Essay ReviewThe Study of the Shona NovelJ. HaasbroekTeachers' College, GweloThere has not really been any seriousliterary assessment, in depth or on a compara-tive basis, of modern Shona narrative writingin particular, or of Shona creative writing ingeneral. All that we have are the collection ofessays edited by E. W. Krog,! which deals withproblems and principles of modern creativewriting in both prose and poetry as well ascontaining some analyses of Shona and Ndebelenarratives and poems, and some review articlesor essays in journals by Kahari and otherscholars such as Fortune, Albert Gerard andBeat Inaucn.2The publication of Kahari's study ofChakaipa's novels* is then to be welcomed asthe first detailed study of modern Shona litera-ture, from the point of view of one particularauthor and his work; indeed, it may well bethe first detailed study of any African writer ofone of the indigenous languages of Africa. Itis therefore doubly unfortunate that this workunder review is not very good.Although the collection of essays by Kroghad the merit of making Shona writers andstudents of the language aware of some of thetheories and principles of modern Europeanfiction and some of the problems of the modern* G. P. Kahari. The Novels of Patrick Chakaipa,Salisbury, Longman, 1972, 110 pp. Rh$l,75.publishing business, the critical analyses of theShona narratives, that had been published by1966 and were there examined, left much tobe desired for the serious student of Shonacreative writing. These analyses followed theplot-character-theme-setting approach demand-ed by school children and their publicexaminers, so well exemplified in the countlessslim study-series on chosen English textsfound on the shelves of booksellers all overexamination-conscious Africa.As far as the authors of review articles areconcerned, it is significant that excepting forKahari, who is a native speaker of Shona, andGerard, who is a critic of vernacular writing inAfrica but presumably with hardly any know-ledge of the writings in the original languages,3both reviewers mentioned above are not pri-marily professional literary scholars or critics,although they do have a profound scholarlyknowledge of Shona.This is significant because it means thatKahari as a literary critic has not an authenticAfrican literary pedigree or tradition to drawupon, in the academic sense. Nevertheless hadhe at least followed the form of criticism beingestablished by Gerard and other critics of Afri-can creative writing, he might have done muchbetter in this study. Instead he looks (pp.117108-10) for the genealogy of his literary scholar-ship mostly to such dubious or culturallydistant ancestors as Henry James, Allot,Forster, Lever and van Ghent. James andForster, we all know, were practitioners aswell as theoretical giants in the tradition ofthat very specialised, relatively new( and per-haps very Western) type of prose fiction calledthe 'novel' that emerged in England, firsttentatively with Bunyan, and then moreassuredly with Defoe, Richardson and Fieldingin the eighteenth century. This novelty thatbecame the 'pure' novel of Henry James andForster is not an African form and so far hasshown all the signs of rejection in transplants.On the other hand, the story or tale, a veryancient genre found in all pre-technological,heroic cultures, all over the world, pre-eminently is an African form.The two genres are very different and mustnot be confused. The present reviewer haswritten elsewhere that story-telling is not novel-telling. Nowhere in Kahari's study is this ideaelucidated although it could have been amost fruitful organising principle for an ex-planatory approach to these writings. Ratherthere is a confusion of classification andterminology. Although there are many interest-ing snippets of information on the oral residuesof the tale to be found in Chakaipa's writing,we never get a clear picture of what PatrickChakaipa's oral literary antecedents reallymean in the context of the new medium, writingŠ a medium that must necessarily draw himtowards a more novelistic type of expressioneven against the strong pull of the oral narra-tive type of telling. Kahari consistently usesthe word 'novel' for what this reviewer con-siders essentially to be short written narrativesor written stories; and he insists that Chakaipais a novelist: 'Chakaipa, as a novelist, is a"'real wizard" (muroyi chaiye, as the expressiongoes in Shona)' (p.62). Then, in the lastchapter, which seems to have been tacked onafter new information and a new interpretationhave been considered, he concedes that in viewof the shortness of the stories, they might becalled 'novellas', or 