic strategy is to deflate in a brutal way the self-importance which males have always rushed to appropriate for themselves at the expense of women. When we take into account that Hove himself is a male, there is also something of a ruthless process of self-criticism implicit in the many levels of collaboration with l~anyepo noticeable in the role of the male characters In Bones. Related to the stock-taking exercise which the novel demands from maies is, of course, the desire to create more space for the femaie character whose actuai historical significance has been either neglected or distorted. In creating a phalanx of female figures through Nehanda, Marita, the unknown woman and Janifa, Hove is attempting, in his own ambiguous way, to state the centrality of the woman character in the Zimbabwean experience. This is an aspect we see in Marechera's Black Sunlight (1980) and Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988).

In the light of the above, it is logical to argue that the roles assigned to women characters hardly break new ground in the context of Zimbabwean and, indeed, African literary discourse. What Bones successfully depicts is the frighteningly awesome extent to which the African woman has suffered at the hands of colonialists as well as at those of the men-folk. At its best the text captures the prodigious energy of Marita, her passion for life, her love for her fellow sufferers and her deep yearning for justice and a fulfilling existence. It seems that deprivation and denial are the hallmarks characteristic of the life of women caught up in a coloniai and neo-colonial context. As such the text appeals to our conscience but it does not go on to suggest that women can indeed determine history and improve their lot in life as we see in Sembene Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood and Ngugi wa Thiongo's Devil on the Cross. The spiritual freedom which Janifa seems to realize at the end of Bones is significant but the question is: Can it be sustained in a context in which the socio-economic conditions are prejudicial to the interests of women?

Lite~y wo~ refcned to 1~1 the text

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