Deformity, disability and

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Deformity, disability and marginality in
Zimbabwean literary discourse
Muchativugwa Liberty Hove
a
a
Department of English , North-West University
Published online: 14 Jan 2013.
To cite this article: Muchativugwa Liberty Hove (2013) Deformity, disability and marginality
in Zimbabwean literary discourse, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 8:2, 134-144, DOI:
10.1080/17447143.2012.753897
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Deformity, disability and marginality in Zimbabwean literary discourse
Muchativugwa Liberty Hove*
Department of English, North-West University
(Received 28 August 2012; ﬁnal version received 17 November 2012)
In this article, I attempt a seamless explanation, categorisation and discussion of
the twin concepts of deformity and disability as they are imagined in Zimbabwean
orature and literary discourse. I suggest that the two aberrations manifest
themselves physically and psychologically and that, generally, Zimbabwean
society exhibits ambivalence towards the two. This ambivalence is manifested
through fear and anxiety, especially when such afflictions assail one’s loved ones,
particularly children. Silence over such realia was, and continues to be, an
unwritten behavioural coda, and to a large extent, this silence has become not
only an interregnum in discourses on deformity and disability, but also a terminus
ad quem even in the wake of political afflictions. Such psychological and political
madness has become the bane of Zimbabwean society in the 30 years of its
fre(ak)dom.
Keywords: marginality; silencing; fre(ak)dom; grotesque; normative; ambivalence
Introduction
Harriet had come down one morning . . .to see Ben squatting on the big table, with an
uncooked chicken he had taken from the refrigerator, which still stood open, its contents
spilled all over the floor. Ben had raided it in some savage fit he could not control.
Grunting with satisfaction, he tore the raw chicken apart with teeth and hands, pulsing
with barbaric strength. He had looked up over the partly shredded and dismembered
carcass at Harriet, at his siblings, and snarled. (Dorris Lessing, The fifth child, 1988, 97)
Ben is a grotesque child. The strong verbs ‘grunting’, ‘tore’, ‘shredded’, ‘dismem-
bered’ and the striking adjectives ‘savage’, ‘raw’ and ‘barbaric’ enhance this image
of a deviation from normal social concourse and interaction. In essence, Ben’s
characterisation equates him to a wild, untamed beast. Ben’s physical and psycho-
logical deformities render him as different and push him to the margins of human
identity and being. In pushing him to the margins of society, his next of kin deny his
existence and at best hide him away from contact with normal humanity.
Children are generally construed and perceived as sites of innocencia. To be born
as a normal child is, therefore, to be brought into a world that is already fraught with
evil, wretchedness and general ostracism. In fact, to be born, in the wisdom of
Zimbabwean orature, is to ‘share death’ between the mother and the child. Thus,
when a child was successfully born, the emphatic announcement from the midwives
was rufu gwagovamwa, meaning that wily death could not take away both the mother
*Email: muchativugwahv@gmail.com
Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2013
Vol. 8, No. 2, 134Á144, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2012.753897
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
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and the child in one fell swoop, but each one in their own time, separately. As Pathisa
Nyathi rightly observes in Traditional ceremonies of amaNdebele, ‘it must be
appreciated that procreation was the raison d’eˆtre for the marriage institution . . .
no marriage is considered complete before a child has been born’ (2001, 90).
In contrast, to be born as a deformed or disabled child has generally been
perceived as, prototypically, a deviation from the norm, and therefore constitutive of
a curse. As Jeff Greenberg and Arndt (2011) argue, images of deformed and disabled
and malevolent children have a spectacular power to disturb and frighten. The
Zimbabwean societal imaginary of children as dependent, dependable, uncorrupted
and precious is, therefore, an important dimension in the reading and interpretation
of the discourse that has grown out of this validation of identity and being in
literature where children appear either as deformed, disabled and therefore located
on the margins of society.
Methodological framework: sociological origin and function of silencing practices
The assumptions and principles upon which this study is anchored relate to the social
origins and functions of silencing practices relating to states of deformity and
disability. Procedures and techniques for data collection and analysis included
collating ontological and epistemological viewpoints from Zimbabwean oral epithets
and, further, investigating the occurrence of similar or related constructions in the
written literature (Shi-xu 2012b, 211).
The constructs of deformity and disability are, in themselves, complexities that
are inextricably bound up with the histories and cultures of Zimbabwean society.
