Stanley Nyamfukudza's The Non-Believer's Journey and Tim McLoughlin's Karima are two literary accounts of the war of independence which raged from 1966 to 1979 in the country then known as Rhodesia.² Postcolonial literature is marked by a political and social dimension, as are both these short novels, but where the one represents the white man's attempt to rationalise and order the chaotic world in which he finds himself, the other transcribes that chaos into the very substance of the text.

Karima recounts a massacre in a remote village in the north of Rhodesia. The novel relates the events prior to the slaughter of the villagers and portrays the characters involved in this act, both the perpetrators and the victims. The narration is recounted through the eyes of two protagonists, a white man, John Viljoen, District Commissioner for the region in which the village is situated, whose son, Richard, is involved in the killing, as a member of the Rhodesian army, and Dewu, a young black boy who lives in the village of Karima. Several other characters intervene from time to time in the narrative.

McLoughlin uses the cinematographic technique of juxtaposition of scenes, presenting the black and white worlds as contrasting chapters, recounting these distinct and conflicting points of view as a third person narrative. The time scale is carefully delineated over one weekend and the novel's three parts are named as Friday, Saturday and Sunday, within which chapter divisions clearly demarcate the text in terms of space and time.

Sam, the narrator of The Non-Believer's Journey, is the ultimate outsider, the educated black from the remote village, who does not belong to the urban society in which he lives and who has become alien to his own people, who have re-named him The Teacher. His professional life is not referred to; he lives in a twilight world of bars, walking home through a tattered landscape in the early hours of the morning, waking with a hangover in a dirty room. Sam travels to his own village, to attend a funeral, one of a series of "gatherings", a word used by Bhabha to describe the state of the exile in a foreign space. In The Non-Believer's Journey, the space is home, but a home which is occupied and in which the inhabitant is uprooted. The narrator emphasises the alienation of his own family within traditional tribal structure : "the Mapfekas (...) were regarded by older neighbours as immigrant upstarts" (p.84). The complex nature of social and political relations is evident in Sam's meeting with a farmer, who has been nominated as Master Farmer. The latter is very proud of this honour, awarded by the very white government which he hates and is doing his best to overthrow, by providing food and shelter for the black freedom fighters. By returning to his home village, Sam is forced to confront his dilemma and, in dying, confirms his belief in nihilism as the only possible outcome to this particular conflict.

The Non-Believer's Journey is also constructed in spatial, linear terms since the narrator travels from town to country, enacting his personal drama as a physical journey. Nyamfukudza's first person narrative makes no attempt to see the war from the white man's point of view, although there are voices other than the narrator's, which are sometimes used as sounding boards, sometimes as autonomous views on the narrator's central story. One of these voices is that of a woman who briefly becomes Sam's lover and who questions his attitude towards life. Unlike in Karima, the narrator's point of view in The Non-Believer's Journey is central to the novel's progress. The more intimate, less ordered structure reflects the novel's discourse, in which states of drunkenness and dream contrast with McLoughlin's neatly defined narrative. The Non-Believer's Journey is permeated with doubt about the desirability of any system of government, even that of the black terrorists on whose side the narrator belongs.

It is the nihilism demonstrated in the final episodes of these works which is of interest. The protagonists are doomed because of historical circumstances. Postcolonial fiction seems frequently to contain an exuberance born of multiplicity, a sense of joy, evident, for example in Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Zimbabwean war literature, although situated within the context of postcolonial writings and containing characteristics which mark it as postcolonial, reflects a chaotic situation which spawns a spiralling cycle of destruction related to nihilism. The troubled nature of even recently published Zimbabwean fiction³ may be due to this dark inheritance and may reflect the fact that violent upheaval engenders nihilism in a people and its writers long after the conclusion of conflict.

Postcolonial literatures are defined as taking us

from the monocentric into the polyphonic, from the dominance of a single culture into convergent cultures, from pure ancestry into hybridisation, from the novel of persuasion to the novel of carnival.(...) postcolonial fictions help to decolonise our imaginations, by enacting various modes of escape from the mental straitjackets in which imperial habits of mind had locked them.⁴

Although these elements are part of Karima and The Non-Believer's Journey, they do not contribute to a sense of unity or security; discourse is disparate, uncertainty prevails, the characters are in ignorance of, or, if they are informed, they react negatively to a given situation. McLoughlin's protagonist is presented as an admirable man, employed by an evil system; he believes in work and duty, apparently unaware of the impending disaster, which undermines his good intentions, both in personal and professional terms. Voice is plural in McLoughlin's writing; through splitting of narrative, the schizoid, subversive nature of the concept of nation is conveyed. The Non-Believer's Journey imparts the same sense of ambivalence, in that the narrator/hero, Sam, is unheimlich⁵ in his own country; he is a wanderer, an inhabitant of the borderline between urban and rural, between traditional and Western society. He chooses the bottle rather than the gun to escape from, rather than combat, racism and injustice.

