The Stone Virgins was published in 2002. The book was written by Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera and the story follows the lives of two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba. We see how life unfolds for them in the backdrop of war and conflict. She immerses her readers into the world of postcolonial Zimbabwe. Her prose are as beautiful as they are terrifying. And her ability to interweave her narrative style with lucid imagery, phantasmagoric landscapes, and the power of moving poetry makes this book an unavoidable read. Vera’s central focus rests on her women characters, who are not only the protagonists but are the very life force of her stories. Vera also gives the land a subtle voice, and a close reading will reveal the murmuring cries of its heart. It is these murmurs that speak of the becoming of a young nation that once sought to strive for independence. A nation birthed at the cost of its own people.
Vera vs. History
Although Vera spent a huge part of her life studying and teaching in Canada, she showed herself to be an acute observer and eloquent interpreter of her home country’s difficult past, and particularly the effect it had on women. After a long stay abroad, Vera returned to Zimbabwe in the mid-1990s. She was appointed director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, where she taught and facilitated the growth of local artists. Her tenure at the gallery proved to be another important point of observation as the country drove itself towards the looming period of the land reforms. History was an important factor for Vera. But her approach to history differed from other novelists. For Vera history functioned as a subservient tool. Her characters were not to be found in history, rather history was to be found in her characters. Vera took seriously the role of the subject and the subjective experience.By highlighting the importance of the subjective experience Vera draws attention away from History with a big ‘H’, which always seeks validation. By doing this Vera is able to highlight what’s important as well as omit what is historically ubiquitous. And in turn she restores a forgotten truth that lives outside the clutches of politics and history. The intention to emphasize the effect of what happened in her country on her characters’ lives allows Vera to avoid retelling events either in the service of idealistic nationalism or state sponsored interpretations of history. As evidence of her disinterest in representing national political figures the names of Abel Muzorewa, Canaan Banana, Joshua Nkomo or even Robert Mugabe never appear on her pages.
akiradesignhouse
We only come across the names of Solomon Mutswairo who became Zimbabwe’s poet laureate, and the great spiritual priestess Nehanda Nyakasikana who led a revolt against the British South Africa Company in the first Chimurenga*. So it is Vera’s primary desire to limit her powers of recreation to the emotional and psychological state of those ordinary individuals who were caught up in these historical moments.
*The first war of independence, 1896-97.
1950-1980
Vera sets the first half of her story in this period. The times are marked by a sense of stability. As far as description goes Vera sets us off to somewhat of a peaceful start. This is reflected in the busy streets and in the travels of the people. We begin in Bulawayo. From Selborne avenue, Vera carries us through the city like a bird in flight, seeing everything that can be seen. The city’s colonial history is felt only through the names of its streets and avenues: Rhodes street, Grey street, Jameson road, Catherine Berry Drive and so on. We are told Selborne goes straight out of the town’s limits and heads all the way to the infamous city of Johannesburg, South Africa. Vera compares this city-to-city linkage with an umbilical cord, claiming that part of that city, Johannesburg that is, lives in Bulawayo.
We are told of the voyage that black labourers have to make to the city of gold to dig up minerals. Vera writes, ‘They have been dipped deep in the gold mines, helmeted, torchlit, plummeted, digging for that precious gold which is not theirs.’ Indeed Johannesburg has been a magnetic force that has historically created for itself a centre of gravity, pulling in as much human resources as it can from key regions in southern Africa. Vera speaks of the black man who ventures off to Johannesburg for opportunities but gets allured by its lights and sense of modernity, only to end up forgetting himself and where he’s from. And worse, he even forgets his wife and children. She writes, ‘The bus also brings the disintegration of relationships, empty parcels with no letter enclosed, or a letter with a message of which the heart cannot partake.’ The damage done by the city is far reaching and its effects are felt generations down the line. The poignant sense of this matter is captured in Hugh Masekela’s song, Stimela:
There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi
There is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe
There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique
From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland
From all the hinterlands of Southern and Central Africa
This train carries young and old, African men
Who are conscripted to come and work on contract
In the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg
And it's surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or more a day
For almost no pay
Deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth
When they are digging and drilling that shiny mighty evasive stone*
*Excerpt from Stimela, composed by Hugh Msekela, Live at the Record Plant, 1974.