Normative society has constructed these two states as stereotypic. This investigation
locates and questions these sociocultural indigenous world views in their princi-
palities as guiding the discourse patterns immanent in Zimbabwean society. It is
argued here that tracing the linguistic and cultural lineage of deformity and disability
enables a continuous reflexivity on socially and culturally significant problems (Shi-
xu 2011, 212; 2012a). Research scholarship on the marginalisation of deformed and
disabled members has been largely relegated to medicalization of manifest cases, in
addition to the social, cultural and national peripherilization, and even subjugation,
of these alternative states represented by deformity and disability. The sociocultural
ramifications of these marginalised selves require a more urgent discourse analytical
critique and attention in order to unpack the inequalities and tensions inherent in the
private and the public nomenclature of in/sanity.
Philosophical orientation: tensions between confession and proclamation
Madness in Zimbabwean society, and in other societies as well, is always
simultaneously included and excluded from discussions of reason and rationality.
Foucault (1961/2005, 37) argues that ‘silence is the form in which madness is
expressed’ and this article discerns a love-hate ambivalent relationship with the
insane, an attraction-repulsion complex towards lunacy. The terrifying prospect of a
mind in turmoil, or a mind of turmoil in one’s progeny necessarily frightened parents.
There was an inherent shame in and about madness that remained unutterably
painful and was therefore pushed to the margins of possibility in the marriage
institution. Madness, like other physical deformities and disabilities, was generally
Journal of Multicultural Discourses 135

perceived as a state of degradation and bestiality, a pathological state that conjured
and demanded both silencing and marginality.
In the taboo narratives of pre-colonial, colonial and even post-colonial
Zimbabwean society, there was a litany of bizarre consequences that would befall
anyone who disparaged taboo. Many of these grotesque consequences centred on the
deformed and crippled possibilities in one’s progeny, particularly the loved ones and
children. Crippled children, the deformed and the disabled were therefore seen as
abnormalities, the terrifying signature of punishment meted on those that
transgressed the social coda and prohibitions of specific societies (Chigidi 2009;
Mkanganwi 1998; Pfukwa 2003; Tatira 2000). In their being, such deformed and
disabled figures subvert innocence and become concretely symbolic reminders of
mortality rather than act as symbols of victory over inevitable death.
One specific deviation was madness, which was linguistically couched in
euphemistic terms that underestimated the qualitative ogre that society interpreted
as responsible for the insanity. Terms such as mupengo (the mad one), fuza (an
inveterate fool) and benzi (lunatic) were hardly used to describe states of madness
and instead, such euphemisms as anonzwa musoro (he suffers from an incurable
headache), dzakadambuka (his brain wiring is faulty), dzakasangana (the wiring in
his brain is entangled), dzinokuta (he has a short circuit in his wiring) and
dzakatamba nevanana (even though he is an adult, little children have played with
the wiring and left it disoriented) were used almost as honorific terms expressing fear
and veneration in order not to invite similar curses into the speaker’s household.
When such a deviation occurred amongst the people, the sufferer was referred to the
biggest mental institution, Bulawayo Psychiatric Hospital, which was, in common
parlance, called eNhlanyeni (the place of the mad ones). Oral narratives rebound with
bizarre tales of how the authorities at the institution treated the inmates, especially
under the tests for normalcy. Patients were asked to carry water in holed buckets
from the communal tap. Should the sufferer be disoriented, they would continue
on this Sisyphean task and arrive with empty buckets, whereupon they would start
to refill their buckets all over again. Those whose senses had returned to them
and whom the winds no longer afflicted in tempestuous fury would mock and scorn
the authorities about the holes in the buckets and ask for proper carriers that did
not leak.
