Africa-Press – Lesotho. Prominent Zimbabwean writer, Ignatius Mabasa shocked many scholars and artists across the sub region by producing the first-ever PhD thesis written in ChiShona language at Rhodes University. That has not yet happened in any university even in Zimbabwe itself where Shona is the language of the majority of Zimbabweans.
In 2021 Rhodes university announced that “A PhD student in the African Language Studies Section in the School of Languages and Literatures, Ignatius Mabasa, has been awarded a PhD for the first-ever thesis written in ChiShona at Rhodes University.
” The university bulletin continues: His thesis, titled “CHAVE CHEMUTENGURE VHIRI RENGORO: HUSARUNGANO NERWENDO RWENGANO DZEVASHONA.
The folktale in confrontation with a changing world: a Shona storyteller’s autoethnography. ” encompasses his story as a Shona folklorist and creative writer, and the story of the Shona people.
It is said that Ignatius Mabasa named several reasons why he decided to write his thesis in his mother tongue. He said, “The elephant must after his nature trumpet and not meow like a cat. I am a Shona storyteller, filmmaker and author who started telling stories before I could read or write. ”
Talking to veteran journalist, Moses Magadza, Mabasa says: “My PhD written in Shona has shown me that there are a lot of Africans out there who identify with the problem of being mentally colonised. There is a strong desire to decolonise the mind.
The challenge is that most key institutions – like schools and universities, government departments in charge of arts and culture, and the media – are unwilling to decolonise because the decolonisation agenda is not appealing to the colonised mind.
We still think wisdom speaks in English. . . ” Regarding Mabasa’s ChiShona thesis, one of the key scholars in the sub-region, Prof Kaschula said, “Mr Mabasa is one of the most accomplished storytellers in Zimbabwe – hence we decided his thesis should be written in his own language, ChiShona.
The contribution of this thesis is ground-breaking, as it brings intellectual strength not only to the tradition, but to the people of Zimbabwe as well, at a time when we are still grappling with the role that African languages, cultures and indigenous knowledge should play in a decolonised educational curriculum.
” Ignatius Mabasa was eventually awarded his PhD at Rhodes University’s virtual graduation ceremony in April 2021. He currently lectures at the University of Zimbabwe’s Department of Creative Media and Communication.
However some of us who have always followed literature have always known that Ignatius Mabasa is quite a phenomenon in Shona literature, especially the novel.
His most well-known novel, Mapenzi, (Fools) of 1999 is considered to have changed the landscape in Shona literature through its innovativeness. The creation and use of a central character of Hamundigone’s temperament is a serious innovation on its own in Shona literature.
Hamundigone is a wanderer, going from place to place, censoring careless speakers, rebuking pretenders and social hypocrites, chiding mean and selfish relatives, criticising the status-quo, singing the latest tunes.
He is a man of no fixed abode but you sense that he has a private destination –– to tell the truth! His voice is reminiscent of the voice of the tramp writer in Marechera’s Mindblast.
However, Mabasa has written two other novels in Shona that tend to make people shed tears as they read them. These are Ziso Rezongororo (2021) and Ndafa Here? (2008)
Ziso Rezongororo, which translates to, the eye of a millipede, is the most recent Shona novel by the inimitable Zimbabwean writer, Ignatius Mabasa. These are Shemhu’s very-very delicate recollections of his very turbulent boyhood.
Shemhu, the dramatic name, is equivalent to shame in English. That name worries the boy immensely as he refers to it as ‘zita rinorwadza. ’ He wonders if his parents were ashamed to have a baby boy or they were having a go at all the people who, for some reason, had declared that they would never have a baby.
The boy’s insensitive teacher would look at Shemhu in class and say, “Shame on you, Shame. ” The boy would cringe. Shemhu’s parents’ divorce when he is just a boy of five.
On the day his mother leaves the homestead, somebody very sympathetic asks Shemhu to go pick some cucumbers from the fields, and when he comes back, his mother is gone and gone forever!
