Race and land ownership in Rhodesia: trajectories of conflicting nationalisms in Shimmer Chinodya's Dew in the morning (2001)

Abstract

This paper analyses Shimmer Chinodya's novel Dew in the morning in order to demonstrate that fiction has the capacity to reveal patterns of meaning that comment on race relations and to show how these are related to the issue of land ownership in Rhodesia. The novel questions the assumption that bitterness and anger over economic dispossession necessarily leads to rebellion. Dew in the morning recounts different kinds of resistances that emphasise the ‘peasant option’ (Ranger, 1985) in which Africans developed groups to stave off the possibility of being absorbed as full-time wage earners. The novel adds complexity to the notions of the armed political struggle and the peasant option by showing that these routes produced differentiated African subjectivities based on race, class and gender nationalisms. The movements or trajectories of these forms of peasant consciousnesses produced conflict-ridden nationalisms characterised by moments of resistance, incorporation and obeisance to colonial rule.

1. Introduction: Race and Land Ownership in Zimbabwe's Nationalist Historiography

In Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) the idea of ‘race’ as an identity construction based on differences of skin colour between blacks and whites was a direct result of the attempt by forces of colonial capital to control blacks and render them cheap sources of labour. Access to land was based on the colour of one's skin (Palmer, 1977). The economic prosperity of Africans who owned land and cattle was resented by European farmers, who consequently petitioned their government to impose economic controls on black farmers. It was at this point that armed resistance was conceived of as the most visible and direct challenge to segregatory land policies.

However, the tendency to conceptualise African resistance to land alienation only in military terms has continued to obscure and even suppress other modes of thinking about African agency which was employed to resist land alienation. Gunner (1991: 77), for example, argues that ‘the Zimbabwean Chimurenga was a guerrilla war and it was in important ways a people's war, with land and a sense of dispossession at its centre’. Dandy (2002: 95) considers Rhodesian Africans with a history of land ownership, military violence and who fought as armed ‘guerrillas’ as central to his analysis of Chinodya's Harvest of thorns (1989) and Nyamfukudza's The non-believer's journey (1980). Robert Muponde (2004: 87) similarly misses the point of Dew in the morning when he argues that the novel ‘contradicts the ways in which Zimbabwean nationalism has sought to construct the concepts of place and belonging’. Muponde's difficulty is that his analysis of Dew in the morning imagines a single or particularised ‘Zimbabwean nationalism’ that the novel must therefore reject.

Frederick Cooper (2003: 32) warns that when analysing novels and historical phenomena, we need to be open-minded because

much of the resistance literature is written as if the ‘R’ were capitalized. What is being resisted is not necessarily clear, and ‘colonialism’ sometimes appears as a force whose nature and implications do not have to be unpacked. The concept of resistance can be expanded so broadly that it denies any other kind of life to the people doing the resisting. Significant as resistance might be, Resistance is a concept that may narrow our understanding of African history rather than expand it.

Cooper's insights force us to acknowledge Zimbabwean nationalisms and recognise their complexity. Dew in the morning asserts the presence of ‘conflicting nationalisms’, which implies that Africans developed ‘complex strategies of coping, of seizing niches within changing economies, of multi-sided engagement with forces inside and outside community’ (Cooper, 2003: 33). This is a process that destabilises the category of race that accords Africans a static identity as the oppressed. Stuart Hall (1999) in fact suggests that the monomyth of the ‘black experiences’ as a singular and unifying framework was already under strain in black communities living under colonialism and after independence. For him, the challenge for critics lies in how to shift from the notion of ‘black’ as a signifier of common aspirations to ‘blackness’ as a symbolic notation of varied perceptions within African communities. It means uncoupling from Africans the notion of ‘collective’ racial identities, a phenomenon that Hall (1999: 705) likens to ‘the end of innocence, or the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’. This ‘end of black politics’ (Hall, 1999: 705) introduces different shapes and dimensions and is underpinned by intersecting conflictual notions of African nationalisms in rural Rhodesia. For example, when African men went to work in urban areas, women assumed the roles of bringing up the family and increasing agricultural production on the land, although their unremunerated agricultural production enabled European employers to keep male wages extremely low (Schmidt, 1992: 82). This gendered relation of women to land means that it is no longer possible simply to limit a discussion of Africans and their relationship to the politics of land ownership, control and productivity to the politics of race only. Furthermore, the ‘peasant option’ was modified by the fact that some peasants prospered while others in the same community did not, irrespective of whether the peasants in question were all black, male or female. In short, in Dew in the morning the convergence of economic nationalism with militant African nationalism helps the critic produce multiple readings of the novel.