'written rungano' in viewof their oral origin. Yet on the same page(p. 106) Kahari still insists that, 'Chakaipa'snovels are novels in every sense of the word'.He then gives his definition of what pur-ports to be a 'Shona novel':The Shona novel may thus be defined as apiece of written prose narrative of someconsiderable length, which involves thereader in an imagined real world whichthe author has created. It bears some re-semblance to oral tradition in tone and instyle. It is used in school as a teaching tool.Missionary influence, which has foundsupport in the existing African traditionalconservatism, is profoundly felt.This epitomises the great weakness of thebook: it is inconsistent, contradictory, andcompletely lacking in coherent theory.There is generally also a complete lack oflogical development, sometimes even fromsentence to sentence. Each section, not tomention paragraph, seems to add new ideasor information that is not logically related towhat has been said before or even flatly con-tradicts previous statements. Here is just oneglaring example:When it comes to characterization, Chaka-ipa is at his best. His characters' actionsare strongly motivated by human feelingsand intentions and not by strings remotelycontrolled by him (p. 60).Then, on the very next page he makes thisremarkable statement:Most of Chakaipa's characters tend to bevehicles of moral themes because they seemto belong to the realm of super-natural orpoetic justice (p. 61).Thus according to Kahari, Chakaipa's charac-ters are of the realistic psychological type ofthe novel, but he then immediately contradictsthis by saying that Chakaipa uses the charactertypology of allegory where the author is, infact, the puppet master who pulls the strings.In addition to the foreign literary heritagementioned above, there is also another perni-cious influence or inheritance at work in thisstudy: modern linguistic analysis. Literarycriticism, ever since the time of Aristotle per-haps, has at various times toyed with the ideasand methods of the exact or natural sciencesand, especially, in the last decade or so, withthe structural methods of linguistic science. Thequantitative methods of statistics and chartshave long been used when dealing with certainforms of textual criticism like prosody. This*118Ł »Ł *-can have great explanatory value but we mustnot lose sight of the fact that literary scholar-ship has its own valid methods that can beequally intellectual, systematic and illuminat-ing Š and what is more, these usually stresscomprehension more than explanation, responsemore than analysis.5Every now and then, and completely outof the context of literary appreciation andassessment, Kahari makes his bow to theaugust linguistic doyens and mentors of hisUniversity department by giving us, for in-stance, proverb structure (p. 40), ideophonicstructure (pp. 40-1), registers (p.44), substantivestructure (p. 74) and so on. These linguisticintrusions and the jargon in which they arecouched are quite incompatible with his over-all literary approach.Anthropology and sociology are also oftenbrought in as interesting snippets of backgroundinformation. But, again, there is no literary in-terpretation or assessment of this in the light ofChakaipa's writing. For instance, Kahari tells usin detail (p. 37) about traditional naming inShona, the inazha madunhurirwa (eponyms,nicknames, praisenames). All very interesting,but the far-reaching literary implications of thisfor characterisation are not discussed or evalu-ated with reference to any of the characters.In a public lecture on these writings, I oncesaid:There are two main schools of Africanwriting, as I see it. The one is Africanorientated and bound to memories of anindigenous oral tradition. The other isEuropean orientated and bound to an en-grafted written tradition. The first I wouldlike to call the thank-God-for-anything-written-in-Shona school. This school tendsto patronise the African writer not becausehe is a good writer but because he is anAfrican launching out in the new pres-tige medium, script. The idea is that writing,any writing, is helping the progress of Shonaas a literary medium so critical standardsmay be lowered in order not to discourageit ... Now we come to the second schoolof criticism. This school I would like toterm the we-must-apply-European-standardsschool, otherwise, it is implied, there maybe a literary lowering of standards, theremay be a desecration of the sacred cow ofnovel writing that is worshipped with for-malistic ritual in the West.6Kahari clearly does not consistently adhere toeither approach. His emotional response andsympathies are with the