INTERVIEW: ‘White Rhodesia was not Africa: it was England in the tropics’
30 October 2011
Tinashe Mushakavanhu interviews writer and academic Paul Williams (insert) who was born in England but lived in Zimbabwe during his formative years. In this wide ranging conversation, we discuss identity issues, reading influences, writing matters in Zimbabwe and his two critically acclaimed books, The Secret of Old Mukiwa and Soldier Blue. He has been a professor of literature and creative writing in various locations in Africa, America, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. Williams, who holds a PhD in Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, was instrumental in introducing creative writing into the African Literature Department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and founded and edited the creative writing journal JALA. He has won numerous awards for his teaching, research and creative writing.
Wikipedia describes you as having been born in England but grew up in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). How do you relate to these two countries bearing in mind the historical friction that persists to this day?
I never considered myself English. And I was never at ease being a ‘Rhodesian.’ However, I think the present historical friction is primarily Mugabe-made. ‘Britain is the cause of all Zimbabwe’s problems!’ Strangely enough, in the sixties and seventies the Rhodesians had a similar antipathy to Britain, when the UK declared sanctions on the rebel colony.
How was it like growing up in Rhodesia?
This is the question I have tried to answer in my memoir Soldier Blue. Growing up white in Rhodesia was quite simply a lie: whites lived in a bubble of propaganda. White Rhodesia was not Africa: it was England in the tropics. It ignored African cultures and history, and made African people invisible. At school I learned Latin, French, Italian, but not a word of Shona or Ndebele. From my peers, I learned racism and sexism and arrogant myopia. I had a very privileged upbringing, and it was not until I was called up to fight in the Rhodesian army that I began to see through the façade of this ‘Western Christian Civilisation’ and experience the horror of war. The memoir chronicles my attempt to disentangle myself (unsuccessfully) from being ‘Rhodesian’ and from fighting in the war.
What kinds of books were you reading as a child? Did they impact on you in any way?
All the books I read as a child were English and American. I was addicted to Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton’s William, and Mark Twains’ Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. And so the first young adult book I wrote (The Secret of Old Mukiwa) was in the style of an Enid Blyton Famous Five adventure.
Your parents had to flee Zimbabwe after four decades in the country. Is it because they owned a farm and they were displaced from it or they just didn’t feel safe in Zimbabwe anymore? And what are your thoughts about the land reform and its effects on displaced families?
No, my parents were not farmers—my father was headmaster of Hartmann House (at St George’s), but when he retired, he felt increasingly alienated and felt there was no future for his family in Zimbabwe, especially as he supported the opposition party, and the government increasingly scapegoated whites for everything. But the effect of the farm invasions made everyone feel unsafe–that the government could send thugs to your house, business, and you had no recourse was very unsettling. And then there was the economy. The pension he had paid into his whole life shrivelled into nothing.
And regarding the white farmers, I find it hard to see them as victims, even though they are victims. It’s just that for ninety years in Rhodesia, and for twenty years after independence, white farmers enjoyed a privileged status. The issue of living on stolen land was never resolved. When reading and viewing white accounts of the farm invasions (Cathy Buckle’s African Tears, Ben Freeth’s Mugabe and the White African for example), what strikes me is a certain blindness to history, and a tone of self-righteous condescension and paternalism. But of course, Mugabe’s solution was not land reform at all: his so-called land reform merely displaced hundreds of thousands of farm labourers and in many cases replaced the white baases with black chefs.
The Zanu PF rhetoric is to treat any [white] Zimbabwean with suspicion or label them as die hard Rhodies. What defines identity and nationality?
Theoretically race should play no part in national identity. You cannot help being born white or black, and therefore this must not exclude you from your birth right to be Zimbabwean. To say, as some people do, that whites are not Zimbabweans is to use the same racist reasoning used by Ian Smith’s Rhodesians to exclude blacks from political rights–skin colour. So we have to get away from race in defining identity or nationality. But of course we can’t. Being white or black connotes a whole lot of historical and political baggage. We have not integrated our society enough to ignore skin colour.