This early setting is quite important for what comes later, as Vera begins to set up one of her key themes, which is that of the existing tension between the man and woman of this story. And from the city of Bulawayo we are then taken to a rural enclave called Kezi, where most of our story takes place. Kezi is a stark departure from Bulawayo. It is defined by its natural landscape rather than its man-made structures.
The land stretches far out and over into the hills of Gulati, where the towering boulders of rock take up space like buildings. Huts are the customary form of shelter here. And one does not hear of such names as Grey street, Jameson road, or Catherine Berry Drive. Instead footpaths that were carved from peoples footprints have become street markers. Here in rural Kezi nature’s ebb and flows are far more felt, and their effect on the senses far much greater than would be in any other place. Nature’s silence is heard as the wind blows over the dried riverbed, as rainwater settles on the hut’s roof and a pleasant scent of wet thatch fills the air. And finally the road leading from Bulawayo to Kezi takes one to Thandabantu Store, a grocery and supplies shop for the locals of Kezi. But Thandabantu Store, which literally means ‘to love people,’ is much more than just a shop. It is where the community meets. It is where stories are told, and gossip gets carried around. It is where students meet after school. It is also where lovers meet. These sections of the novel don’t necessarily follow conventional narrative forms. We hear almost nothing about the characters backgrounds. These initial chapters play out more like dreams, or even memories, of a long-forgotten past, yet still desired, a nostalgic stream of consciousness.Vera meanders the landscape like a spirit moving about in the wind, eavesdropping and picking a few thoughts and emotions, here and there. The store is where we first meet one of our central characters, Thenjiwe.
Jacob Lawrence
Thenjiwe
Thenjiwe makes her appearance just a few chapters into the novel. She heads off to Thandabantu Store to buy some groceries. There she meets a man that is seated alone at the step of the shop. We are told that the shadow of the roof cuts his face into two halves – one dark, one light. This image brings to mind the dichotomous nature of the stranger, which is one that is steeped in uncertainty. And since there hasn’t been any familiarity established, the presence of this man can mean anything. He could represent the light, presumably an amicable nature. Or he could represent the dark half that is cast in the shadow. This idea also speaks into the tentative bond that exists between men and women – that some encounters can turn out to be good in themselves and lifegiving, whilst other encounters can end up in separation, pain, or even death. And every potential meeting between a man and a woman bears these uncertain possibilities. Thenjiwe goes on and heads into the shop. But on her way out she notices the man watching her. A subterranean encounter occurs between them. No words are spoken. Their communication is only done through looks of interest and inference. The man’s eyes do not leave her.
She is followed by his eyes everywhere like an impulsive panopticon, a typical reflection of the masculine gaze. She leaves the shop and sees a marula tree with its fruits scattered about on the ground. She wants to pick it but has sudden hesitations about doing it. Her world is now stifled, and her movements are no longer that of a person but of a desired object in the mind of another. Vera writes, ‘She wants to pick it up but does not. That would be a risk. She has no confidence that she could bend her knees that far down, stretch her arm, and still be able to come up for some air. She would perish, for sure, with him watching, with him able to blow her ashes off the ground with a single breath.’ Thenjiwe, in this moment of hesitation, decides not to pick the marula fruit. Now, the marula fruit is a genius visual metaphor that Vera includes. The fruit is indigenous to the Miombo woodlands of southern Africa. The technical term derives from the Greek, Sclerocarya birrea, meaning ‘a hard shell or nut’. The fruit falls to the ground when green in colour and unripe.