2. The Moral Economy of Peasants in Dew in the Morning

Dew in the morning fictionalises the African peasants' struggle to survive in a colonial context. The novel's sense of different kinds of African nationalisms derives from the ways it foregrounds the African people's ‘small acts of courage, moments of defeat and fear’ (Kahari, 1997: 55) in competing with Europeans in the produce and labour markets. The narrative is set somewhere in the Midlands during the mid-1950s when land alienation had intensified and Africans were being forced into areas infested by tsetse flies. In Dew in the morning, the rural landscape in the south of the country is no longer able to sustain the ever-increasing numbers of small rural black farmers. In the Chivi district, from which some of the people are being removed, ‘the pressure on land there is three times what it is here. No one owns more than six acres’ (p.148).1 This ecological disaster is the product of Rhodesian land policies, based on racial segregation, although it is blamed on what are perceived as the Africans' poor farming methods. Some of the Africans removed from crowded lands are dumped into areas in Gokwe and Sanyati where rainfall is erratic.

In this novel it is easy to identify which racial group commands the power to distribute land. Godi, or Godfrey, the young narrator, observes that it is the white government that wields the power to remove African people from their ancestral lands in droves: ‘families came in convoys of closely packed government lorries, taking two or three days to complete the journey, so the passengers frequently camped out for the night’ (p.30). The sheer brutality that is exercised in forcibly removing the black people is captured by Godi, who observes that people were ‘rumbled [and shunted] into the remote forests’ (p.30). He further observes that coercion was used by the colonial government to remove them:

For seven successive years the weather had been harsh in the region. The government had observed the area with a wary eye, resenting the erosion, land wastage and the diminished contribution to the economy. At last it was decided to move people into the remote virgin land in the north to give the denuded region a chance to become green again. At first there was opposition to this plan by the villagers but eventually, after much persuasion, they agreed to destroy their homes, leave their deceased kin's graves and their fatherland and move into the new land. (p.29)

In a colonial context such as the Rhodesian one that Dew in the morning imaginatively captures, the power to decide which group will move in order to give way to government projects resides in the colonial authority. In 1948, the director of native agriculture, Mr Alvord, remarked that it was ‘unwise’ to give land to Africans although there was a ‘cry for more land’ from them (Bantu Mirror, July 1948: 5). In such a context, argues Anthony Chennells (2001: viii), ‘persuasion and agreement are mere euphemisms for coercion’. Chennells further argues that ‘colonialism is always a system of unequal power relations and power resides with the wary, alert government’ (Chennells, 2001: viii). The power that the colonial authorities possess should not be underestimated. In the novel, force is consciously used to reorder and rearrange the black people's sense of place and identity. Such a reading of Dew in the morning defines all the black people as a group who suffered the colonial onslaught in similar ways. Such a narrative of collective racial suffering cannot be wished away; it has ‘value in providing the myth of unity without which the nation can never discover its larger self’ (Chennells, 2001: vi).

When Africans were forcibly removed by the colonial government of Southern Rhodesia, it was not only their sense of physical identity that was being reconfigured, they were also obliged to adjust to new environments (p.10). In Dew in the morning a culture shock also occurs when the newcomers or derukas come into contact with the local people, whose culture is different from theirs. In the novel this close contact is depicted as having both negative and positive value for the new communities, to the point that it redefines, in various ways, the category of ‘race’ as a marker of ‘blackness’ among African people.

3. Emergent African Rurally Based Class Nationalisms In Dew in the Morning

Dew in the morning, however, refuses to tell a simplistic story in which Africans are mere victims of colonialism and beer (Muponde, 2004). Nor does the novel only relate the darker side of country living, with its menacing superstitions, jealousies and occasional violence (Zhuwarara, 1987: 135). Rather, it is possible to recover an alternative narrative that emphasises African agency in domesticating the new environment into which blacks have been driven. Shimmer Chinodya is more concerned with depicting and celebrating the spiritual resilience and sheer vigour with which the newcomers embrace the forced peasant option, by taming nature and growing produce both for their families and for European markets. In this alternative narrative space, not all Africans have experienced the harsh colonial policies in the same way. For instance, Godi registers the enthusiasm of his family, and that of the other derukas who are the new farmers, at being given as much as 30 acres each. One of the consequences of colonial policies was to produce a stratum of successful peasants. It is the vitality and rhythm of turning over rich soil, dropping seed that sprouts into green tendrils, which Chinodya evokes with relish. In one of the most celebrated passages in the novel, elements of the pastoral are simultaneously counterpoised and sublated to capitalistic logic in a memorable manner, unsurpassed in revealing the spirit of African rural entrepreneurship:

