On his blog, Moments in Literature, Emmanuel Sigauke has posted two articles on aspects of The Uncertainty of Hope.
In one post, he succinctly and favourably reviews the novel. In another post, he focuses on a question posed by one of the characters in the novel and tries to answer it.
The Women of Mbare
Valerie Tagwira, The Uncertainty of Hope,
Weaver Press, Harare 2006, 368 pp.
Mukai — Vukani. ‘Jesuit Journal For Zimbabwe’, No 40 July 2007.
Reviewed by Oskar Wermter SJ.
This is the first novel by Valerie Tagwira, a medical doctor specializing in gynaecology. The women of Mbare are her subject, dependent on men and yet struggling on their own for survival during these recent years of economic and social decline. This an exciting book for any Mbare resident who will have to say on every page: this is exactly what it is like.
The central character is Onai Moyo, kind to all and loving, a loyal wife and deeply caring mother of three children, loyal to her husband even though love has long died and he, a drunkard and womanizer, abuses and assaults her so badly that she has to seek treatment in hospital, hiding the true cause of her injuries from the doctor. Katy, her best friend, urges her to leave her abusive husband, “Do you want us to take you out of this house in a coffin?”(6). And Katy’s daughter Faith, a law student, reflects angrily, “Why should a woman allow herself to bear so much at the hands of a man? Her own husband? Had his act of paying bride-price reduced her to nothing more than a possession?” (26).
One of her husband’s other women is Sheila, though Onai does not know it, who says, “You know what, Mai Moyo? When I was a prostitute, I didn’t care about catching HIV. I thought I would die from hunger, anyway. Kusiri kufa ndekupi? As a prostitute, I could at least die with a full stomach. Now that I know I will die of AIDS, I think dying of hunger is far much better. If I could have another chance….” (62). Women are vulnerable, not only Sheila and her colleagues, but also Onai, so anxious to preserve her status as a respectable married woman. Marital intercourse for her, though, is not a matter of love, but of self-defence. Female condoms “made her feel more in control of her sexuality and definitely less vulnerable to Gari’s demands. During his various degrees of drunkenness, he often failed to notice when she had a condom on. This meant that the fights about him wearing a condom were less frequent than before. What a relief it was that on most evenings he was drunk, almost to the point of paralysis!” (70).
Gari comes home only to eat and sleep, but does not provide for the family. Onai has to do that as a street vendor which takes up her whole life. She cannot even go to church any longer. “The need to make a living for her children had been much greater than the desire to spend her Sunday mornings in prayer and worship. Somewhere along the line, the core of her faith had disintegrated” (127).
As an informal trader Murambatsvina (Operation Clean-up) hits her especially hard. “On arrival, she was shocked to find shards and splinters of wood and asbestos where her three shacks had been standing only that morning. The bulldozer was just reversing slowly back onto the road. It had flattened a portion of her fence and the flower-bed in its wake” (137). Her lodgers have to take their belongings to Tsiga grounds and stay in the open. Her own informal trade is now a criminal activity.
Faith, a child of Mbare and now a budding lawyer, is outraged. But fear prevails. “You can say what you like to me, but not to other people, as I’m sure you know very well. And don’t worry about coming here…. There have been clashes with the police today, so it’s not safe…,” says her mother.
Her fiancée Tom, a ‘new farmer’ and businessman, plays it safe and adopts the official line. He is alarmed when she calls the assault on the Mbare people ‘a gross abuse of humanity’. “It wasn’t as if he didn’t care about people’s suffering. He did. It was just that he wanted to get on in life. He had done well so far, and he knew too well how the wrong word and at a wrong time or in the wrong place could set one back.” He has benefited from the land redistribution and cannot afford to turn against his benefactors. Faith feels deeply for her parents and mainini Onai, but she, too, is not going to risk either her future career or her prospective marriage. Success in life is getting out of Mbare. Even her parents who make their money by dealing in foreign currency hope to move eventually to a stand in Mabelreign.
Not Murambatsvina, but her husband’s death destroys Onai’s home. Her brother-in-law claims everything, house and money. “She had lost everything. Although Gari had paid a full bride-price, their marriage had never been registered. What rights did she have to anything?” (248). Customary law, at least as interpreted by greedy relatives, is not kind to widows.
