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3 Of fathers and ancestors in Charles Mungoshi’s W Wa ai it ti in ng g f fo or r t th he e R Ra ai in n NEIL TEN KORTENAAR Charles Mungoshi’s one English-language novel, Waiting for the Rain, although published in 1975, in the middle of the Zimbabwean War of Liberation, and set around the same time,1 ignores politics almost altogether in order to focus on a single and singularly dysfunctional family.2 Three generations of the Mandengu family live together on a homestead in Manyene, near present-day Chivhu. Tongoona, the head of the household, lives with his wife, a daughter and three young sons, his parents and his mother-in-law. The family is extended vertically in time but not laterally in space: Tongoona has but one wife, as his father had before him, and the children on the homestead are all his own. Tongoona’s elder brother, although he lives in the vicinity, is not part of the family. The family constitutes a closed, self-sufficient entity with ‘The Father and the Mother of the House’ at the centre (136), and its mistrust of outsiders is so deep as to resemble paranoia. In terms of setting, Waiting for the Rain is even more confined. The novel retells the events over the three days that the two adult sons return home, Lucifer from the city and Garabha from his wandering in the rural areas. The narrative never travels to another homestead, let alone to the city, and the second half of the novel does not venture from the homestead at all. When, on the last page, Lucifer drives away, the novel cannot follow him and must end. It feels as though the homestead and the nearby road are surrounded by a vast space of darkness, and so they are. In that darkness, however, there are mountains, a plain, a forest and a desert, aspects of a dreamscape visited on occasion by Lucifer, Garabha, and their paternal grandfather, called simply Sekuru or the Old Man. In these phantasmal landscapes, the dreamer is the sole human, but there are other presences , inscrutable and ominous. It is the looming presence of the ancestors that makes it impossible to consider Tongoona’s household a nuclear family. The hostility of this phantasmal landscape reflects the Mandengus’ sense of their immediate surroundings. Although, in the course of the novel, the Mandengus receive visits from neighbours and even host a party for the village, the family regards all outsiders with suspicion. This is a family that ‘rarely borrowed fire’ (81), and only pretends to show warmth to 31 extended family in order not to give cause for more enmity. In another context , for instance, the contemporary world depicted in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Tongoona’s older brother, Kuruku, would be the babamukuru or Father of the Family. In this novel, however, Tongoona and his wife mistrust Kuruku and blame his wife Rhoda for the long-ago death of an infant son (74). They fear that the success of Lucifer, about to go overseas, will invite the hostile attention of the paternal uncle and his family. If things continue as they are, Tongoona’s branch of the Mandengu family will come to an end with the current generation, which seems determined never to marry. The thought of children fills Garabha, the eldest, with ‘a vision of black ants tearing away at a helpless buck that is still kicking with life having fallen and broken its leg’ (85). His sister Betty, pregnant as a result of an adulterous affair, is a partial exception to the sterility of the younger generation, but her pregnancy is primarily a form of filial rebellion . Her desire is not for a lover or even a child, but a form of suicide: ‘She is quite aware that her chances of coming out of it alive are … bleak, but a rope around her neck wouldn’t have been wiser either’ (38). Later we learn from Matandangoma, the spirit medium, that Betty’s child will be stillborn (145). All three adult Mandengu children want to escape the painful world they grew up in, the sons by leaving and the daughter by having an affair without her parents’ knowledge. Their desire to escape, however, contributes to the decline of the family; and the mutual recrimination and the misery that result add to their own torment. The two sons carry the family with them wherever they go. Lucifer has...

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