As soon as Jairos found us a small plot of land we started planting our crops. Matudu, the man who built our huts, came to plough our fields with his fine pair of oxen. We followed behind the plough, dropping seeds into neat brown furrows and savouring the smell of oxen and newly turned earth. The seedlings soon germinated, small and tender in the dew. We rose early in the blue-grey dawn to the shouts of the ploughboys and the bustle of yoking up the oxen. We walked across the glistening green, dew-laden grass to the fields. While the sun ascended in the sky, we sweated in the fields. Our backs ached, hot sand burnt our feet, and the hoe-handles drew blisters. We drank maheu, worked again, then went home for a late breakfast at noon, when we usually met the herd boys bringing the cows home to be milked. Usually we returned to the fields late in the afternoon, when it was cool, to put in a few more hours of work. Then after supper we read for an hour or two in the lamplight before going to bed. The nights were short it seemed. Dawn came soon with mother, hoe in hand, rapping on our door. (pp.6–7)

In this passage the past memories of a generation of Africans, of being forced to destroy their homes and abandon their ancestral graves in the South, are supplanted by new memories and narratives of beginning anew. The Wamambos own more than 30 acres, which is a feat in a colonial context where discriminatory policies worked to undermine African entrepreneurs. Chinodya uses this passage to celebrate the value of labour as a purposive activity for the satisfaction of human wants. Furthermore, by describing the joys of the Wamambos, the author is able to distinguish labour whose goal is directed towards self-enhancement from labour associated with exploitation through the chibharo system.

Leroy Vail and Landeg White (1986) urge us to go beyond the kinds of organised resistance that are politically or militarily visible in order to try to understand human motivations, attitudes, perceptions and cultural values. They pose a question:

A frustrated farm labourer in colonial Zimbabwe who misses work because of drunkenness may be viewed as undermining settler capitalism and hence as ‘resisting’; a man who works hard, saves his money to educate his children, and finds his satisfaction in ferocious church-going may well be seen as selling out to the system and, hence, as ‘collaborating.’ But with reference to which theories of the human mind do these labels become the ‘right things to be said about such behaviour? (Vail & White, 1986: 195)

Vail and White might almost be speaking for Godi's father who in the novel is ‘too busy working for our education to participate in its pleasures or its fruition’ (p.140) and a mother who ‘spent the day weeding, and pacing the fields in her tattered gumboots, defending her precious crops from cattle and goats’ (p.141). But the real import of the message is to enable the reader of such a novel to expand the meaning of resistance, and appreciate that the changes introduced by colonialism brought with them new commercial ethics dictated by the profit motive. In Dew in the morning rural people perceived their circumstances, made their choices in a hostile environment, and constructed new identities that were not uniform within the black community.

One of the consequences of those transformations for the racial identities of black people in Dew in the morning is the emergence of a new class of rurally landed African peasants. Some derukas such as Mugova are so consumed by the desire to become rich quickly that they will do anything to make this happen. This man owns cattle with which he ploughs people's fields for a fee. ‘He was a very wealthy man. He owned two ploughs, two barrows and a tractor. He grew groundnuts, cotton and sunflowers in two huge fields’ (p.101). Mugova has successfully appropriated for himself the discourse of commercial farming that is a consequence of colonial modernity. He uses ploughs, barrows and a tractor: all of which are the technical machinery that colonialism has made available to African communities. With these instruments Africans can now produce adequately for domestic consumption and also for the colonial produce market. As a sign of status and social upward mobility within the colonial and the African community, ‘Mugova was one of the illustrious agricultural demonstrators. He had built himself a fine white brick and zinc house and had fenced off his huge fields in the fertile land near the vlei’ (p.101). In fact, in Dew in the morning the new rising racial class of successful African peasants also identifies with other aspects of colonial culture such as ‘tea and sugar, bread and margarine’ (p.4). Mugova, the successful peasant farmer, is set apart from the locals by his house, fields and fence. These metonyms of colonial modernity that have entered African communities and been appropriated by some, becoming a way of life for newly rich peasants, provide the energy for peasant economic nationalism in the novel.

