The sweetest dream : Lessing, Zimbabwe and Catholicism

In her later work, Lessing refers frequently, if in passing, to Roman Catholicism, often as part of her growing interest in spirituality, which began while she was writing The Golden Notebook. Some of these references are in the accounts of her travels in Zimbabwe, but they are also to be found in her autobiographies, reviews and occasional journalism. Because of their frequency, she cannot be regarded as entirely indifferent to the church. A valid line of enquiry into Lessing’s work asks whether her dislike for the church, formed during her traumatic four years as a young child in the Salisbury convent, remained her dominant impression, or whether in later life she found in Catholicism, particularly in Zimbabwe, an institution that invited more complex responses. An answer is provided in The Sweetest Dream, her last long novel that deals directly with Africa. The novel is partly set in Zimlia, a country that clearly suggests Zimbabwe. It avoids representing Catholicism and traditional spirituality as antagonistic; the complex plotting at its end rejects a confident division between the sacred and the secular, and suggests that, although Catholicism is on the whole a force for good, its powers in Zimlia are limited, confronted as the church is by the literal epidemic of AIDS and the power of traditional spirituality. One possible reading suggests that this latter power prevails.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss202018-01-31hb2016Englis

Doris Lessing's versions of Zimbabwe from The Golden Notebook to Alfred and Emily

Throughout her long career, Doris Lessing frequently wrote about Rhodesia or Zimbabwe, often giving the country fictional names, including Anna Wulf’s Central Africa in The Golden Notebook. Anna dismisses her account of the country as falsified by nostalgia, but her Black Notebook contains energetic debates about what the country would be like if blacks emerged victorious from an anti-colonial war. African Laughter, her account of her visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s and early 1990s, allows Lessing to consider how accurately these debates anticipated what the country became. Her narrative moves through delight at the new nation to disillusionment with the opportunities that are being wasted. Disillusionment is also the dominant mood of The Sweetest Dream, a novel partly set in the newly independent Zimlia, and Zimbabwe is explicitly discussed in an influential article called ‘The Tragedy of Zimbabwe’. In the 1990s Lessing wrote the two volumes of her autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade; several episodes of the Rhodesian section of the first of these are re-worked in sketches in her final book, Alfred and Emily, part novella and part memoir of a Rhodesia that her parents experienced as an extension of the trauma of the First World War. In each of these different types of narrative Lessing assumes a different subjective point of view, and there is no single objective account of the country. Her narrative choices require that Lessing’s versions of Zimbabwe are nearly always provisional.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/racr202017-01-31hb2016Englis

"Where to touch them?" voorstellings van die Ndebele in Rhodesiese fiksie

Vroeë sendelinge en reisigers wat Mzilikazi se Ndebele teëgekom het, het laasgenoemde sonder uitsondering as meerderwaardig teenoor ander mense in die verre binneland uitgebeeld. Eers toe hulle tussen Brittanje en Masjonaland te staan gekom het, het meer vyandige voorstelings van hulle die lig gesien. In daardie stadium is hulle allermins as edel beskryf, maar eerder as eenvoudige barbare wie se gewelddadige strooptogte die gebied om die Khumalo-koninkryk gedestabiliseer het. Die invloedrykste fiktiewe voorstelling van die geïdealiseerde Ndebele is dié van die Kukuana in Haggard se King Solomon's Mines wat, hoewel hulle barbare was, tog 'n neiging tot edelheid openbaar het waaruit die blankes kon leer. Die Kukuana het talle latere fiktiewe uitbeeldings van die Ndebele voorafgegaan. Latere romans het dikwels propaganda vir die British South Africa Company (BSAC) verteenwoordig. Veranderende voorstellings van die Ndebele het dus afgehang daarvan of die BSAC besig was om Masjonaland, en later Matabeleland, in te val, en of dit gelyk het asof die Ndebele hulle aan die gesag van die BSAC onderwerp, of daarteen gerebelleer het. Sommige romanskrywers het die Ndebele as slagoffers van die BSAC se gierigheid en wanadministrasie uitgebeeld. In latere Rhodesiese romans is hulle selfs as waardige bondgenote van die nuwe regeerdes van die suidelike Zambesiese plato beskryf wat die gesag uitgeoefen het wat voorheen die prerogatief van die Khumalo-konings was. ENGLISH: Early missionaries and travellers who encountered Mzilikazi's Ndebele invariably represented them as superior to other people in the far interior. Only when they were seen as standing between Britain and Mashonaland, did more hostile representations prevail and then they were reported not as noble, but as simple savages whose brutal raids destabilised the areas surrounding the Khumalo kingdom. The most influential fictional representation of an idealised Ndebele were the Kukuana of Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, who while being savages, showed a capacity for nobility from which the whites could learn. The Kukuana anticipated many subsequent fictional depictions of the Ndebele. Later novels often reproduced British South Africa Company propaganda and the changing representation of the Ndebele depended on whether the Company were in the process of invading Mashonaland, and later Matabeleland, or whether the Ndebele appeared to have submitted to the Company's authority, or had rebelled against it. Some novelists represented the Ndebele as victims of the Company's greed and misgovernment and in later Rhodesian novels they were shown as worthy allies of the new rulers of the southern Zambesian plateau who exercised the authority that had formerly been the prerogative of the Khumalo kings

Inculturated Catholicisms in Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

When African nationalist writers of the mid-twentieth century refer to Christianity they almost invariably represent it as being implicated in colonialism. Writers like Beti and Ngugi evidence this, and Ngugi in particular employs Christian mythology in order to displace it with a nationalism that is given spiritual dimensions. Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus ([2005] 2006. Harare: Weaver) belongs to a new generation of novels that take for granted Christianity as part of contemporary African culture and although the novel criticises the Eurocentric and exclusive Catholicism of previous generations, and demands respect for Igbo spirituality, no attempt is made to recover traditional religion in everyday life or to inculturate Catholicism in religious practices that are no longer central to the majority of the people. Christianity can never be separated from the cultures in which it seeks to express itself, however, and the novel suggests that the Church should be inculturated in a post-modern Nigeria. The post-modernity of the novel is characterised by the migrations of people, a mistrust of large intellectual systems, and a recognition that intellectual life can hope only for local revelations and tentative conclusions