Fighting imperialism in the literary trenches
A Fine Madness, By Mashingaidze Gomo, with a Preface by Ngugi wa Thiongo, Oxfordshire, Ayebia Clarke Publishing Limited, 2010. 174 Pages ISBN: 978-0-9562401-4-9 (Paperback)
Courtesy of the Zimbabwe Herald
SPEAKING at the official launch of A Fine Madness in Harare on October 26, the writer Mashingaidze Gomo noted that training at military school taught soldiers to fight.
However, he had decided to use the skills learnt there in an entirely different arena.
He said: “That is why I am here today, deploying these missiles, confident that the intended target is the same the nation’s defence forces are assigned to hit.
“And it is my intention to soften the target for them . . . my intention to destroy its moral back-up . . . my intention to undermine its global support systems . . . my intention to make African children learn from the story of ignorance, recklessness and death around the mouth of the imperial cave. And, if any should think that it is mad to do so, I must insist that it is A Fine Madness.”
Thus emerged the story of A Fine Madness, a real classic in the making and a book that seeks to examine imperialism, its root mission and impact on the colonised peoples of Africa and the rest of the developing world.
Gomo, however, chooses to set his story in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place he grew to know so much as a result of the war he was involved in, a war that was waged to repel US-backed Ugandan and Rwandese rebels.
As indicated in an earlier review of the same book, a deep understanding of African history is needed to get to the core of the reasons why the Great Lakes region in general and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been involved in endless conflict.
The primary reason has always been the natural resources that the vast central African country in endowed with. It is for this reason that Gomo cannot separate western greed for these resources from the perennial struggles in the DRC.
The coming of independence to the DRC ushered in a government led by Patrice Lumumba, a man whose Marxist-Leninist leanings made him unpopular with the west and therefore made him an easy and prompt target for a coup d’etat and murder.
The coup enjoyed the support of the west and thrust Mobutu Sese Seko into power.
The Congo region has never ceased to fascinate. From early writings in English like The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad to A Fine Madness, the setting of the stories has principally been the Congo.
The character Kurtz, an ivory trader in The Heart of Darkness, leaves Thames Harbour in an expedition that is expected to culminate with conquering the “darkness”.
As his mother is half-English and his father half-French, it would be accurate to consider Kurtz as a product of all Europe and as such it appears as though it is all Europe that sets out to conquer Africa, a feat they accomplish via the Berlin Conference of 1884.
However, Kurtz dies at the end, on the steamboat as a friend and protagonist Christopher Marlow attempts to take him back.
It is important to note that this “heart of darkness” later becomes a place where the West wants to remain for the sake of its resources.
This is the background against which Gomo writes.
A Fine Madness is a war against imperialism.
It is a war against western commerce that even feels Tinyarei, the woman the narrator has left behind as he delves into war in Boende, DRC, has the potential to make money as a model in Europe.
But Tinyarei is the epitome of African womanhood in a way and commercialising her would signal the demise of Africa.
The author writes: “Armoured cars, helicopters, armed men, commandos/ paratroopers and hired guns crawling into gigantic/ aircrafts to be airlifted to the borders of human dignity/ To the place of the skull/ To the weeping place/ To prop up and hold African civilisation together, where/ it was coming apart, dismantled by the insolent/ champions of Western civilisation/ And like our own case back home/ Like it was the case all over Africa/ What was at stake was a birthright/ An African birthright!” (pgs 16-17).
Gomo is, however, fighting not only the physical war in the DRC, but also in the literary trenches.
This is an all out war against a renewed imperial onslaught on the continent’s resources.
The same story of resistance has been seen in Angola as Unita rebels, enjoying overt support from the west, battled government forces while the country’s resources, especially diamonds, were being flown out through Huambo.
In Mozambique, Renamo bandits, again with support from the west via apartheid South Africa, fought the Frelimo government for years in a struggle that was clearly for imperialism.
Very few books have come in the form and style of A Fine Madness.
In it Gomo has managed to lace together themes of love, war, betrayal, exploitation, dispossession among others into a whole single story of resistance to the western worldview.
At the end of the day, the book becomes a celebration of the success of the people’s resistance against renewed attempts towards indirect occupation. Lumumba’s murderers are again on the prowl!
In the narrator of the book, we see a new soldier, one who is conscious of his present predicament and has a thorough understanding of the ideological implications of the war he is fighting.
He is well aware that the Ugandan and Rwandese war machine is being oiled by the west to introduce chaos that would give way to the plunder of resources.
In his own words at the launch of the book, fighting in the war in DRC produced a new way of looking at life.
For him the survivors of the colonial genocide are the ones who are being asked to fight defending and protecting “the raiders of Chimoio, Nyadzonia, Freedom Camp, Mkushi . . .”
For Gomo therefore, the war in the Congo is waged not only to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the DRC, but African dignity in general.
It is a war through which the Africans want to make a bold statement of their resolve in defending their own when it comes to resources.
It is a book that shows the writer’s ability to reflect on the African condition.
It is for this reason that Gomo wonders why “African children are not reading the story around the colonial cave”.
Reading that story would obviously make them understand the importance of resistance.
Ngugi wa Thiongo says the prose poetry is not only about “the horror of war but also about the beauty of resistance”.
He could not have been further from the truth about A Fine Madness.
Mashingaidze Gomo was born in 1964 in Rhodesia.
He lived through the euphoria of independence and joined the Air Force of Zimbabwe in 1984 as an aircraft engines apprentice.
He later joined 7 Squadron as an Alouette helicopter technician and gunner which saw him involved in Zimbabwean campaigns in support of the Frelimo government in Mozambique, as well as the DRC conflict in 1998. He completed a BA in English and Communication Studies with the Zimbabwe Open University.
In 2007, he retired from the Airforce to read for a BA in Fine Arts and to pursue a life in the arts.
He is evidently an artist at heart and he says the publication of A Fine Madness is only the beginning of a long artistic career.
This book is a must-read for those who seek to right misinformation of Western media on the various conflicts on the continent in general.
It is a book that curriculum designers should seriously consider for inclusion as a set text for literature because of its relevance to the African situation in general and Zimbabwe in particular.
The book is available at Baroda book stores countrywide as well as selected stockists in South Africa.
edmore.zvinonzwa@zimpapers.co.zw
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