The Sunday Mail
Ignatius Mabasa
I am about to eat an elephant, but I pity myself because my mouth is small and my stomach does not have the capacity. In order for me not to get constipated, I will only attempt to eat this elephant’s tail.
My dear brother, teacher and mentor Charles Muzuva Mungoshi is dead.
The clever, unassuming, deceptively simple, versatile, pathfinder, pacesetter, master of storytelling and successful experimental writing is gone.
Do we realise our loss as a nation, as a people? A historian, teacher and prophet is dead, and Zimbabwe is poorer.
I first met Charles Mungoshi when I read “Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva” many years ago.
If you know the story of Rex Mbare, Magi and Rindai, you will know that pain has the ability to walk off the pages of a novel and sit next to you in a way that you think only Hollywood is capable of doing.
Although I met mukoma Charles on numerous occasions, it was on two other occasions that he made me feel special. The first of these instances was when he told me that he had read my novel “Mapenzi”.
I felt small. I wanted to run away.
Knowing that Charles Mungoshi had read my novel was just too much for me to handle.
What did he think? I think he could read my mind that I was waiting for his verdict. And the verdict came.
He smiled and said in his deep and rumbling voice, “Unogona!” I was speechless.
An endorsement and validation by Mungoshi was enough to assure me, encourage and want me to do more for Shona literature.
The next humbling time I was to meet Charles was during the Nama awards in 2014.
I never thought that one day I would jointly share an award with my mentor.
Charles Mungoshi’s novel “Branching Streams Flow in the Dark” shared the Nama accolade for the Best Fiction.
It was my wish one day to have talked about this with him, but alas, death beat us.
If you track the development of the Shona novel, you will understand that we have the old world Shona novel, which was basically an extension of Shona folktales.
These are the early novels by the likes of Giles Kuimba, Patrick Chakaipa and others.
It is the arrival of Charles Mungoshi on the scene that marks the birth and development of a more sophisticated form of Shona literature.
Charles Mungoshi is the only Zimbabwean writer to write successfully in both Shona and English. He is the only writer to write novels, short stories, poems and plays — and write all these exceptionally well.
He was editor for the Literature Bureau and helped nurture a lot of African writers.
Despite his international fame, Charles was one never to live the life of the proverbial lizard that praised itself. He won the annual Book Centre of Rhodesia Award for the person contributing most towards the progress of literature in Rhodesia.
Charles was almost shy, yet he was witty and humorous. I will miss his deep and hearty laugh that Memory Chirere used to say sounded like a tractor going uphill.
I have many questions swimming in my head right now.
So what happens to that legendary script that Charles Mungoshi had been writing for years?
I really wonder what kind of characters he had in that story and why his conversations with them would often spill into the real world. When those that saw Charles conversing, arguing or stressing a point with his characters, they may have thought he has lost his marbles, but good literature with convincing characters is born out of many shades of disputation within.
Farewell Manhize, your works are here to remind us that the African belongs to the soil and if he cuts himself from it, the future is uncertain.