And once on the ground it ripens, turning into an ember colour. The visual metaphor is even more striking when we learn what is inside the fruit. Inside it is a thick-walled stone the size of a pebble, its endocarp. These stones, once dried, expose the inner seed that is encased in the endocarp, the source of its life cycle. The taxonomy, and much of the lore that surrounds this fruit, provides Vera a rich tapestry of sensory engagements that bridges the gap between her characters and the spirit of the landscape. It is this stone embedded fruit that is tied to the novels namesake. Thenjiwe decides to head back to her home. One can only imagine how things would have turned out if she had decided to pick the fruit. The stranger sees her leave and follows her silently from behind, watching her every move. She knows that he is following her, but she does not tell him to go on his way. Rather she invites him in. She takes the stranger into her home. A surprising decision and a very careless one given that she does not know him. But we soon realise that there is an intimacy and a longing for bonding that she desires. And the possibilities of it being offered by a complete stranger doesn’t appear to bother her much. Vera writes, ‘She takes the stranger home. She has a lot to forget, so this is all right. She has no idea now, or ever, that some of the harm she has to forget is in the future, not in the past, and that she would not have enough time in the future to forget any of the hurt.’
Luciano Cian
Thenjiwe, and possibly the stranger she invites home, will never truly know how events might turn out from this encounter. But her willingness to take a chance is evident. She is willing to let her guard down. And the irony of this situation is that for one to experience love, at least in the proper sense in which love is intended, one has to be willing to make themselves vulnerable to the other. And it is this vulnerability, that process of letting down your guard, that is so volatile and can turn things either way. It’s not wrong to say that love is a gamble, but it would be more proper to say that love functions like a leap of faith. And in Thenjiwe’s case this leap is not assured, it is rather assumed, because the man that pursues her is undetermined, and the influence of a burning nation has been branded upon him by a measure that is inconceivable. Yet in the backdrop of all these concerns Thenjiwe starts a relationship with him. This love affair is so convincing that Thenjiwe longs for him to meet her sister, Nonceba. Vera gives us Thenjiwe’s reasons for them to meet, ‘Thenjiwe wants him to hear their two voices together, so that he will know, as tenderly as she does, that before he occupied all the places in her mind, Nonceba, her sister, had already been holding her hand quietly and forever.’
Nonceba
When we finally meet Nonceba we notice that the situation is starkly different from how Thenjiwe would have imagined it. We hear of a man who presses his hand down on her body forcefully, with the intention of breaking her. He embraces her cruelly, and she can smell his scent and the vicious intentions he breathes upon her body. We soon read that he is at the pit of her being, and that she is nothing to him but an aftermath of desire. Thenjiwe’s supposed lover, the stranger that followed her home, turns out to be the man at the pit of her being, the man that rapes Nonceba. The rape itself takes on the form of intimacy.
Buqaqawuli Nobakada
But the intimacy expressed here comes with the physical closeness of violence and sexual abuse. Almost all forms of gender-based violence are perpetrated by the victims of the lover, showing that violence for the most part is an intimate affair. In order to inflict harm, especially of this kind, one has to get as close as possible. Getting this close means that they can touch their victim. They can feel them, and smell them, and even see their sense of fear and desperation. And in this limited space, this suffocating atmosphere, the mask of intimacy is revealed to be a claustrophobic nightmare. Violence in intimacy also shows us the betrayal of trust as most perpetrators will intentionally create a safe space and a trustworthy environment, only to later use this as bait to exercise their vile intentions. This is what happens to Nonceba when she suffers at the hand of her sister’s follower. And where is Thenjiwe in all of this? We read that, ‘on the other side of the doorway, where the wall curves and disappears, she sees her sister, Thenjiwe. A part of her. Thenjiwe, fallen, breasts pressed to the ground, bare soles, blind eyes, bent arms folded, legs stretched out, a body pleading, a stillness visible.’ Thenjiwe too is possibly raped by this man. And the act of rape is not simply driven by an unchecked desire for sex or the frustration of unrequited love.
The act itself is manifested by a desire to kill, to spoil, and to destroy completely the body and the soul of the victim. After raping both sisters, the man reemerges from the dark and kills Thenjiwe brutally. He does this right in front of her sister, Nonceba. The act of rape reaches its sexual climax, not in orgasmic elation, but in the final release of murder.
