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135 The Chichidodo Syndrome Creative writers and popular singers in Zimbabwe have been sensitive to and critical of the colonial and post-colonial state’s habit of assigning the identity of ‘human dirt’ to those that they consider dissident. The fictional works of Chidzero, Samupindi, Hove and Vera and some of the songs by Chipanga question the notion of describing humans as ‘dirty.’ Creative works place the reader and listener in a position of rethinking issues of citizenship, the subject and subjectivities in the period after Operation Murambatsvina. Zimbabwean writers and singers suggest that this operation had been rehearsed over the years by the authorities. The authors and singers in postcolonial Zimbabwe condemn the heavy-handed politics informing the ideology of the authorities that unleashed the operation on innocent Zimbabweans. Bernard Chidzero’s Nzvengamutsvairo (1957) is probably the first novel in Zimbabwe to capture creatively the colonial origin of the language of ‘clean up’ of the ‘assumed dirty’ in the cultural lives of African people. The novel’s suggestive title can loosely be translated as ‘Dodge the broom’ and implies that the colonial socio-economic and political philosophy was based on an understanding that to usher Africans into the colonial modernity, their culture, political and economic systems had to be systematically undermined and swept aside. Father Biehler of Chishawasha mission wrote to Lord Grey in 1897 that the Shona people were the most hopeless of humankind. The revered father suggested that the only salvation was to kill all the Shona people from the age of 14 years in order to pave the way for a cultural renewal driven by colonial modernity.1 In Chidzero’s novel, colonialism is the physical as well as the metaphorical ‘broom’ that is supposed to sweep the ‘dirt’, described as African customs and ways of life. However, many people in Zimbabwe tend to forget that the struggle for independence was a huge military operation akin to Murambatsvina, aimed as it The Chichidodo Syndrome Rehearsals of Operation Murambatsvina in Zimbabwean Literature and Popular Songs Maurice Taonezvi Vambe 1 Vambe M.T. 2004. African Oral Story-telling tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English. Pretoria: UNISA Press, p. 1. 10 136 MAURICE T. VAMBE was at removing the exclusionary racial politics that characterised white rule in Rhodesia (Martin and Johnson 1981). Nonetheless, the actual conduct of the armed struggle by the liberation movements showed tendencies of ‘sweeping’ or persecuting those Africans whose ideas and views on the struggle were not aligned with the interests of the leaders of the political movements. This culture of suppressing alternative views within the liberation movement was, ironically, a form of Murambatsvina and it undermined attempts at broadening the ideological understanding of the cause, course and execution of the armed struggle. Samupindi’s novel, Pawns (1992) captures these contradictions within the struggle to an extent that when the novel is read after Operation Murambatsvina , the struggles within the liberation movements figure as preludes or official rehearsals of this operation. The novel is about Daniel, alias Fangs’s spiritual/ physical/mental journey to manhood until he joins the liberation forces on the side of Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). Awaiting training and deployment at Seguranza, a guerrilla camp in Mozambique, Fangs and his comrades go through hunger and disease, and he witnesses the death of Peter, his friend. During these long months of waiting for training to become a freedom fighter, there were also ‘defections’ (p. 69) from guerrillas who feared being persecuted by their superiors for holding different views on the course and aims of the struggle. For example, once the masses were labelled as ‘sell-outs’ and reported to the guerrillas, they could be regarded as ‘dirty’, dispensable and murdered, in spite of the fact that they had provided fighting guerrillas with food. This violence against the masses is evidenced by comrade ‘Logistics’ who murders the old peasant, Mhangira, even as the guerrilla had no tangible evidence that the old man was a sell-out. By capturing this incident of heavy-handedness, Samupindi refuses to accord his guerilla creations the status of heroes. This is the author’s strategy to debunk official nationalist myths that portrayed the guerrillas’ relationship with the masses as always mutual. In Pawns, the presence of the Vashandi guerillas complicates the nationalist narrative of war favoured by the old guard of ZANU(PF) who claim to speak in a unitary voice. The Vashandi were a group of young, educated cadres committed to dismantling privilege within the...

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