The boy hopes his mother has gone away on an ordinary visit. He waits for days on end and his spirit crumbles. When she does not return, that is when the boy learns about the terrible word ‘divorce’ for the first time.
Years later, Shemhu writes a letter to his mother but neither does he know her address nor affords an envelope and a stamp. The letter eventually rots in his back pocket.
Part of the letter goes: Amai, muri kupi? Muri kuitei ikoko? Muchadzoka here? Muchiri kundida here kana kuti mandikanganwa? Mufunge zvenyu amai, ndakatukwa ndichinzi uri mwana wenyoka.
” Something like: Mother where are you? What are you up to? When are you coming back? Do you still love me? Mother, they say that I am the young one of a snake.
” Every child appears as innocent and seemingly as blind as the millipede; zongororo. But the millipede is to be seen going everywhere, feeling its way up and around objects, almost blind but sensitive.
For Ignatius Mabasa, the mind of a child is like that, questioning, active, indefatigable and overly sensitive. That is Shemhu’s condition. As he gropes on after his parents’ divorce, Shemhu goes on an intense mental search. Many people don’t know how it feels for a boy to try to work out why his parents can no longer be together. That is the forte of this novel.
Shemhu asks Dhanyere (an older nephew whose parents are also divorced) about the meaning of divorce and all he says to Shemhu is, “It (divorce) is something close to what happens when a cow is forcing its calf to stop suckling when the calf still desperately needs to suckle.
, the cow running away from the poor calf and sometimes having to kick the poor calf in the face.
” The boy, Dhanyere, works out that divorce is not mutual; the cow wants the suckling to stop but the calf wants to continue. . .
Your mother is gone, the people eventually tell Shemhu. But Shemhu wonders why he was not consulted before the so-called divorce! Immediately, Shemhu’s father gets married to a new woman.
Shemhu fails to relate with the new woman. He also loses touch with his father. You come face-to-face with what a child feels to see his dear father being suddenly tender to a new woman who is not the boy’s mother!
Eventually, Shemhu’s father dies too and the boy is adopted by his father’s brother who transplants Shemhu from the village to the city. Sadly, Shemhu’s uncle takes the boy home with no prior arrangement with his wife, maiguru, in the city. When uncle gets to his Highfields house with Shemhu there is a huge row between him and maiguru.
The well-fed and stubborn woman complains loudly that she will not tolerate God-forsaken strangers from the village into her home just like that: “Zvekuunzirwa tuvanhu twune mazino anenge embeva, twusingagezi ndizvo zvandisingade” The frightened boy waits outside the house as he hears his uncle plead with his wife until he is grudgingly accepted.
You tremble with the book in your hands. For me, the tense relationship between Shemhu and Maiguru is, most probably, the worst person-to-person relationships that I have encountered in all Zimbabwean literature.
Shemhu says, “Maiguru vaindibata sebepa rafuriswa madzihwa rinofanira kuraswa,” meaning Maiguru treated me like used tissue paper that needs to be thrown away.
Shemhu is very dark in complexion. He is generally darker than all the people around him and he suffers from a kind of racial segregation in the extended family.
Maiguru tells Shemhu that he is just too dark and scary to look at: “Shemhu, unotyisa unozviziva! Maziso ako matsvuku ayo, neganda rako dema iro zvinoita kuti uite kunge munhu wemashave.
Chakachena chete pauri mazino. ” At some point, Maiguru tells her son, Simbai that Shemhu is a monster! “Simbai, tiza! Hokoyo naShemhu uyo!” afterwards she bursts into uncontrollable fits of laughter.
She also says words like, “Shemhu uri firimu chaiyo. Uri Chituta chine kirimu!” meaning the boy is as amazing as a film star and is prince of all idiots.