Zimbabwean orature also abounds with loaded idioms and metaphors that
communicated both taboo and warnings about mental deviance and sociologically
sanctioned behaviours. In order to warn parents of terrifying possibilities,
Zimbabweans chided wakazvara sekera muchitende, literally meaning that any parent
should desist from laughing at the follies and aberrations of any child, lest their own
child behaved in similar fashion. Another indictment was in the form of a banal
statement, mugoni wepwere ndousinayo, implying here that only those without a child
would dare declare their authority and wisdom with regard dealing with aberrant
children. The implied wisdom in this declarative statement lay in the reality that the
behaviour of children could not be predicted: they could be the source of pride or
disappointment and all that the adult world could do was hope for the best. One
other familial expression was wako ndewako, kudzana kwebenzi unopururudza,
effectively harping on the fact that whatever a wayward child did, the parents of
such a fool would protect and guard their progeny and bloodline even in their
untoward gestures, rather than publicly rebuke or mock the folly displayed. In the
wisdom of oral narratives from Zimbabwe, all the living were warned never to mock
136 M.L. Hove

or laugh at deformities till death throes set in, lest the same deformities and
disabilities you mocked befell you or your progeny: seka vurema wafa. In these
illustrations and more, disability was perceived as a curse that could befall any
member of society, and the authorised practice was to keep silent about such
difference. Members of society who were afflicted with seasons of madness were
therefore addressed or referred to in euphemistic terms such as mhengeramumba (the
one who raved in madness behind locked doors), ane mhepo (she/he is possessed by
wild and tempestuous winds) murungudunhu (literally, an albino, the strange and
lonely white man who lived in the rural areas) and chimumumu (literally, a dumb
person, the voiceless/unvoiced one). Albinism was an especially feared biological
condition to the extent that in earlier days, such children were killed at birth as they
were thought to be harbingers of worse curses to follow.
This paper contends that even in the normative practices embraced through the
spectral lenses of modernity, albinism, together with other manifestations of
difference, are still regarded as aberrations that elicit sympathy rather than empathy,
an ambivalent accommodation that is fraught with fear than a total understanding
of the state. In a provocative essay called, ‘To speak or not to speak: an encounter
with J. M. Coetzee’s Foe’, Laura Tansely (2010) argues that ‘Foe’s voice is usurped by
the ogre of silence’. Coetzee, like Lessing in the characterisation of Ben, vampirises
the encounter with Foe. There is a dense presence and tension between silence and
voicing presence that inhabits this deformed mbeveve, an oppressive and frightening
reality of marginality. With his cut tongue, Foe actualises the knotted process of
voicing immanent in him, as opposed to the powerlessness of non-voice. Readers
enter his mental and psychological recesses in the last two chapters in order to fully
appreciate his narrative of silence in presence.
The nation and its apparatus of cultural fictions
Musaemura Zimunya centres the experiences of Tambu, a typical deviation amongst
the Manyika people in a poignant short story called ‘Tambu’. Tambu’s people aptly
call her zhenenene, a forceful idiophone that echoes her frenetic habituations,
including her inclinations to fetch water from a communal well and her involuntary
but incessant smile:
Tambu was obsessed with going to the well to fetch water. She went to the well from the
moment of sunrise to the moment of sunset . . .. It seemed Tambu was possessed by the
spirit of the water goddess . . .she was heard singing with whirlwinds that tore past her
father’s home. (Zimunya 1983, 36)
Tambu is born into a deviant family where her father has defected from the
communal rhythms of lore in order to join a sectarian church movement. He
chastises the community for what he calls a hedonistic way of life and chides their
beer-drinking inclinations. He prophesies their ultimate destruction in the midst of
their lascivious clasps. Meanwhile, his own family is afflicted by inexplicable ailments
ranging from the stutter to runaway marriages and scary deaths:
. . .Tambu’s father was a prophet of a fanatical cult which saw all other religions and
most of the villagers as heathens . . .he says no school for children because that will
make them rebellious, immoral, lustful, evil and only fit for the devil. The girls wear
skimpy skirts . . .which he always likens to unguarded pots which dogs will lick. He hates

radios because they play corrupt music which makes boys and girls dance obscene
dances in the night . . .. (Zimunya 1983, 38)
In all his admonitions of the village and its people, Tambu’s father envisions
himself as the Pauline puritan whose mission is to exorcise the village of its detritus.
In the meantime, the villagers ‘had long relegated the family to the level of zoological
creatures [and] anybody who wished to see deviations went to Tambu’s family’
(Zimunya 1983, 41).
In a moment of madness, this village prophet rapes his own demented daughter:
His claws sank in her as she lay fallen on the ground. While she struggled mutely
something sharp pushed between her legs. The earth moved, the moon trembled in the
sky . . .. She wanted to scream at the man who reminded her of her father, who looked
like him, groaned like him, smelt like him and breathed like him . . .Tambu’s mother
cried and cursed . . .as she washed the blood and the mucus from her daughter’s legs and
feet. (Zimunya 1983, 43)
The villagers have a harvest of tales, anxiously waiting to see who this child of a
cursed union would resemble amongst themselves, and they ‘felt robbed . . .denied
the opportunity to see what strange animal would have come out of this strange girl’
when the pregnancy prematurely aborts. Such is the callousness of the village in the
face of calamity, depravity and difference. The palpable tension between normality
and abnormality, sanity and insanity, joy and malfeasant mockery is concretised in
this short story as a characteristic reaction to deviation from the normative practices
of Zimunya’s society.