first (and he admits itin the book), but as professional literary critiche feels under obligations to the new order. Isthis not the dilemma of the divided man inAfrica who wants to have his cake (the oldAfrica) and eat it (the material rewards ofthe new)? He then has no overall or consistenttheory or framework of literary criticism andhence the confusion and contradictions through-out the book.These criticisms of mine raise the questionof v/hat can one properly expect of a mono-graph like this. Firstly, I believe the readerneeds something of a comparative and historicalassessment as to where Chakaipa, and hisfellow Shona creative writers, stands in anoverall framework of fictional theory whichcould also be relevant to the whole continentof Africa and so bring the continuities and dis-continuities of African literature in a newmedium into clearer perspective.Then the reader would like to have thethemes of this writer clearly expounded andlaid bare Š the sinews or muscles, as it were.For example, how does Chakaipa handle themajor theme of the cultural clash with itsmany subsidiary themes like the corrodingeffects of city life, the theme of the dismissalof parental authority and/or parents' permis-siveness, the theme of economic necessity orthe lust for money, the theme of magic, sorceryand witchcraft, the theme of an African identityand many others.Also, one would want to know whetherChakaipa's attitude is one of unquestioningacceptance of Western innovation and values,especially Christian values. What concessionsdoes he make to the older order, to the oldtraditions and dignity of his people? In aword, the evidence of syncretism, if there isany; otherwise his dichotomy of values. Forthis reviewer, Chakaipa, on the one hand, doesnot want to compromise with the grossermaterialistic aspects of Western culture but, onthe other hand, because of his Christian com-mitment as a priest, he cannot compromisewith the spirituality of traditional Shona119culture. Lastly, one would also like to havean assessment of the literary implications foran African author like Chakaipa creating in aforeign medium for a society that is largelyilliterate in the double sense of the word. Ithas been said that Chakaipa writes for schoolchildren books that will be acceptable to theeducational and administrative authorities ofthis country. How far is this true?There are many other literary questions leftunanswered. Does Chakaipa, for instance, everimply that characters who try to fit themselvesto European ways are making fools of them-selves and in the end suffer (i.e. the themeof an African identity)? Is the reader evermade to feel that the European or urban cultureis deprivation rather than acquisition? Arethe "New World Novels" popular precisely be-cause they do reflect the life and predicamentof the majority of Shona people and in spiteof their many defects?These and many similar questions are ofparamount importance to the literary criticlooking at an emerging vernacular literaturewhich is trying to cope with or make senseout of nascent and syncretic culture (or is itlargely anomie this literature is depicting?).REFERENCES^African Literature in Rhodesia, Gwelo, Mambo Press, 1966.zSee G. Fortune, '75 years of writing in Shona', Zambezia, 1969, 1, i, 55-67; A. S. Gerard, 'African literaturein Rhodesia', Africa Report, 1968, 13, v, 41-2; B. Inauen, 'Ten Years of Shona literature', Bethlehem, 1967, 7,224-6; G. P. Kahari, 'Bernard Chidzero's Nzvengamutsuairo', Teachers in New Africa, 1969, 6, x, 14-16;xi, 1920; (Kahari's 'Tradition and innovation in Shona literature', Zambezia, 1972, 2, ii, 47-54, is largelyreproduced in his book under review) ; J. Haasbrock review article: 'Ndakambokuyambira by Paul Ghidya-usiku', Teachers in New Africa, 1969, 6, iv, 20-1.sAlbert S. Gerard is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Liege, Belgium. He formerlyheld a similar position at the then University of Elizabethville, Congo."'Some aspects of Shona literary writing', unpublished paper presented to the Shona Language Committee,Salisbury, November, 1970.5 For a fuller discussion of these ideas, see R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature, London, Cape, 1954.s'The Shona Novels Š A Tentative Framework for Literary Criticism', unpublished paper presented in theDepartment of African Languages, University of Rhodesia, 1970.7Compare this with the syncretism found, for example, in Mofolo's Moeti oa bochabela, where according toP. D. Beuchat. Sotho beliefs and Christian thought merge, Do the Bantu have a Literature?, Johannesburg,Institute for the Study of Man in Africa, [1962] Paper No. 1, p.19.120