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Reading in a war zone
Title: It's A Little Inconvenient: Memories Of A Bulawayo Book Club
Reading in a war zone
Title: It's A Little Inconvenient:
Memories Of A Bulawayo Book Club
Author: Althea Farren
Publisher: Original Writing
Pages: 254
Price: €4.54 (eBook), €5.44 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-909007-49-9
Reviewer: Cliff Hutton
♦
White-run Rhodesia eventually buckled — under the pressures of 15 years of global sanctions and an increasingly bloody and debilitating guerrilla war — by agreeing in 1980 to hold free and fair elections supervised by Britain. The foregone conclusion among rational folk was that the poll would result in a handover to a Black majority government, as indeed it did.
However, the nasty shock for Rhodesian Whites was that the election was won by the radical Marxist Robert Mugabe when, all along, Prime Minister Ian Smith's government-controlled media had been assuring Whites that the winner would be the moderate Bishop Abel Muzorewa.
It's a Little Inconvenient is a memoir set against the final days of rebel Rhodesia's doomed struggle for survival and of the nation's post-natal trauma as Zimbabwe. The title is a quotation from Zimbabwe's president Mugabe who, when challenged for not reigning in the mobs hounding Whites from their homesteads and occupying their land, said he considered the White population's problems 'a minor inconvenience' compared to years of suppression and racial discrimination suffered by the country's Africans.
Waging war
The story opens with the formation of a book club (still in existence today) set up by a group of women in Bulawayo, the country's second city, while their husbands alternated between civilian routine and serving compulsory call-up tours against an increasingly lethal insurgency. With their men waging war in the bush, the ladies of the book club often engaged in their own skirmishes as members bickered over personality conflicts, or about who served inferior wine at their meetings and which of them was not putting enough effort into their monthly literary reviews.
With the end of White rule, the drumbeat of battle receded. But, as Mugabe's grip tightened on Zimbabwe, the terrors of war were replaced by the horrors of life under the new political regime, with tribal massacres, endemic corruption, rampant lawlessness, empty supermarket shelves, bureaucracy bizarre beyond belief, currency chaos and fuel shortages, and price inflation that eventually reached a mind-boggling 165,000 percent.
Still the book club ladies soldiered on, though numbers were whittled down through disagreements, dispersion and divorce. There's a moving account of one member's battle to conceal her advancing deafness from the coven. Increasingly unable to follow group discussions, she eventually confessed her disability. In the style of stalwart troopers, the others rallied round to ensure their sister's continued participation.
These bleak chapters in African history are for the most part related matter-of-factly, without dramatic embellishment, albeit from a mainly White perspective.
But then streams of narrative are occasionally interspersed with extracts from the author's diary. The effect at times is akin to that of a hand-grenade lobbed into a market. The story dives for cover, or simply freezes in shock, as these explosive fragments demolish the reader's lapse into complacency. Some extracts are just two or three sentences — like bursts from an AK47 — while others are more contemplative. Their revelations are sometimes shocking and occasionally funny. Collectively they construct an intimate portrait of a crumbling country and its anguished people.
Machiavellian
These personal observations provide some of the most powerful and harrowing scenes, with farmers being dragged from homesteads by lynch mobs and beaten to death while Mugabe's security forces sometimes stood by and watched. The 'political activists' extended their brutality to African farmworkers in White-owned fields. Those who were not butchered frequently had their homes razed and were evicted from the land, leaving them homeless and jobless.
While the Machiavellian Mugabe jerked the nation around like a
marionette and the Whites struggled to find equilibrium in a living nightmare, episodes of quotidian life managed to play out — and the author is adept at injecting tension even into an event as mundane as a women's coffee morning. Will the home-made samosas be edible? Or would it have been better to have purchased them — at six-thousand dollars each?
If four-day power cuts and a weekly supermarket bill of 31-million dollars weren't enough to make a grown woman weep, then some of their husbands certainly were. Many, it transpires, preferred the company of their office buddies, with squash games three nights a week followed by all-bloke booze-ups and boys' barbecues at the weekend. In response, the monthly lit crit sessions were occasionally pressed into service as field hospitals for emotionally wounded wives.
In the end comes painful acceptance that the party really is over. Efforts to steer politicians in a more moderate direction had failed. Female life expectancy in Zimbabwe had sunk to among the world's lowest. The author's once thriving printing business had become hog-tied by ink shortages and unreliable suppliers. The only sensible course was to sell her home of 20 years and move out of Africa.
Observers and survivors of Africa's colonial conflicts will find this an engaging personal account of a struggle against corrosive winds of change, and a powerful lesson in the value of democracy. Robert Mugabe, should he read it, might realise that he destroyed Zimbabwe far more effectively than any military campaign could have done; a truth which he might well find a little inconvenient.
Cliff Hutton
• About the reviewer: Cliff Hutton is a professional editor and international freelance journalist. His career in Africa has taken him from Algiers to Cape Town, from Lushoto to Libreville and from Mombasa to Mozambique. He has also worked in Bahrain, Britain, Cyprus and Ireland, and has written about Brazil, Canada, the US and Mexico, and about Ceausescu's Romania, where he spent several months prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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