The earliest version of psychic deformity inscribed in literary discourse in
Zimbabwe is, perhaps, Phineas Kamunda, the protagonist in Thompson Tsodzo’s
Garandichauya (1975). Tsodzo’s characterisation of Phineas Kamunda etches the
razor-thin difference between sanity and insanity. Phineas purportedly holds a degree
in English, and in his monolingual village, his adumbrations in English make no
sense at all. He is framed on the traits of Lakunle of Wole Soyinka’s famous play,
The lion and the jewel (1978). In this characterisation, Kamunda earns himself the
label of madness because his speeches and language are deliberately pompous, self-
important ejaculations that ostracise rather than redeem him. When one is
excessively westernised through education, and begins to set oneself apart from the
norms of society, they are immediately labelled mad Á anopenga.
In another novel, Dzasukwa, mwana asina hembe, Tsodzo aptly captures the
anomalous relationship between a mother, whose mouth cannot shut up on any
occasion, and her son, who is born mute, without a language facility: mai muzavazi,
Tatari imbeveve. To be unable to speak because of a genetic defect is, ipso facto, to
deny the authority of the word. It is essentially a denial to name the world and to be
named by it, although the erudite world continues to historicise and name the world
of non-speakers. Tatari, the stutterer whose words cannot completely name his
world, projects that oppressive, provocative and frightening reality of marginality.
The most successful oxymoron in Tsodzo’s novel lies in the relational placement of
talkative mother against silenced son; the tension is palpable between silence and
voicing experience. To a large extent, Tsodzo ‘vampirises’ Tatari as the silent
character who can only do but never speak.
National narratives and historiography commonly exclude schizophrenics and all
those suffering from some aberration of the mind. It is argued here that narratives of
138 M.L. Hove

the nation exclusively push to the margins the identities of the deformed and the
crippled; that narratives of nationhood and its achievements become projects that
not only sanitize events and history but silence the deformed ‘other’. In postcolonial
writings that emerge from Zimbabwe, the most poignant figures representing
deformity include an ex-guerrilla, Munashe (Pawns), Mazvita (Without a tongue)
and the national president, Robert Mugabe in Heidi Holland’s Dinner with Mugabe
and also in Peter Godwin’s The fear.
In the titular poem to his scathing and satirical anthology, Chirikure Chirikure
(1998) speaks on behalf of his village as it turns against a recalcitrant son. In this
poem, the child has incessantly demonstrated abnormally wayward behaviour and
now the village vows never to sleep again (Hakurarwi) before they rectify the
obscenities and psychic deformities of their own son:
Gore rino hakurarwi
tisina kuzvigadzira
Rino gore hakurarwi
tisina kuzvipedza
Hatingaregi uchiwondonga, takangotarisa
Hatingaregi uchibvoronga, takangonyarara
Hatingaregi uchiwondomora, takangodzvondora
Hatingaregi uchibvonyonga, takangoduka
Zuva riya wakatuka mbuya, tikazvinyarara
Riya zuva wakatengesa pfuma, tikangonyarara
Nezuro wakapisa dura, tikazvinyarara
Nhasi woisa tsvina mutsime?
tsvina mutsime?
tsvina mutsime?
(We shall not sleep until calm is restored and matters are settled. The culprit and deviant
son in question has committed a number of crimes against the community: breaking well-
known traditional norms, stirring up trouble, creating havoc among the villagers Á and no
one has ever retaliated Á that is until this moment. The poet becomes specific Á the culprit
insulted an old woman (his grandmother); sold family property (without consulting any
one); burned down the granary (the family’s only source of food and livelihood) and
now this same unrepentant son has shat in the communal well! The repetition in the last
stanza Á tsvina mutsime Á echoes a popular Shona saying which can only be loosely
translated in Ian Fleming’s words as: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; thrice is
enemy action. Something must be done).