We also read that Mugova is not the only successful deruka who has appropriated the colonial discourse of modernity based on the profit motive. The derukas ‘brought with them a distinct deruka lifestyle based on shrewd hard work’ (p.31). These newcomers are the new economic force marking the emergence of an African middle class. As generally successful farmers, they clear huge fields and grow maize and groundnuts. Their commercially enterprising spirit means that some start to grow ‘sunflower and cotton to sell to the Grain Marketing Board’. They also ‘kept many cattle, grew vegetables, dug fish ponds by the river and raised chickens. Some of them sold vegetables, milk and eggs’ (p.31). Dew in the morning is also sensitive to the budding elitism and exploitative tendencies developing along class lines in African communities. For example, Mugova is adaptable and therefore bound to survive in the new dispensation, but he too has begun to acquire the negative aspects of colonial modernity. His success is largely based on exploiting other less fortunate Africans. These contradictions emerging within African ‘class nationalism’ are captured in Mugova's relationship to land and to other Africans:

He kept his soil drugged with manure and fertilizers, so that even in bad years his mealies grew tall, and his acres went white with cotton balls. He was one of those derukas who enslaved the soil, overworked and underpaid their servants and sent out huge herds of cattle to tax the humble meadows. In such homesteads milk, eggs, meat, vegetables, rice and green mealies were available at most times of the year but human sweat oozed all year round. (pp.101–2)

The language of economic self-sufficiency is sublated to the overriding vocabulary of' ‘drugged’, ‘enslaved’, ‘overworked’ and ‘underpaid’ that belongs to the political economy of the development of a ‘staggered’ but also crude capitalist modernity in Rhodesia. This vocabulary that has infiltrated the daily modes of organising the popular imagination among the deruka communities complicates the notion of ‘blackness’ and racial identities. It demystifies the sign of ‘blackness’ as a putative signifier of who is oppressed and who is not, especially in a colonial context where African lives are undergoing rapid change from the exterior. The unsavoury aspects of the rugged capitalist sensibility are manifest among the derukas who employ locals to whom they pay meagre wages.

In other words, economic nationalism implies that rich African peasants can compete with and challenge colonial agriculture by the ironical act of producing for the market in order to ward off the possibility of themselves being absorbed into the unequal matrices as providers of cheap labour. The colonial authorities were perturbed by the gestures of asserting economic independence among some Africans. The Zimbabwean economic historian Nyambara (2000: 106) writes that in 1952

peasant cotton production averaged 3 three million pounds with an output of 1.1 million lbs. Native Commissioners, Land Development Officers and Agricultural Instructors complained about the large number of peasants who wanted to grow cotton but were not registered cotton growers … [Elsewhere in colonial Rhodesia,] in 1948, the growers of Mhondoro reserve and Msengezi Purchase Area both in the Hartley District were paid a total of 5200 pounds, and an average of 7.10s per household.

These figures reveal a strong sense of economic nationalism that is nevertheless unevenly distributed within the African communities. This economic self-awareness of the peasantry as a class in itself interrogates any facile notion of a single ‘Zimbabwean nationalism’ (Muponde, 2004: 87) against which all other manifestations of African peasant agency can be described as aberrations. Peasant economic nationalism in Dew in the morning is paradoxical in that it exists both inside and outside the parameters of the initial intentions of the colonial agenda. In this regard, the peasant class identities given formal expression in the novel are unique, because their modernness is defined by the extent to which the peasants' entrepreneurship challenged as well as subsidised the colonial agricultural project in Rhodesia.

In contrast to the enterprising commercial spirit of the derukas, the local people seem ‘to live from one day to the next, eating sadza, drinking beer and raising children. They built their huts with grass and poles, seldom bothering to plaster the walls with mud … firelight peeped through the gaps between the poles’ (p.31). Less successful peasants, like Jairos the headman, are still associated with the ways in which traditional roles and practices can hold back the pace of change; Jairos is associated with dew that ‘soaked his trousers to the knees and washed his cracked feet’ (p.133). He is mocked by the children who ‘spat their insolence at him’. He ‘mauled his food like a hungry dog, hissing as if it burnt his mouth. He was as hungry as a tiger and as harmless as a puppy’ (p.133). The ‘dew’ in Dew in the morning is a metaphor underlining the vulnerability of the likes of Jairos in the new colonial dispensation. Jairos is compared to both domesticated and wild animals: ‘puppy’, ‘dog’, ‘tiger’. This suggests that his power as a symbol of traditional authority has been undercut and overshadowed by the new rising class of the derukas to whom he has given land but now depends on for food.

Dew in the morning paints an unflattering image of Africans in a colonial context. The rural population can no longer find safety and comfort in the assurance of a brittle identity based on racial allegiance. The differentiated African peasants have also adopted different cultural beliefs. For most of the derukas, including Godi's family, Christmas holds spiritual values associated with the new missionary gospel of salvation from the biblical original sin. But for the local people the ‘Bible account of the birth of Jesus was a superb folk-story’ (p.23). They still believe in the power of spirit possession as an alternative way of understanding the reality around them. It is to the credit of Chinodya that in Dew in the morning neither of the religions is given precedence or privileged over the other. The syncretic nature of the different forms of African nationalism in the novel is captured in the figure of Masiziva who confirms that both the ancestors and God exist (pp.54–5). African political nationalisms were themselves eclectic because they borrowed cultural resources from European and African sources.