One day, when Maiguru is miffed that Shemhu is taking too long in the bathroom, she bursts into the little room and starts to relieve herself in full view of the stunned boy who is still bathing!
This is a story that will make you cry. This is a story that will make you laugh. This story will change your relationship with children and young people.
You will be happy to know that this story has no sad ending and that Shemhu’s relationship with Maiguru ends well. Ziso ReZongororo has been prescribed for the Zimbabwe public exams for Advanced level Shona exams from 2021 to 2023.
If Ziso Rezongororo could make you cry there is still his second novel, Ndafa Here? which appeared in 2008 and touted as being Mabasa’s “mature novel.
” This is a shocking novel in which people lose their values and turn the tables upside down.
Ndafa Here? is a deliberately calmer novel than Mapenzi. The author chooses to employ intrigue ahead of experimentation with form. Betty is the unwanted wife.
Her mother-in-law thinks Betty is too ugly, and senseless to marry her son. Why does Betty have to elope to her son already full with child, she queries. I want to find my son a real woman, she rants. Betty’s sister-in-law is more awkward.
She has had two children with two different men out of wedlock but she still thinks she is more decent than Betty! She is daring in a negative way, ganging up with her mother to assault her father each time he protests about her ways. She orders Betty to nurse her children as she goes about her business around the location.
Betty’s brother-in-law asks the most cruel question in the book when Betty gives birth to a child with albinisms: Maiguru, mwana makamuita sei uyu? (How dare you give birth to this albino?) That heinous question arguably makes the climax of this novel because nobody in this world ever makes an effort to bring forth a child with disability.
Betty’s husband, Wati is a henpecked man who is always in his mother’s clutches. Wati wakes up one day and suddenly realizes that the woman he marries is not the correct one.
He flees to London. When he is generous enough to phone back, his wife is not allowed to talk to him. His mother grabs the phone and talks on and on asking for a house in Borrowdale, clothes, money and other things.
The irony is that Wati’s father has very different ideas. He thinks that his desolate daughter-in-law is the most beautiful woman he has ever met. He hounds Betty.
He peeps through the gap in the curtain or the key hole to watch and drool at Betty’s naked body. As he playfully lifts Betty’s albino baby, he deliberately fondles Betty’s breasts.
Meanwhile, Wati sends his mother and sister air tickets to London and never bothers about Betty and the baby. Wati’s father strikes. Now that everyone has abandoned Betty, he verbally proposes to his daughter-in-law! At least he is the only person in this story who sets out to appreciate Betty.
This story challenges the ordinary feminist critic. Here is a woman who is heavily abused by fellow women because of their sharp appetites for petty things.
Betty takes very long to realize that she has to assert herself and move on. She represents all women out there who are abused until they become invisible. About his novel, Ndafa Here Mabasa has this to say: “It is very true.
Actually, when I wrote Ndafa Here? I was very worried that I was going to be attacked for trying to speak for women, yet I had to because I was witnessing the cruellest and dehumanising things that were happening to two women that I knew – and these things were being done by other women.
Again, like Mapenzi – I think the success of Ndafa Here? comes from the way it does not gloss over things that make other writers feel are too sensitive to write.
” It is not difficult to see why Ignatius Tirivangani Mabasa is considered one of the leading writers of his generation in Zimbabwe.
His courage to take on the world using Shona, an African language, has paid off. He is also a storyteller, and musician, who writes mainly in Shona. He was born in Mount Darwin and grew up on his grandfather’s farm there.
Mabasa’s debut novel, the satirical Mapenzi (Fools), won first prize in the Zimbabwe Book Publishers’ Association Awards in 2000. His second novel, Ndafa Here? (Am I Dead?) won the 2009 (NAMA) Outstanding Fiction Book as did his novel, Imbwa yemunhu (You Dog) in 2014. He lectures in Media and Journalism studies at the University of Zimbabwe.
https://www.thepost.co.ls/insight/the-shona-storyteller-who-is-breaking-new-ground/
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