A nation’s tendency to valorise its cultural hubris is extensively exploited in this
poem as the village becomes incensed by the behaviour of its mad son, one whose
deviance demands some socially legitimated form of surveillance and reining. As in
all experiences of contact with deviance, a prescriptive, proscriptive and protective
gesture is called for in order to limit the damage likely to be caused by this son who is
a simulacrum of Ben in Lessing’s The fifth child. The satire about the satyr in
Chirikure Chirikure lies in the habitually deviant son who defiles the public water
reservoir and it becomes a telling indictment on the politically maverick proclama-
tions of the national president. Delusions of invincibility resident in his mind call for
a modern propitiation and a collective coup de grace, Chirikure suggests.

The unspeakable anxiety induced by deformity and disability in Zimbabwean
literary discourse manifests itself in a double-pronged silence: silence for fear of
consequences and silence about the reality of the mental condition to the extent that
muteness becomes a normative practice in the face of such debilitating abnormality.
Alexander Kanengoni, in Echoing Silences (1997) succinctly captures this ritualiza-
tion of knowledge, memory and silence through a fictional rally that is addressed by
Herbert Chitepo, the parcel-bombed secretary of ZANU:
It all began in silence. We deliberately kept silent about some truths, no matter how
small, because some of us felt we would compromise our power . . .then the silence
spilled into the everyday lives of our people and translated itself into fear which they
believe is the only protection that they have against imaginary enemies whom we have
taught them to see behind their shoulders. They are no longer able to say what they
want. Neither are they able to say what they think because they have become a nation of
silent performers, miming their monotonous roles before an empty theatre . . .. We owe
the people an explanation. (my emphasis)
The protagonist in Echoing Silences, Munashe, has been severely brutalised by the
experiences of the liberation war. He inserts himself into the struggle on the
conviction that dislodging settler colonialism will usher in new possibilities. But he is
initially disillusioned by the factions and fractions at base in Mozambique. His initial
assignment is to bludgeon an innocent woman and her child to death, first because
she is called a witch, second because the base commander is done with raping her for
a full year and third because she belongs to a different faction. All these
contradictions and the experience of killing a woman and her child haunt Munashe
till he goes insane. Even after the appeasement by the local mhondoro (lion spirit)
Munashe is found dead the following morning because the narrative that he has
silenced because of fear conveys a different version of the war of liberation that has
been choreographed and conveyed as having been characterised by unity and
common purpose. Through his death, Munashe’s narrative can only be partially re-
membered, conveniently cleansed of the contradictions inherent in his mental
aberrations.
Deformity and disability Á and silence Á are ‘organic crises’ Á crises of
legitimation at both family and national level. The constructions and contradictions
of a hegemonic silence inform the cusp of this article’s central argument Á that the
disciplinary eternal silences about deformity and disability warrant that such
narratives and histories are put into conversation with the current struggle for
ideological and political hegemony that Mugabe embodies.
Familial and patriarchal pressures, together with invocations of African
‘tradition’, have different valences that generate different tensions that invariably
produce complex cultural histories. The arrogance, violence and paranoia of Ian
Smith’s Rhodesia have apparently been re-invented in the postcolony. Meanwhile, the
location of the deformed and disabled has remained on the margins. Michel
Foucault’s ‘Ship of fools’ has de-anchored and re-anchored with a cargo whose anti-
colonial cultural histories and specificities demand urgent tactics, instead of silence.
This article has hinted at the silencing practices of Zimbabwean society with
regard abnormal and aberrant children. Quite often the deformed and disabled
children were kept away from physical and conversational contact with society in
general: they were kept indoors, away from the prying and surveillant gaze of ‘the
normal’. In the contested narration of nation, several writers have conceived the
140 M.L. Hove

1970s liberation war fighter as a ‘son of the soil’ a la Wilson Katiyo’s novel. In this
regard, all adult fighters, male and female, were configured in the emerging literature
as ‘children’. The daring deeds of and the feats accomplished by these ‘children’
became a trope for interrogating psychic and political deformities, disabilities and
marginality in the ensuing literary discourse. Thus the national president, Robert
Mugabe, was portrayed as ‘a son of the soil’ whose militancy was, in part, a
constituent element in the imagining and emergence of a new nation. Writers such as
Heidi Holland (Dinner with Mugabe) and Peter Godwin (particularly in The fear)
scripted texts that publicly proclaimed the mental and psychological aberrations of
Mugabe as specifically causative ingredients for the implosion and decay of the
nation state. Outside Dambudzo Marechera’ poems, ‘Oracle of the Povo’ and
‘Throne of Bayonets’ and his novels, House of Hunger (1982) and Black Sunlight
(1983), Zimbabwean literary discourse had kept a lid on physical and psychological
aberrations. Holland and Godwin are therefore among the first to depart from the
architecture of silence that had long characterised the orature and literature of this
nation. For the first time, oral, historical and literary texts directly parade and mock
the mental and psychological imperfections of this ‘son of the soil’, in spite of, or
despite the silencing practices of a postcolonial militarised state apparatus.