The ‘infantilisation’ or ‘savagisation’ of the local people is intimated in the novel by the description of the local people who still ‘wore pieces of cloth between their legs’ and the girls who ‘went around bare-breasted’ (p.30). This portrayal of the local people as noble savages is confirmed by Jairos. He is prepared to allow all the forest to be destroyed as long as a deruka promises beer, and expresses his scandalous appetite for beer in a bizarre fashion: ‘I want beer parties every night in this village. I want all these thick forests to be chopped down to provide fields. I want my people to be happy and prosperous’ (p.33). Jairos also demands that Masiziva (Godi's mother) should brew beer to satisfy a self-invented custom to appease the earth and ancestors:

‘Masiziva, here we have a simple custom that l haven't explained to you yet, which is that every deruka family should brew beer for the village on at least one Christmas. We call it thanksgiving beer just to show the elders you are thankful that they accepted you into the community.’ (p.58)

The vision of continual merriment might appear self-serving but it underscores Jairos's unconscious desire to assert a pristine identity for his people, a longing for pastoral bliss that can, however, no longer be found where there is a disrupting colonial presence.

Jairos embodies a feeling of ‘romantic anti-capitalism’, a feeling that looks back to the old authentic days of a ‘hierarchical world before the “fall” into modern commercial civilization’ (Kaarsholm, 1991: 36). But the material basis of such a communitarian feeling, which defines Jairos, has been ruthlessly undermined by the workings of colonial capitalism. The narrative of class differentiation among blacks is placed as a counterpoint to the racial one. Wealth and powerful leaders will emerge from those who have appropriated colonialism's tools, such as formal education or the necessary farming skills, so that Africans can challenge colonialism using its own instruments. Godi's father juxtaposes rural nationalism, based on land, to urban African nationalism, based on educational entitlements, when he reminds his children that

it doesn't matter if you are all going to be graduates and live in the nice big houses. Then you can buy a tractor and have someone plough your fields for you. You will be able to use fertilizers and manure and plough five acres. You will grow hundreds of bags this way. You can never make a final break from the country. (p.144)

For Godi's father, land is not an issue of a sentimental gift. The towns depend on what originates from the rural areas in the form of mineral and agricultural produce. The rural areas also benefit from what comes out of the towns, in the form of the ‘village pump’ (p.1), ‘zinc tiles’ (p.15), and fertiliser. Godi's father insists that the soul of African nationalism resides in the rural areas. He is aware of the intensifying struggle between blacks and whites, and ultimately among blacks, to control land. He knows that land is a critical productive force. But he is even wiser in that he educates his children. The pragmatism of African nationalisms manifests itself here, in that colonial education is acquired so that with its enabling powers Africans can confront the system. Finally, Godi's emerging consciousness of himself as a black boy belonging to the rising petty bourgeoisie, possessing both rural and urban sensibilities, underlines the fact that race alone will in future not be adequate for understanding the dynamics of African identities. Of his father's love for education as a tool for social climbing, Godi says:

I knew him as my mother's devoted husband and my determined father who had worked for two decades without a holiday in order to give us an education. He had been born and raised in the country, among smoky huts, cattle and millet. Later, his rural memories had pulled him back and he had built his own rural home, but he had been too busy working for our education to participate in its pleasures or its fruition. (p.140)

In Dew in the morning access to land, and to colonial education, complicates the notion of African identity based on race. The narrative of racial identity that was meant to generate an African nationalism based on racial consideration with which the novel began has been modified by the economic nationalism of the derukas in the African community. This narrative of economic nationalism is not allowed to stabilise within the novel itself. An aspect of African nationalisms that critics of Dew in the morning have tended to ignore but which the novel confronts, and advances, is that the very basis of production amongst rural African peasants was largely dependent on female labour. This gendered narrative in Dew in the morning further modifies the claims of the conventional Zimbabwean nationalism whose symbol is a freedom fighter imaged as a man.