Interestingly, you introduced yourself to me in an email as an [ex?] Zimbabwean writer. What are you then? Is it because you find descriptions problematic or limiting?
At university, I took quite a radical anti-white stance, and felt that because of my ‘whiteness’ I could not be expected to be accepted by black Zimbabweans just as I was. I could not sweep my whole racist, privileged past under the carpet: I felt I needed to ‘decolonise my mind’, to use Ngugi’s phrase, or become the ‘coloniser who refuses’ [to use Memmi’s phrase]. Am I a Zimbabwe[an] writer because I am from Zimbabwe, or because I write about Zimbabwe? Is Doris Lessing a Zimbabwe[an] writer? Is Wilbur Smith a Zimbabwe writer? Is JM Coetzee now an Australian writer and no longer a South African writer? Writers are beyond limiting boxes of nationalism. Perhaps writers are their own ‘tribe’.
Do you read contemporary Zimbabwean fiction?
Like many young Zimbabweans I fell in love with Dambudzo Marechera’s writing. I also read avidly–Stanlake Samkange, Stanley Nyamfukudza, Charles Mungoshi, Chenjerai Hove, Shimmer Chinodya. But it was only later I asked myself– where were the women writers? The first generation were all male. And then came along Yvonne Vera with her wonderful lyrical style and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s amazing Nervous Conditions. The latest Zimbabwe novels I’ve read this year are Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not, and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort.
Would you agree that Zimbabwean literature is a literature of two halves: black and white? I find that there is a serious disconnect. Black writers write about the black experience. White writers write about the white experience. Can it ever be one?
Unfortunately, it is very divided. Just look at the last two Zimbabwe novels I’ve read this year—I had to keep asking myself—is this the same country these writers are writing about? JM Coetzee once said “Am I white? Am I black? These are the first questions one has to ask in this country.’ He was talking about South Africa, but the same applies to Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe inherited two separated cultures and they have not been integrated. But there is also an ideological problem in trying to resolve this literary Apartheid. The South African writer Njabulo Ndebele points out that we tend to write characters as types, caricatures, and unless we share total living conditions, we cannot write accurately about others. I’ve noticed that when white writers write about black characters or vice versa, they tend to portray one dimensional stereotypes. It’s hard to get outside one’s skin and the prejudices imposed on us by history. However, there’s also the danger of appropriation, especially from white writers–speaking on behalf of other races, speaking on top of them, silencing them. I became interested in JM Coetzee because he writes about this very problem–the inability to get outside yourself and understand the other. What is interesting about Coetzee is that he writes without a single direct reference to race. Disgrace for example has no mention of skin colour, and that’s perhaps the way to go, to consciously erase race from our writing…. I also like writing that attempts to cross over this great divide. Tim McCloughlin’s novel Karima (1985) gives voice equally to white and black characters. I’ve tried to do the same in my own writing. Soldier Blue is told from the perspective of a naïve white boy, but I have inserted voices of ancestors, alternative histories and interviews with ZIPRA and ZANLA combatants that intrude upon and disrupt this ‘white’ narrative. And in The Secret of Old Mukiwa, I consciously try to bridge that divide by writing entirely from the point of view of two black teenagers.
There have been a few “white memoirs” coming out of Zimbabwe from writers like Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Judith Todd, Dan Wylie, and Jennifer Armstrong. Why was it important for you to write a memoir about growing up in Rhodesia [or Zimbabwe]?
Catharsis? Confession? Nostalgia? Actually two books influenced me to write Soldier Blue. The first was Julie Frederikse’s None but Ourselves (an illustrated history of Rhodesian war propaganda). It opened my eyes to re-examine the lies my childhood was founded on. Second, Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind helped me decolonise my ‘white’ mind. So my memoir was an act of deconstructing my race and gender. I documented how I became a white male, a racist, sexist, a ‘Rhodesian’, and traced my attempts to wriggle out of this ‘white skin’. But the book is also an emotional act. Living away from the country you love, your heart yearns to recapture the smells, tastes, memories, feelings of the land. I felt very alienated living in the USA: I felt the tug of Zimbabwe’s red earth, its past, its energy and this is the nerve point of the memoir.