In the preface to Dinner with Mugabe, Heidi Holland instructs the reader that this
is ‘the story of one man who lost his moral compass, with dire consequences for
many others’ (Holland 2010, xv). She continues to impress the depravity of Mugabe
such that the resultant template is of a man who ‘squandered his life’s work . . .
turning into a power-crazed peevish autocrat’ (Holland 2010, xv). Since this ‘child of
the soil’ has become morally and politically deviant, Holland justifies her civil and
political responsibilities in enlisting the services of Shayleen Peeke, a ‘psychologist
with 15 years’ clinical experience’ in order to ‘analyse [Mugabe’s] state of mind’
(Holland 2010, xv). Holland has already classified Mugabe as ‘the world’s most
puzzling and destructive’ (Holland 2010, xv), a two-pronged trait that necessitates
clinical inquiry and psychological intervention. For Holland, as for many outsiders,
Mugabe becomes an enigma whose capacity to perplex and bewilder are endless.
Even Lord Carrington, the last of British governors in the transition to Zimbabwean
independence, confesses that ‘[Mugabe] was not mad at all. People say he’s mad but
he isn’t at all . . .He’s a puzzle’ (Holland 2010, 67).
Throughout the chronicles of Mugabe’s political and private life, Holland inserts
moments of her bafflement with the personality and behavioural traits of Mugabe.
She audaciously compares him to Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister: ‘both
defied international opinion, giving the finger to the whole world in much the same
belligerent way’ (Holland 2010, 82). Later she states that ‘he possesses a strong vein
of schoolboy obstinacy’ (Holland 2010, 90). On the contentious issue of land re-
distribution, Holland states that Mugabe was incensed and was bitter when the west
criticised his land policies:
How can these countries who have stolen land from the Red Indians, the Aborigines and
the Eskimos dare to tell us what to do with our land? (Holland 2010, 99)
Terms such as ‘paranoid’, ‘delusion’ and ‘internal demons’ are used frequently to
refer to the conundrum that Holland perceives in Mugabe. In the penultimate pages
of her chronicle, Holland admits that ‘while he may not be mad in a clinical sense, his
is a mad way of being in the world, a cut-off, deluded way’ (Holland 2010, 234).

The difference exhibited by Mugabe needs rehabilitation, a complete institutional
reformation in the thinking of Holland. She seems to suggest that issues of
democracy, good governance, the rule of law and legislation regarding the land
have all been dealt with constitutionally by the west and the template that they have
produced is full/fool-proof. To that extent then, she intimates that all Mugabe should
do is impress the template onto his own nation state and he would then be regarded
as ‘normal’ rather than deviant, towing the line rather than pulling in the opposite
direction. The ‘season of madness’ that Holland writes so eruditely about presents a
version of Ben/Bob ‘squatting and . . .snarling’ (Lessing 1988, 97) at his siblings and
the west, a grotesque child whose departure from innocencia is both shocking and
deplorable.
Timothy Brennan (in Homi Bhabha 1994, 49) argues that the ‘political tasks of
nationalism directed the course of literature in the era of [decolonisation]’. In the
light of this assertion, Brennan contends that such ‘literature participated in the
formation of nations through the creation of a national print media’ (Bhabha 1994,
49). Peter Godwin’s The fear could therefore be legitimately read as part of that
‘apparatus of cultural fictions’ which plays a decisive role in the projection of Robert
Mugabe as ‘a son of the soil’ whose psychotic aberrations have quickened
Zimbabwe’s current political and economic demise and marginalisation.
Quite early in The fear, Godwin paints Mugabe as ‘a homicidal African
dictator . . .a spiteful Robespierre’ (Godwin 2010, 6). The general Zimbabwean
populace is projected as ‘officially the unhappiest people on earth’, where again
Mugabe is ‘belligerently unrepentant’ and ‘driven by his own rampant megalomania’
(Godwin 2010, 6). Physically, Godwin points to ‘Mugabe’s ludicrous moustache that
begs for Adolfian allusions’ (Godwin 2010, 10). He emphasises that Mugabe is a
‘dictator’ (Godwin 2010, 12) and one who ‘will die in office’ (Godwin 2010, 14)
rather than gracefully hand over power to someone more acceptable to the west.