A postcolonial reading of McLoughlin and Nyamfukudza allows us to contemplate the current situation in Southern Africa. The white tribe is problematically ever present; Nyamfukudza's vision has proved, as we will see, to be unnervingly accurate and the guilt which permeates McLoughlin's text is accepted and rejected by individuals, according to the place they occupy in this highly complex landscape. Both of these literary texts, although published in the early 1980s, reflect the current state of loss of control expressed by the people of Southern Africa, who have a highly developed sense of scepticism towards representatives of authority, especially politicians and officials from international organisations.

For both authors, colonial discourse is not located at the centre of the narrative. In Karima, the white protagonist's professional role of District Commissioner, labels him as representing the colonial system, but his half English, half Afrikaans name indicates his hybridity. We are reminded that the historical situation in Rhodesia is not a colonial one; Smith unilaterally declared independence on 11 November 1966, installing a white, rebel government.⁶ We should note, however, that the government's policies were modelled more closely on those of South Africa than those of the United Kingdom. Thus, pre-independent Zimbabwe is already a decentralised phenomenon, socially and politically. The characters of both texts are African, regardless of their colour, but, in spite of the absence of overt reference to colonialism, these novels are written in response to a war between settlers and indigenous people. Both texts are, therefore, permeated with a crisis of "identity-in-resistance"; they reject "the authenticity of origins, of cultural continuity and belonging"⁷ equated by theorists with a movement towards the idea of Nation in postcolonial counter discourses. Their very negativity is a response to a situation engendered by colonialism, but not a direct manifestation of colonialism. Anxiety is the most prominent feature of these texts, anxiety founded on multiplicity of origins, on fragmentation of identity, on lack generating desire. Thus the war literature of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe is an essentially disruptive and, in some senses, nihilistic debate, in which the concept of Nation is openly challenged and where violent reaction to multiplicity threatens to overtake democracy.

The structures of power in both of these novels are violent in nature. The person who wields the gun ostensibly controls all those around him. Viljoen opposes the exchange of power from white to black hands in Karima and underlines the breaking of tradition by the young : "Your young men have rejected your traditions. They do not care about respect. Politics possesses them now. They want power (...). Power over me, over you, over everything that stands in the way of their own progress" (Karima, p.193). The white soldier in The Non-Believer's Journey, incensed by the intelligent replies of an educated black man, demonstrates the power of his gun and his position by threatening Sam and his fellow bus passengers (p.35). Yet, the narrative casts doubt even on this premise of violence ensuring power. Sam, in The Non-Believer's Journey, asserts his right to die by his own choice, not through the decision of those who wield the power, either on the black or white side : "No, I'll choose my own way of going, let them sort out their problems, before they call on me to die for their rivalries. We have two armies fighting Smith's army, and they will sort each other out when they meet, forgetting their common enemy, bloody Ndebele, bloody Shona, bang bang. No I won't, I want to be sure I don't go that way" (The Non-Believer's Journey, pp.55-56). These words reflecting the campaign of violence by Shona against Ndebele, once the former obtained political power,⁸ highlight the complexity of the African situation and the ambivalent reaction of the individual which underlies the more obvious construct of power through ownership of weapons. In Karima, the gun-wielding white youths who take part in the massacre, demonstrating their power over the villagers, are tools of a regime led by a madman, whose power over the white minority lies in effective use of propaganda, symbolised by the radio broadcasts which soothe the young soldiers, allowing them momentary escape from the horror of responsibility which will haunt them for the rest of their lives: "The barracks and the gunfire, the thud of hard metal seats, the dark, shadows, screams, gunfire, silence, gunfire, blazing huts, all were lost in this blaring lilting rhythm" (Karima, p.163). The list of horrors predicts the nightmare of guilt which will haunt generations after the war.

