Despite her heroic attributes, Marita's role remains fundamentally 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?
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