Your other successful book, The Secret of Old Mukiwa, won the coveted Zimbabwe International Book Fair prize for young adult fiction. What is it about? And what is the inspiration behind the story?
In the 1980’s and 90’s, my mother was a school librarian in Harare, and she noticed that in spite of the many local Zimbabwean books on the shelves, school kids were only taking out Enid Blyton books. The Shona teacher at the school was puzzled. Why don’t they read local books? she asked. Why are they participating in their own [mental] colonisation? Why doesn’t someone write an African Enid Blyton adventure? So I took up the challenge: I used what was appealing about Enid Blyton—plot structure, formula, kids as heroes…. and wrote The Secret of Old Mukiwa. It’s about a brother and sister whose parents cannot afford their school education and send them to work for their strict uncle in Mhangura. There they find a white farmhouse which was deserted in the war, rumoured to be haunted by a ‘mukiwa’ ghost. They are forbidden to go there, but they see strange goings-on at night there so decide to investigate…
What is the symbolical significance of mukiwa in white Zimbabwean fiction? I am here also thinking of Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. Of course, it could be pure coincidence.
By using the Shona word, I am [and I think Peter Godwin is too] trying to look at myself from the outside, from an African point of view. Again, that attempt to decolonise whiteness. The similarity of Godwin and my title, however, is pure coincidence, even though I wrote my novel first!
In South Africa, you were instrumental in introducing creative writing into the African Literature Department in the University of the Witwatersrand, and also founded and edited the creative writing journal JALA. Do you think we need the same infrastructures in Zimbabwe to support and encourage young writers?
Definitely. I see you have done some wonderful things to support and encourage writers. When I lived in Zimbabwe, the Budding Writer’s Association nurtured some good writers. Young writers need a place where they can feel safe to experiment and be encouraged without being judged or criticised. I started JALA (Journal of the African Literature Association) because there were so many voices but no avenues for expression at that time. There were only two or three ‘highbrow’ literary journals in South Africa that published established writers, and we needed a journal that published budding writers, that promoted writing in progress and offered a supportive platform for writers to try out their talent. So we launched JALA and for the first issue, published everything submitted (even the unpolished stuff) with the idea that this was a workshop, a work in progress, a dialogue, a melting pot of ideas. I also teach Creative Writing at university, which offers emerging writers a space to ‘play’, get feedback, to experiment, and to read each other’s work. A writing community is very important for support, as a lot of writers tend to be plagued by self-doubts.
You are not just a writer but an academic too. How do you effectively merge these two roles into what you call fictocriticism?
When I first started writing, there was no room for creative writing in the academy. You had to be a literary critic, stand outside the creative artefact and speak a detached academic discourse. But now creative writing has become a respectable part of English departments everywhere in the world. I began my academic career by teaching in the African Literature Department at WITS, which was founded by writer Ezekiel Mphahlele, and later headed by Njabulo Ndebele. Both of these writers were also academics who both strongly believed that Creative Writing had a place in the academy and that studying literature and writing literature should go together. Creative Writing, they argued, empowered students to break down the elitist idea of a literary canon. So I introduced creative writing in the tutorials as a method of analysis, as well as an alternative assessment tool to the essay. I believe that teaching Creative Writing as well as teaching Literature from a creative writing point of view (looking at narrative craft, looking at the writer’s writing process, looking at what I call ‘literature from within’) has enlivened and created new ways to approach the study of literature. Fictocriticsm, for example, opens up the possibility of using more creative ways to write about literature, instead of the usual ‘objective’ academic discourse of the essay. In the department where I teach, for example, students are encouraged to approach the criticism of literature using creative methods.
Books by author:
Soldier Blue (2008)
Encounters from Africa: An anthology of short stories (2000)
The Secret of Old Mukiwa (2000)
AIDS Awareness Programme: Junior Secondary – Loverboy (1992)