Thenjiwe, Nonceba’s beloved sister, is no more. She is left shocked, speechless, and powerless in the sight of this agent of death. The man carries both sisters on his shoulders, Thenjiwe’s dead body and Nonceba’s almost dead body. He abandons the bodies somewhere out in the field, where the vilest human acts are performed to mute witnesses like the trees, the stones, and the hills. Now alone, Nonceba manages to move her limp body to life. We read that, ‘she turns Thenjiwe’s body over and pulls the blouse down to cover the wet breast.’ Nonceba, who was described as someone who was patient like a mantis, who had no sudden impulses, was slow and careful in everything, as though she moved on a delicate ray of light, was now left distraught, broken and without words. The only speech she could mutter was a mourn, as Vera says, that was caught between rock and sky.
Sibaso
And who might this man be, this man that can take a life so easily and so remorselessly? We are told that, ‘he is an ordinary man, wearing a blue shirt with buttons, not white, not black, [but] Gray. Short sleeves. Khaki trousers. A safe attire. A shirt you can trust, with buttons you can trust.’ Vera brings us back to the fold of trust, and how difficult it is to decipher true intentions based on appearances only.
Oswaldo Guayasamín
This man, according to the description, isn’t the typical villainous creature that would have committed such an act. He is an ordinary man, trustworthy by all means of observation, a common person, one perhaps who might even look like you or me. But if his appearance won’t give us the answer, then what will? We get a little more information about who he is. His name is Sibaso, a soldier who spent some time fighting in the Rhodesian Bush War. Sibaso recounts how the war made him a lifeless being, how it made him forget his name and forced him to assume other names.Vera writes that, ‘his mind is perforated like a torn net and each event falls through it like a stone. When he stands, his head hits against something heavy – he discovers that history has its ceiling.’ Sibaso cannot escape the damage caused by his many years of fighting in the bush. War itself has caused him to have endless enemies, and if he so happens to lose them all, he invents more.
Sibaso is imbued with a necrophiliac spirit, a spirit that loves graves and cemeteries, especially things belonging to the dead. Sibaso considers himself as part of the dead, a society of beings that have psychological deceased and are only awaiting their final consummation in the death of their physical bodies. Vera writes concerning Sibaso’s point of view, ‘The soil is chaos and ash. I enter into its burning. The soil is warm like a liquid. I am among the dead voices. I inhale their last breath.’ Sibaso’s necrophilia goes to the extent that he nestles himself into the soil, closely to the dead, as far away as he can be removed from the living and from himself. And here, deep in the soil mixed with the bones of the dead, is where he can find something to trust.
1981-1986
To think that Sibaso’s crimes were just an isolated incident would be to miss the bigger picture. Sibaso, as Vera puts it, is a symptom of a larger cause. And this larger cause, this problem of all problems, rests on the issue of independence. And like any other African country that kept skeletons in its closet, Zimbabwe had its own hidden within the independence period. The way memory functions is different from person to person, from community to community, and even from the state to the individual. The pompous ceremonial celebrations of freedom at the state level do not always coincide with the lived realities of the masses. We read that, ‘to celebrated is to be joyous without measure. After all, an entire nation has sanctioned your joy, demanded it of you. Your response must be immediate; if you wait till after independence, you will dance alone in the streets. Everyone will have closed their doors and their windows, tired of celebrating.’ But what is actually being celebrated? In contrast to this celebratory mood, Vera opens a particular chapter by stating: ‘The war begins. A curfew is declared. A state of emergency. No movement is allowed. The cease-fire ceases. It begins in the streets, the burying of memory. The bones rising. Every road out of Bulawayo is covered with soldiers and police, teeming like ants. Roadblocks. Bombs. Land mines. Hand grenades. Memory is lost. Independence ends. Guns rise. Rising anew. In 1981.’ The war brings about the social devastation of the people of Kezi. No longer is this community made up of neighbors, but it is now divided according to the prescripts of warring politics.