Furthermore, Godwin observes that Mugabe’s ‘reaction to opposition has invariably
been a violent one, inherent in his political DNA’ (Godwin 2010, 19). Projected as the
‘madman of Zimbabwe’, Godwin relentlessly chronicles the fissures in a postcolonial
state where ‘fear is such a crucial part of the way [Mugabe] runs things’ (Godwin
2010, 24). In terms similar to Holland’s, the Godwin script deploys provocatively
nuanced adjectives and nouns such as ‘homicidal’, ‘belligerent’, ‘megalomania’ and
‘madman’ in order to convey ‘a landscape and a people grotesquely altered, laid waste
by a raging despot’ (blurb, The fear). The myth of the polite, perfectible (read
manipulable) Zimbabwean society is therefore transformed into repulsive images of
the ogre that is resident in and afflicts Mugabe in the writings of Holland and Godwin.
Zimbabwean societal conspiracy generally hinged on the unsaid maxim that it is
by confining one’s own deranged progeny that one is convinced of one’s own sanity Á
and the sanity of their society. In deliberately silencing the grunt and roar and snarl of
the madman, the loveÁhate tension is further accentuated in the caesura that
establishes the distance between ‘reason in madness’ and ‘madness in reason’ as
Shakespeare’s King Lear proclaims through the bastard Edmund. One immediately
observes that insanity displays a liminal and ambiguous position: even if madmen
are not necessarily taken seriously, they, like Mugabe, inherently display provocative
and exceptional talent. The fury and ire of Holland and Godwin lie in that Mugabe
is, perhaps, the madman who names Empire’s grotesque private parts in public, a
modern version of a mhengeramumba whose expletives against the west have got to be
contained.
142 M.L. Hove

Conclusion: implicit and explicit findings on discourses of deformity and disability
Discourses of and about marginality Á including enunciations, proclamations and
prohibitions Á constitute in/tangible human inventions that have been generationally
transmitted to convey sentiments, values and shared understandings of both
individual and collective behaviours. Aberrant behaviours (oral sources; Chirikure),
political and psychic disorders (Godwin 2010; Holland 2010) and grotesque actions
(Lessing; Zimunya) have been identified as markers of deviance and the linguistic
sanction over these is performative silencing. Language, as a transactional instru-
ment of culture, captures the idiom of its users and becomes a register of the speakers
of that language, as Prah (2010, 2) submits. The oral and literary discourse that has
been examined exhibits fear, anxiety and ambivalence towards the manifest presence
of deformity and disability. In the human rights and justice-seeking admonitions
proffered by Holland (2010) and Godwin (2010), there is an apparent overreaction
and West-centric encouragement of hostility towards a perceived demented
praesidium. Such a simplification and ‘regimentation of the [Zimbabwean] public
mind’ (Brady 2002, 8) validates a West-centric monologic toolkit on human rights
abuses and democratic principles. The apparatuses of silencing in Zimbabwean
orature and literature inhibit the ugly from the ears of the hearer-madman as
propriety considers such dissemination as irreverent and exclusive.
In sum, this paper has demonstrated that behaviours such as those exhibited by
Ben Á eating raw chicken in a savage fit, raiding the fridge and dismembering
carcasses Á are, at best, never made public. The grotesque is often hushed, in anxious
moments where such abnormalities cannot be wished away. Sociological and
psychological limitations in humanity’s capacity to deal with difference, especially
abnormality, deformity and disability have exerted endless pressures to the extent
that, often, silence and internal bleeding over the manifest presence of such curses
have governed reactions towards such incidents. Denial has been an inveterate factor
of the spectacular power to disturb that is incarnate in deformed children and those
closest to framed identities of belonging.
Deformity and disability as both biological and political realities have also been
explored, particularly in the satire and political narratives that have been
characterised postcolonial disaffection and the ensuing, border-crossing exilic
experiences of the Zimbabwean population. Many a question has been asked of
the e´migre´ about their silence and perceived inaction with regard to the political
malfeasance in Zimbabwe and, perhaps, this paper has demonstrated the roots of this
silence.
Notes on contributor
Muchativugwa Liberty Hove holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics and is currently interested in
nation and narration, auto/biography and the interface between literary production and
cultural practices in Africa. He has published scholarly articles in refereed journals.
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