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11 ‘A man can try’1: Negotiating manhoods in colonial urban spaces in Dambudzo Marechera’s T Th he e H Ho ou us se e o of f H Hu un ng ge er r and Yvonne Vera’s B Bu ut tt te er rf fl ly y B Bu ur rn ni in ng g 2 GRACE A. MUSILA This chapter suggests that the male subject in the colonial urban space often occupied an ambivalent position on the margins, in his relationship with both the women, and the colonial urban economy. Through a reading of Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger (1978) and Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning (1998), we submit that the urban space both offered men certain freedoms – found in the gendered colonial economy – while simultaneously destabilising and redefining their identities. This had varied results as men struggled to retrieve, construct, and evolve various senses of manhood in the continually shifting social terrain of the urban space, and its fluid topographies of gendered relations. In many respects, The House of Hunger and Butterfly Burning focus on the microscopic detail of men and women’s encounters in the colonial urban space, and offer rich insights into the ways in which the city unveiled both the creativity and vulnerabilities of men and women as it disrupted conventional gender roles. In Butterfly Burning, Vera expressly attempts a reconstruction of colonial Bulawayo, thus providing interesting insights into gender(ed) relations;3 while The House of Hunger offers an unflinching gaze at the colonial black urban experience. Thus we see the two texts as complementary and engaging in a conversation on the unstable terrain of manhood within an urban perspective. M Ma ap pp pi in ng g c co ol lo on ni ia al l u ur rb ba an n s sp pa ac ce es s Miescher and Lindsay (2003: 10) observe that in colonial Africa, the advent of urban economies, opportunities for education and wage labour, challenged the political power and dominant masculinity of older males, and even undermined local political hierarchies.4 They suggest that while colonial racism denigrated black men, it ‘did not prevent the assertion of powerful masculinities outside its gaze’; a fact that complicates the popular theses of the emasculation of the black man (ibid: 21). Similarly, studies suggest that African men were innovative in negotiating between local and western 142 ideals of manhood, and often succeeded in meeting the normative expectations of both societies, by finding ways of reconciling the two.5 That this was possible was because traditional patriarchy largely coincided with the highly gendered colonial administrative structure, which for different reasons, had a similar interest in keeping women in the domestic and men in the public domain. In Rhodesia, like many British colonies across the continent, boys were educated at the mission schools, in preparation for entry into the European-dominated, mainly urban, economy, while women’s education centered on issues related to the general management of the domestic sphere (Schmidt in Hansen, 1992; Veit-Wild, 1992). This was with a view to influencing modern African families to espouse the Christian vision of the ‘proper’ family. Apart from formal education, African men enjoyed various other privileges , chief among these being legal access to urban space as the economy found use for male migrant labour. Exempt from pass laws in a system where such documentation legitimised an individual’s existence and assured access to waged labour, women had no visibility6 in the official urban space. They could not, for instance, own property without a man’s name being attached to them (ibid.)7. This minority status ‘bestowed formal control of all African women on the African men as women had no direct recourse to the law in their own right’ (ibid; 6), extending legal affirmation to traditional patriarchy. On the other hand, such invisibility afforded women a range of opportunities for the subversion of the system; opportunities that men could not enjoy since as Terri Barnes (1999) notes, the pass laws rendered any ‘invisible’ man a criminal, subject to disciplinary action. Thus, despite enjoying a range of privileges accruing from the patriarchal colonial system, these remained within the confines of a racial hierarchy, in which the black man succeeded the white man and the white woman. Carolyn Brown’s essay title ‘A "man" in the village is a "boy" in the workplace ’8 captures this situation, where, while affirming black masculinity in the black sociosphere, the system concomitantly...

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