148BOOK REVIEWSsays Caute, all three share a kind of heroism in the refusal to let their separatevoices be quelled by the State and its apparatus.Of course, it is not as simple as that in the telling Š certainly not when dealingwith Marechera Š and Caute acknowledges as much in his Preface to the essay.He will, he disarmingly tells us, make some changes to 'the truth': certainconversations may be slightly altered; certain gaps may have to be filled. Butthrough this fictive approach Š paradoxically Š events and people (oftenunnamed) are eerily recognizable, certainly to Zimbabwean readers. And it seemsan ideal way of writing about Marechera, whose own relationship to objectivereality was often problematic but whose work Š given its rootedness in theshifting states of the unconscious Š offers far more historical perception thanmost other Zimbabwean writers. Indeed, Caute's leaning towards the fictive inthis essay frees him so that he can offer a much more complex picture than iscommon in journalistic writing of his hero/anti-hero: the man whose writing'blisters every totem pole'.But what happens when Caute turns to the novel form itself? Is he freed evenfurther? Perhaps in his earlier work like Comrade Jacob (London, Quartet, 1974)and The Decline of the West (London, Panther, 1968) this was the case. But inThe K-Factor Š his metafictional account of the death of White Rhodesia Šsomething goes very wrong. The story seems promising enough: it is 1979 and Mrand Mrs Laslet of Hastings Farm are surrounded by the effects of war. EnterHector Nyangagwa, supposedly researching land issues for his Ph.D. But is he allhe seems? Or is he really working for the comrades? And is not there somethingdecidely strange about the Laslets? Does their six-mdnth-old baby really exist or isit a figment of everyone's imagination?This final question is never really answered and yet the baby is central to anyunderstanding of the novel. It is the focal point of Sonia Laslet's racial neurosis,but when the child is 'kidnapped' by a group of guerrillas their ransom note ispainfully ironic: 'Your baby has gone. What have you lost?5, it reads. So is thebaby meant to stand for White obsessions and fantasies? Or are the references toSonia's 'virgin birth' to be seen in coejuction with the predominant motif of thebook: sexuality at its most animal and brutal?Perhaps Caute feels that metafiction of this kind is the best way of exploringthe absurdities and senselessness of White Rhodesia. But what are we left with? Abrittle, superficial novel shocking only for its gratuitous violence. And, anyway,the Rhodesia of 1979 was far more surreal than any writer Š except DambudzoMarechera Š has yet been able to grasp.University of ZimbabweFIONA LLOYDTo Breathe and Wait 'By Nancy Partridge. Gweru, Mambo Press, 1986,242 pp.,ZS7.88, ISBN G-86922-379^8.This story of Deidre, a widow in the Bulawayo of 1978, whose knowledge thatshe is dying brings her an ever-increasing awareness of perception about those sheloves and the country she lives ie, will perhaps excite uncomfortable memories forBOOK REVIEWS149many Whites who lived through the pre-Independence war years. A newdimension is added to her relationship with her friend Katharine when she at lastleaves to understand the latter's conviction that the war being waged to preserve'White supremacy is intrinsically immoral. The right of every human being tofreedom, both personal and political, becomes obvious to her with the realizationthat Julia, her maid, and increasingly her friend, is exactly like herself in everyrespect and that their mutual interdependence must be based on an equality offact as well as of personal recognition. At the same time, she acknowledges thather children have the right to stand alone, and that emotional independence is asunimportant as physical liberty. Threaded through the story is Deidre's own lateblooming of heart and mind, paradoxically as her physical strength declines.The tale is told in a stream-of-consciousness style which does not alwayssucceed; some judicious pruning might well have sharpened the impact of theever-flowing, sometimes rambling, thoughts, recognizably feminine in theirpreoccupation with home and family. Though the atmosphere of those years, themood of those involved, is well captured, the book would certainly be improvedby careful editing and a sharpening of the focus on the central problems. Finally,Mambo Press must be taken to task for the unacceptably large number ofmisprints and the erratic punctuation, notably as regards the use of the questionmark, which are bound to irritate the reader.University of ZimbabweVERONIQUE WAKERLEYWomen and Law In Southern Africa Edited by A. Armstrong. Harare,Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1987, xiv, 281 pp., Z$5.00, ISBN 0-949225-48-7.Independence is not only for One Sex By K. Bond-Stewart. Harare, ZimbabwePublishing House, 1987, 128 pp., Z$6.50, ISBN 0-949225-50-9.Young Women In the Liberation Struggle, Stories and Poems fromZimbabwe By K. Bond-Stewart. Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1984,67pp., Z$3.00, ISBN 0-949932-85-X.Zimbabwean Women in Industry By P. Made and B. Lagerstrom, Harare,Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985, 60 pp., Z$3.50, ISBN 0-949932-98-1.All of the above books are published in Zimbabwe Publishing House's 'Womenof Africa' series, but they are very different in concept and style. ZimbabweanWomen in Industry irritated me in its bald and somewhat didactic style, andparticularly in the number of uncaptioned photographs which Š to me at leastŠ-were not self-explanatory. Presumably this book is aimed at the 'working class'women's market, to sensitize women workers to their specific disabilities in thelabour market and to organize them rather more effectively than has been the caseto date; in which case, it would be better produced in Shona, Ndebele and Tongathan in English.Young Women in the Liberation Struggle is based on the writings of femaleex-combatants in the course of their English studies at Ranche House College.There is a tendency in some of the pieces to mythologize, in the style of traditional