4. Gendering African Nationalisms in Dew in the Morning

Anthony Chennells (2005: 135) notes, with reference to the construction of African racial identities under colonialism, that ‘the primary signifier of a colonial identity was race, although what race signified differed between colonial systems and sometimes carried different significations within the same system’. The recognition that the category ‘race’ ‘carried different significations within the same system’ is dramatised in Dew in the morning at the gender level, as women struggle to acquire land and work on it to produce food for their family and for sale. The ‘dew’ is an unstable signifier of what blacks can be in a colonial context. The metaphor rejects the notion of an African identity that can lay claim to common racial and even uniform African class subjectivities at all times. Initially, in the novel, the ‘dew’ sits heavy on the grass in the morning (p.85), symbolising innocence and the quest for the stabilised rural rhythms of life. As the sun rises the dew evaporates and the rural landscape is transformed into the mass of earth ‘waiting for the rain’ (p.17). The dew is at once a symbol of rural purity and of the transience of life as perceptions of stable identities are also undercut by rapid changes in people's lives. As the authorial voice suggests, ‘no one, nothing, came and stayed. Each had promised a fresh start but the many callings of life had to rule them away. All that remained were memories and now anxiety and fear’ (p.215). The ‘dew’, with its appearance in the morning and disappearance during the daytime, suggests that African identities embedded in racial nationalism are in fact underpinned by multiple versions of blackness.

This image of the changing meanings attachable to ‘blackness’ is dramatised in the way Chinodya depicts the changing roles of African women in Dew in the morning. The author has accorded considerable space to depicting the unravelling of female or gendered identities in ways that most critics who have analysed the novel have either ignored or failed to notice (Zhuwarara, 1987). Dew in the morning is closely associated with rural women, their labour, and their courage in maintaining rural homes while producing for the urban markets within the framework of the peasant option. Masiziva, Godi's mother, for example, is a deruka who stems from a family that had unequivocally embraced those narrow opportunities that colonialism had opened for her father. Early in her girlhood, Masiziva was distinguished for her work in the family plots and fields:

A photograph of my mother at thirteen revealed a girl in a simple brown dress and a scout belt. She was already a young woman with a budding chest and legs that a man would turn to look at. She had been born on a farm and her father was a farm foreman: a farmer, who grew potatoes and kept cows. Traders came from far to buy his potatoes and his rich milk. He was a young man, smart, with trim hair and dark moustache. His wife was also a farmer – growing peanuts and raising chickens. She was a smart woman who could not bear a black speck in the milk or a crack in the walls of her huts. (p.80)

When Masiziva becomes a mother herself she also becomes the family pillar, because she produces food for her family and to sell to raise school fees for her children who are attending school in town. In Dew in the morning black women perform most of this work, which exposes the conception of the peasant option as a male preserve as an inadequate characterisation of rural African politics in Rhodesia. Godi's mother controls the space of the fields (pp.140–41). Early morning dew is linked to rural women's sexuality and manual labour. The dew underscores the metaphorical narrative of African female nationalism in which women take over the control of rural space ands its rhythms of production. In the novel, ‘Mother spends the day weeding, and pacing the field in her tattered gumboots, defending her precious crops from cattle and goats. In the blazing sunshine or drenching rain she was the human fence to our fields’ (p.141).

Black women doubled up their functions as bringers-up of children and producers of food for domestic consumption while subsidising European markets. For Schmidt (1992: 43), African women's labour is drudgery but is also rewarding in a colonial context:

The opening of new markets and the imposition of taxes following European occupation served as an impetus to increased peasantization and the burden of augmented agricultural labour fell heavily on women's shoulders … Resisting state attempts to enforce male proletarianization, peasant households, with female producers at the fore, devised new strategies for meeting urgent cash needs.

In Dew in the morning, intensified female labour is manifest in women's taking the initiative in the sale of beer, grain, and vegetables. Masiziva grows groundnuts, sells home-made clothes and even buys cattle (p.141). Both Godi and his father secretly admire her courage and hard work and the way she has taken over the running of the rural home. Godi confesses that the family is proud of the mother's industry: ‘We were proud of her; l knew that secretly father also applauded her imaginative industry, but he was too consumed by his own principles to display his admiration. I dreaded what would happen if the war went on’ (p.141). In Dew in the morning, this occasion is the only one when the ‘war’ or armed struggle as one among several historical dimensions of African nationalism is openly mentioned by name. The irony is that the female-driven rural nationalism that Masiziva represents in this novel does not always sit comfortably with male perceptions of resistance cast in military terms with men playing the hero. There is even dread of the actual liberation war being fought on some battleground. Godi considers it disruptive or rather as having the potential to suppress the full authorisation of other forms of African agency. The ‘dread’ associated with armed resistance is evident because this resistance is easily appropriated by African males and was used in colonial Rhodesia as a master narrative that would silence other forms of African nationalism that the novel is promoting. As Godi observes, the simmering conflict between his father and mother

was by no means a question of my father's obsession with education versus my mother's farming instincts. Mother was equally concerned about our education but she thought our country home might reduce our expenses and help father to save money for our school fees. Later father disagreed, saying that it cost more to run two homes. They never quarrelled openly but l knew the issue was a slow-burning fuse between them that must be put out. I knew from the moment mother received his letter saying that he would not be home for Christmas that a silent battle of principles had begun. (p.141)