The characters may be fictional, but in every other way the novel is a factual account of what happened and still happens in a place like Mbare. The author lets the facts speak for themselves. She does not discuss politics. She does not ask who is responsible for Murambatsvina, the decline of the hospitals, unemployment and homelessness. Readers know that anyway. But they may not know what it is like to be at the receiving end of this government’s policies. At least not in such graphic detail. That this book provides in abundance.
Assistant Commissioner Nzou is the closest there is to a representative of the ruling class. He has foreign currency dealers arrested during the day and buys US dollars and South African Rands from them at night.
At least for Onai the story has a happy ending. She escapes to Borrowdale to a job she had been looking for for a long time. But Mbare remains unredeemed.
Novel revisits Murambatsvina
Bertha Shoko, The Standard, March 25, 2007.
[The] Uncertainty of Hope is a tragic story that captures the lives of two women from Mbare — Harare’s oldest high-density suburb — who take us through some of the most difficult patches of Zimbabwe’s political and economic
problems in 2005.
The main character in the book is Onai Moyo, a vegetable vendor and mother of three.
Her best friend is Katy Nguni, an illegal foreign currency dealer who disguises herself as a market vendor. We are introduced to the harsh realities of Zimbabwe’s troubled economy and subsequent social problems as a result.
Onai is married to Gari: abusive, irresponsible and an alcoholic, employed as a section manager by a beverage company but fails to provide for his family, forcing his wife to irk out a living as a vegetable vendor. Yet, he is prepared to take good care of his numerous mistresses, better known as “small houses”, while ignoring the needs of his own family.
Through his extramarital affairs, two of them with self-confessed prostitutes, he exposes his wife to HIV and Aids.
In contrast, Onai’s friend Katy is married to John, a loving and caring husband who earns a living as a cross-border truck driver. So great is his need to provide for his wife and daughter and escape the poverty of Mbare that he is caught up in the illegal trafficking of young girls and women into South Africa and doesn’t tell his wife about this.
His daughter, Faith, a final year law student at the University of Zimbabwe is looking up to him for tuition fees and will miss the examinations if he does not get the money somehow. His crude forex deals with a senior police officer and his illegal trafficking land him in trouble one day and he is forced to flee the country to escape arrest.
Katy and John are concerned about Onai’s abusive relationship and fear that the worst can happen if she stays put but their friend is adamant. Even after almost a week’s stay in hospital after being seriously beaten by Gari, and attempted counselling by a female doctor who attended to her, Onai cannot gather the courage to leave Gari and uses her children as an excuse.
Like a battered wife, Onai defends her position and attacks her friend Katy during one such conversation: “And where do you think I will take my children? Huh? Have you gone that far with your plans to re-arrange my life?”
She even makes excuses for her husband’s abusive nature: “Please, let me be, Katy. Gari will change. He is going through a difficult time at work. I know he’ll change as soon as things get better for him.”
But she gets a rude awakening when Gari brings into their family home Gloria, his mistress, and introduces her as his second wife; she would be moving into the family home at the end of the week, he says.
This was the last straw for Onai. In a fit of rage she fights Gloria but her husband runs to his mistress’ defence and beats up his wife, before chucking her out of the family home for “being disobedient”. Feeling dejected and betrayed, Onai leaves home and hearth and is taken in by her friend Katy.
But these social problems are only part of the rot in the country. Through the lives of the two heroines, Valerie Tagwira boldly shows how Operation Murambatsvina affected Mbare, the home of the informal sector, and left hundreds homeless and without any sources of income.
Katy and Onai are some of the people who lose their vending spaces and find they have no source of income any more. Their backyard shacks and cottages are also destroyed during the operation and they watch helplessly, as they sleep in the open.
The state of the country’s hospitals, with no medicines and drugs and demotivated and burnt-out health workers are depicted graphically in the novel.
After admission in hospital with a deep cut on her forehead, Onai is stitched up by a grumpy doctor, with no local anaesthetic. The food shortages, the fuel queues and the runaway inflation, shortages of anti-retroviral drugs — Tagwira touches on them all.
This is a “must read” for anyone with a passion for good literature. Tagwira manages to make me angry, happy, hopeful, and hopeless, as she narrates this touching story about Zimbabwe through these two powerful female characters.
© The author/publisher.
Valerie Tagwira 