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Contemporary poets of Bulawayo, Matabeland

Depleted Mines

24 augustus 2010
Since Zimbabwe is a de facto police state, poets with commitment have to be careful what they say above ground. They have witnessed the banning of plays at Amakhosi and Bulawayo theatres and, most recently, the banning of Owen Maseko’s visual arts exhibition at the Bulawayo Art Gallery – the very place where a group of performance poets led by Mgcini Nyoni meet, once a month, at an event called ‘The Lounge’.
Maseko’s theme was Gukurahundi, the name given to the massacre of thousands of Ndebele people by the Fifth Brigade in the 1980s. The memory of those terrible times lingers like putrid urine in the streets and alleyways of Zimbabwe’s second city; and it haunts the souls of even those who were born after the event.

Then there is the living memory of Operation Murambatsvina, which displaced thousands of Bulawayo’s urban poor to rural homes decimated by AIDS, and to South Africa, where many of them ended up not in dreamed-of Toyota bakkies but in cardboard coffins.

Like the rest of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo suffers from regular, extended power cuts, and a continuing deterioration of the water and sewerage system. It is estimated that the city loses
8,000 cubic metres of water per day from burst and leaking and pipes; and there are more than 200 kilometres of choked sewage pipes.

Bulawayo’s poets are surrounded by unnecessary suffering, unnecessary because Zimbabwe’s mineral wealth alone, if fairly distributed, would be sufficient to transform us into a sub-tropical Finland. But the government’s system of patronage, leading to cronyism, ensures that only a few – already rich – people will benefit.

This is the general background to the seven poets who are represented in this special Bulawayo issue on PIW Zimbabwe.

When Mgcini Nyoni recently announced the arrival of Daybreak, an anthology of poems dominated by submissions from Bulawayo district, he said they were about “love, life in general and the occasional politics” (my emphasis). This is a revealing statement from a writer whose poems – at least the ones I have seen – are strongly political. Indeed, Nyoni had a poem published in Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems For Human Rights (New Internationalist / Amnesty International, 2009). Politics was not a criterion for selection in this issue but it seemed to me that the loose, prose-like form of most of the poems I read is better suited to protest than to introspective poetry. Love in particular, a popular theme among young poets, seems to attract clichés and platitudes, and is most apt to reveal the limitations of using English as a second language. This is not the case, however, with Mthabisi Phili’s stark ‘Operation Talk, Taura, Khuluma’, which pits private love against public despair, and makes the ironic claim that “there is no poetry these days”.

“Life in general” is well represented here by Lilian Dube’s satirical eye in ‘Martha’s Tavern’. Still a teenager, she is the youngest of the poets represented here. Depleted mines carry a subliminal image of mass graves in this part of the world, and her poem ‘Depleted Mine’ opens, when read aloud, like a Pandora’s box.

Clemence Chinyani writes plays and short stories as well as poems about life in and around Bulawayo, and in Zimbabwe as a whole. The English proverb, “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill” (don’t make a fuss about nothing), is ironically present in this angry poem – a mountain of meaning packed into a molehill of words. When you read it for a second time, the word, ‘sound’, in the first line, slips into the word ‘mound’. The rest is empty space.

Thandeka Gonde’s poem, ‘Writer’, is a bleak testimony to a space on earth that is intolerant of free speech. Big Brother is watching – and listening. This poem is all about what it doesn’t say! Under an oppressive regime, poets learn to be disingenuous.

Shari Eppel is no longer very young but her courageous poem, ‘Bhalagwe’, the first literary record of Fifth Brigade atrocities in Matabeleland, was written when she was still quite young. Here is an excerpt from the report of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, and the Legal Resources Foundation, entitled Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace:

inmates of Bhalagwe speak of daily deaths in the camp, but they are seldom able to name victims. They will merely comment how they witnessed people being beaten or shot, or how on certain mornings there would be people in their barracks who had died in the course of the night, as a result of the previous day’s beating. The digging of graves is mentioned as a daily chore . . .

The impact of ‘Bhalagwe’ is achieved by its eerie beauty.

Bulawayo’s most introspective young poet is the concert pianist Deon Marcus, but there is something political about the way he transforms impressionist cubes into boxes that suggest isolation, loneliness, displacement. When you are forced to leave your home and you don’t know where to go, your life becomes a clutter of boxes, usually cardboard, sometimes wooden. They are forever breaking and revealing their contents to the public eye. ‘Sonnet’ is a salutary reminder that poets have egos, some as big as Mount Everest!

Finally we come to a young man who is doing so much to promote poetry among the youth of Bulawayo: Mgcini Nyoni. He is the Creative Director of Poetry Bulawayo, and he has established a blog. A poet, playwright and freelance writer, he recently changed his name from Shepherd Mandhlazi (see his poem in Intwasa Poetry under this name) to Shepherd Mgcini Nyoni. All three of his poems in this selection are powerfully (and explicitly) political. His patriotism – love of country, not government – is an inspiration, I am sure, to Bulawayo’s up-and-coming poets.
© John Eppel
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