Godi testifies to the fact that receiving a colonial education could produce another form of African nationalism, to which the father is linked. Working on the virgin land as the mother does also generates nationalism driven by women. In Dew in the morning none of these competing nationalisms is allowed to totally dominate the other. While Godi's mother knows that her children need to acquire an education, the father ‘secretly … applauded [the mother's] imaginative industry’ (p.141). The novel displays this syncretic nature of African nationalisms as the most distinct aspect of African agency in a colonial context. It refuses to allow Zimbabwe's past, present or future to resolve its multiple meanings (Chennells, 2001: xiv). Hence, what in Dew in the morning initially begins as a ‘racial nationalism’ based on identifying all blacks as the oppressed is altered and challenged by an emergent ‘class-based nationalism’, which in turn is also unsettled by gender or forms of African agency authorised by women. These processes never stabilise but instead help to generate a conflict-ridden discourse on African witchcraft within a colonial modernity that emphasises accumulation of wealth by the individual at the expense of the collective.

5. Witchcraft, Modernity and the Discourse of Wealth Accumulation in Dew in the Morning

Within the narrative space of rural Rhodesia that blacks inhabit in Dew in the Morning, claims to notions of stable racial, class and gender identities are denied resolutions that imply harmonious closure. In fact, the material fortunes of some rich peasants and the misfortunes of other Africans produce a discourse that is linked in conflictual and troubled ways to the questions of witchcraft and accumulation of wealth which are played out in a rugged and uneven colonial modernity. For example, as a result of their different levels of adaptation to the colonial narrative of disruption, African peasants trade invectives, insults and accusations of witchcraft. In the narrative, Mai Mapanga is accused of having killed Jeni because she worked hard, ‘Her little man (tokoloshi) tortured her for many nights’ (p.165). The poor women and young men who use witchcraft are depicted as attempting to use traditional modes of accessing power in a changed colonial context that demands a different set of skills and rules for political and economic conduct. These young men and women are described as first-rate witches by the community.

It is probably easy, but simplistic, to dismiss the discourse of witchcraft in Dew in the morning as an instance of outmoded behaviours that have been left stranded by the hegemonic forces of colonialism. But Makepesi, one of the young men accused of practising witchcraft, confesses that he had used muti or magic to paralyse Jairos because Jairos had given away Makepesi's field to a newcomer (p.210). The struggle for the control of land invokes the use of occult powers in rural Rhodesia and occasions the ideological uncoupling of the view that identifies the black race with a unitary black subjectivity. The occurrence of witchcraft in the novel is accorded a materialistic explanation. Fisiy and Geschiere (1996) argue that in a colonial context characterised by inequalities among people, the poor can make use of witchcraft to intimidate those who are perceived to be doing well. The modernity of the discourse of witchcraft consists in its being both a literal and a metaphorical expression of the community's desire to control gratuitous accumulation of wealth in ways that the society deems inappropriate. The irony is that occult forces can be used by the

rich and the powerful themselves in order to further their ambitions and enhance their accumulation of wealth and power … The new inequalities often take on new dimensions and therefore increase the fear of the jealous and the occult powers are thought to be the secret cause of the success of the new rich and even place them outside the reach of their fellowman. (Fisiy & Geschiere, 1996: 196)

In Dew in the morning young and old, men and women use witchcraft to acquire wealth and exert authority over other Africans. This is the case with the woman from Goto village in the novel. Chikanga accuses the woman of possessing dangerous charms with which she takes crops and produce from other people's fields. The woman appears in Chikanga's mirror as a treacherous one: ‘My mirror tells me you steal other people's crops by magic. You are young, yet you are lazy. You never make use of the first rains. You prefer to transfer the greenness of other people's crops to your own poor ones’ (p.206).

Such a diagnosis by Chikanga undermines the perception that Africans can make an unquestioned claim to collective identities. In Dew in the morning, the woman from Goto village renders brittle and even untenable any suggestion of a coherent ‘Zimbabwean nationalism’ (Muponde, 2004) based on collective interests at all times. In his witch-hunting, Chikanga authorises a narrative discourse based on traditional modes of authority. This authority may have worked effectively in the pre-colonial period, but with the coming of colonialism such forms of power have seen their material base undercut by capitalist modernity. Consequently, individuals like Mai Mapanga can defy Chikanga, refusing to touch his bottle of medicine to prove that she is innocent of the charges of witchcraft levelled against her.

