A Versatile Writer with a Passion for His Country
Chenjerai Hove was born in 1954 in Zimbabwe, near Zvishavane (187 km from the capital Harare). He grew up under the colonialism that ended only recently, in 1980. Hove studied literature and education and his writer's career started out with poems. His first book of poems was written in Shona, a language (or a group of languages) spoken in the southern parts of Africa and especially in Zimbabwe. It is classified as a Bantu language, as are Ndebele and Xhosa. Later, Hove also wrote in English. His first collection of Engslih poetry was Up in Arms.
In 1986 he started his first novel, Bones. This is considered a classic in Zimbabwe, and it won the first prize for literature by the Zimbabwe Book Publishers' Association as well as the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1989. I started reading the book because I was searching for books dealing with political topics that were also written using different techniques than I had learned in writing class. In earlier days, before the world had books, there were story-tellers. They have been made obsolete by our books, but the essence of story-telling has stayed the same. And Chenjerai Hove understood this essence as few others have. When you read his Bones, it is as the narrator is whispering the words directly into your ear and all you have to do is listen.
The story describes the anguish of a mother named Marita whose one and only son is fighting with the freedom fighters. She cannot accept this fact and hopes constantly that he will soon return home. Her son had once written a love letter to Janifa, a young girl in the village, and Marita begs her over and over to reread the letter aloud to her. Janifa is quite embarrassed to do it but she can't refuse Marita anything. While describing the hope Marita has for the return of her son, Hove also describes the nature and rural areas of the land with an intense tenderness that demonstrates how deeply he loves his country. What struck me most was how Hove described the relations between the white and the black people in that period. It is the traditional white man who feels himself superior to the black man and who has all the power and the wealth to make people do what the black man can only dream of. It is sad to say that it seems in reality nothing has changed from those backwards days.
His other book in English, which received quite some attention, is called Shadows. Like his first book, this one is set up with a narrating technique which does justice to the African oral traditions. The story is created with different chronologies in such a way that you can read different parts of the book in a random manner. This makes the book more surreal, though I found Bones at times strangely surreal yet excruciatingly realistic and violent at the same time.
Chenjerai Hove is one of the few writers I have read who uses almost experimental techniques to tell a story. As I look back at these two books, I cannot imagine any other way for him to spread the same message. The style served its purpose perfectly well. If you're looking for a different read, whether you are a(n aspiring) writer or a voracious or not-so-voracious reader, then Hove's books are great picks. Not only are they entertaining in the sense that they tell a story, but along the way you also get to understand a bit about the history, culture and the human suffering that took place in Zimbabwe's recent past.