Zimbabwe's war literature brings the postcolonial situation into focus. War forces the taking of sides, but, this particular conflict, like the Vietnam and other civil wars, involved civilians in a no-win situation, where loyalty to the guerrilla army resulted in reprisals from Smith's forces and vice versa, as reflected in the works considered. Lives depend on being able to achieve a high-wire balancing act, existing somehow in the no-man's land, situated not between armed conflict, but in the space where it takes place. More often than not, language adds to the confusion and becomes a barrier between the protagonists.

The language of Christianity veils the truth (e.g. Karima, pp. 176-177); the Christian pastor's inner thoughts undermine the weight of his own sermons; each character denies the truth of the other's language. The protagonist's wife, in Karima. believes the words of her cook ("When they talked politics in the kitchen he always came back to his fear of the politicians", p.196) until her husband undermines her naive credulity : "John said he talked like that to please her...". One version of events is recounted and immediately undermined by another; black society is riddled with informers; white society surrounded by a wall of propaganda. The Non-Believer's Journey charts a less complex cartography. The protagonist's reaction to the barrier of various discourses is refusal, physical violence and, finally, death. He rejects religion, traditional beliefs and tribal in-fighting : "And how do we respond? Go down on our knees and ask for the help of our dead ancestors. You pick up a gun and blow that fucking white man's head off, never mind who our ancestors are. You don't go about whipping up these old, divisive passions at the same time" (p.92). This rejection of traditional beliefs in both novels is overwhelming, even if it is countered by Chenjerai Hove's current exploration of the past and the influence of the ancestors, in his most recent publication.⁹

A bus conductor's agile performance described in one of the novel's rare moments of joy symbolises the precariousness of life in general :

He would step on the back of the seat nearest the door, swing his arms and torso out and, getting a grip on the lower rail of the carrier on the roof, he would stand on the top edge of the wobbling door, reaching down for the luggage and tossing it on to the roof, shouting impatiently at the passengers choking in the clouds of dust to hurry up, dammit, did they want a ride or didn't they? Many conductors had lost their lives, thrown on to their heads by the bus jerking to a halt or misplacing a foot as they performed their dangerous antics on the roofs. But they were undeterred. They were the characters of the countryside and even the passengers had come to expect that sort of recklessness from them (pp. 30-31).

Neither set of protagonists succeeds in sustaining their balancing act; each faces death, emotional or mental instability, as an outcome of conflict. Thus, the historical situation of the books' settings is a metaphor not only for the brokenness of postcolonial identity: hybridity, cultural pluralism, polyphonic voice, but also for nihilism, invoked through refusal, incomprehension, ambivalence. These two novels, representative of Zimbabwean war literature, not only describe a tragic, historical situation, but are metaphors for the African post-war, postcolonial situation whereby

the cohesive limits of the Western nation [...] turn into a contentious internal liminality providing a place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal and the emergent. [...] The nation reveals, in its ambivalent and vacillating representation, an ethnography of its own claim to being the norm of social contemporaneity.¹⁰

8. Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace : A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands (1980-1988). The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and The Legal Resources Foundation, 1997. Available from The Legal Resources Foundation, 5th Floor, Blue Bridge, Eastgate, Harare, Zimbabwe or on Internet at the Mail & Guardian Web Site.

9. Chenjerai Hove. Ancestors. Zimbabwe: College Press Publishers, 1996.

10. Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994, p.167.

Bibliography

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge, 1989.

Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture.London: Routledge, 1994.

D. Brydon and H. Tiffin. Decolonising Fictions. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1993.

Chenjerai Hove. Ancestors. Zimbabwe: College Press Publishers, 1996.

Titsi Dangarembga. Nervous Conditions. London: The Woman's Press, 1988.

T. McLoughlin. Karima. Gweru: Mambo Press, 1985.

Barbara Makhalisa. Eva's Song. Zimbabwe: Harper Collins, 1996.

S. Nyamfukudza. The Non-Believer's Journey. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1980.

Chris Prentice. "Some Problems of Response to Empire in Settler Post-Colonial Societies". In Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson De-scribing Empire, Post-colonialism and textuality. London: Routledge, 1995.

Ian Smith. The Great Betrayal. London: Blake Publishing, 1997.

Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace : A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands (1980-1988) . The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and The Legal Resources Foundation, 1997.

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