If Chikanga's traditionalism is meant to be read as a form of residual nationalism based on communal sanctions, the sense of communal solidarity in it is rudely undermined, thereby showing how the novel is implying that the traditional communalism and collective identities (whether racial or biological) can no longer be taken for granted. In fact, ‘traditional nationalism’ as manifested by the figure of Chikanga is further undercut by the fact that the community cannot agree as to how a witchdoctor who claims to work for the people should present himself. In the novel, it is said that Chikanga is not an ordinary witch-hunter. He has climbed on the bandwagon of the emerging black capitalist class. Godi's mother is convinced that Chikanga could be a quack:

I saw him once … but it was only for a short time. You would never believe that he is a witch finder. He is a very affluent man. He wears expensive suits, drives his own Combi and employs several girls to help him. People say he lived with the mermaids under the great river. They taught him everything from rain making to witch finding. (p.202)

Insinuations from the community suggest that Chikanga is affluent because he also exploits people, playing on their fears of succeeding or failing in a colonial context. The community in which Chikanga is supposed to exercise his spiritual authority holds diverse perceptions of him and people openly declare that he is exploitable and can be bribed. When Simon, one of the villagers, calls for contributions to pay Chikanga the people are thrown into turmoil. It is Godi who observes: ‘There was a varied response to Simon's call for contributions. “Chikanga is charging too much”. “Chikanga could be bribed”. “Chikanga will create hatred between families”’(p.203).

These accusations suggest an uneasy relationship between the people and those who are viewed as ‘natural’ community leaders. Leaders such as Chikanga are resented because as powerful men who possess ‘rain making’ gifts they can abuse these. Fisiy and Geschiere (1996) suggest that since witch-hunters can diminish the powers of small witches, this means, ironically, that the witch finders are potentially ‘chief’ witches. In Dew in the morning the discourse of witchcraft emphasises the emergence of an individualistic accumulation of wealth and the convergence of debt – and a capitalist world view. The discourse of witchcraft is deployed in this narrative to reveal the cracks, fissures and crevices in the African nationalisms that intersect to define blacks on racial, gender and class levels. An African community under colonialism does not have only one enemy. Within and among this community there are also tensions that arise from the individualism of the new rich who are seen as enslaving their own people to further their personal riches.

In colonial Rhodesia the authorities attempted to ban the discourse of witchcraft from the public domain. Its appearance in Dew in the morning therefore might well be suggesting that the whole colonial enterprise, which is described as modernity, was a massive exercise in witchcraft. The colonial system's appropriation of African land led to the ‘zombification’ or theft of some Africans' spirits. In Dew in the morning African people weave different forms of nationalisms in order to arrest the practice of colonialism that they perceive as an advanced form of witchcraft. But the irony in the novel lies in the fact that, in attempting to do so, each of the narrative forms of African nationalisms is also attempting to cast a spell on the other so as to render it ineffectual in capturing the changing identities of the African people. This process is neither successful nor completely consummated, since in Dew in the morning none of the visible and the not-so-visible narratives of African nationalisms have been allowed to occlude the others.

6. Conclusion

In short, the African nationalisms depicted in Dew in the morning cannot be pinned down to the single issue of race as a signifier of blacks who inhabit a uniform imaginary. Rural peasants (men and women, rich and poor) embraced the ‘offered opportunities they did not want to give up and oppressions they wanted to contest’ (Cooper, 2003: 33). African peasants developed multiple social identities. The peasants did not possess uniform skills to develop similar strategies of coping, or to seize niches within the changing economics of multi-sided engagement with forces inside and outside the Rhodesian colonial system. Reading Dew in the morning using the protocols of a single Zimbabwean nationalism – if there ever was only one form of nationalism – renders resistance discourse parochial. This is so because the images of African people's connections to land that emerge from a detailed analysis of Dew in the morning are varied and contradictory. The nationalisms that the novel generates, authorises, promotes and sometimes self-consciously interrogates sit precariously with the concept of a Zimbabwean nationalism based on an armed struggle waged on some military front against a perceived single enemy, identified as colonialism. It is Dew in the morning's capacity for multiplying African identities that unsettles some critics of Zimbabwean writing, who end up drawing moralistic conclusions about a novel whose complexity requires rigorous explication of the changing identities of African agency in a colonial situation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maurice Taonezvi Vambe

Senior Lecturer, Institute for Curriculum and Learning Development, University of South Africa (UNISA).

Notes

¹Page numbers refer to Chinodya, 2001.