This climate of war affects everything. Its devastation is shown in the destruction of Vera’s communal metaphors like Thandabantu Store. This emblem of hope and community is burned down, and in its place are erected the symbols of independence, which Vera refers to as hundreds of soldiers living behind barbed wire fences, helicopters zooming past into the air, and the displacement of families. Following independence the land turns into a nightmare – with ‘campsites where many have been held, tortured, killed, and buried in mass graves.’ And the once peaceful and commercial road that came out of Kezi was now hazardous, teeming with land mines, roadblocks, and soldiers with guns. The countries new political era brings with it a new social imaginary, one that Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe spoke of in his seminal work, On the Postcolony. He speaks of a condition where state power legitimizes itself through brute force. He speaks of the idea of ‘converting raw violence into authority,’ in order for the state to be within its capacity to create a world of meanings, which in turn can be instilled into the minds of the general populace and embedded in the period’s sense of consciousness.
Chikonzero Chazunguza
And it is this whole process, this underside of state independence, that has Vera greatly concerned. Now added to all of this devastation, the land has been experiencing a severe drought. Crops have died and the harvest has not yielded enough. Kezi’s drought is not limited to the ground that receives little precipitation, or the moist depraved trees that fill the land. Rather this dryness – this turning into stone is to be found in the conditions of its people. Vera contemplates poetically, she says, ‘Humans become fossils by being buried in stone, not by being held in air. In fire, they burn. In stone, bones are held still.’ The land is dying and so are its people. But in the midst of all this devastation Vera presents us her driving metaphor once again, the image of the marula fruit.
She highlights the phenomenon of this tree, and how it is able to bear fruit even in the midst of a great drought. It is this symbolic form of resilience that Vera leans into. She tells us that the villagers, in the midst of this great drought, would have had one big temptation: to chop down the marula tree and use its dry timber for firewood. But they choose not to. Instead they choose to cherish the intoxicating scent of the fruit, which fills the air more than the smell of anything that surrounds them, an assault on the senses really, even greater than the drought that threatens their very existence and the war that robs them off of their humanity.
Chikonzero Chazunguza
Here in lies the hope, not just in the ripe smell of the marula fruit but in the idea of its regenerating qualities against the backdrop of ‘war, drought, death, and betrayals.’ This hope is expanded even further when Vera brings up the women of Kezi. She speaks of the land and how silent it is. The rocks, the dry rivers, and the barren trees are all mute spectators of the blood and pain that has been visited upon this land. The women appeal to these lifeless entities. But they remain silent. She writes: ‘The women want to take the day into their own arms and embrace it, but how? To embrace the land and earth, the horizon, and triumph? To forget the hesitant moment, death, the years of deafness and struggle? The women want to take the time of resignation, of throbbing fears, and declare this to a vanished day, but how? … Instead, nothing moves. The rocks remain solid as ever; the boulders are still. Not different. The trees are bare of leaves and carry a stunned and lethargic silence. The women expect sudden and spectacular fissures on the rocks. They expect some crack, some sound that will wrap over them like lightning and they will not need to ask if independence is truly here, or if indeed this is a new day.’ And this crack in the rock, this sense of freedom and true national independence comes in the form of naming their children. She writes, ‘With imaginations unencumbered, they will have children called Happiness, called Prosperity, called Fortune, called True Love, called More Blessing, called Joy, called Ceasefire.’
She goes on to write, ‘The names will cascade like histories from their tongues… All their children will be conceived out of this moment of emancipation.’ Essentially these are the rituals that will anchor the dreams of the coming generation. She adds, ‘these women are the freest women on earth.’ And in contrast the so-called freedom fighters, the big political names many have somehow assumed as the drivers of independence, are the ones held in bondage by their own sociopolitical ideologies. This is an idea Tolstoy indicated in his magnum opus, War and Peace. The idea being that the significance of great individuals is only imaginary, and that in reality, they are only the slaves of history. Sibaso is a slave of history. One could even go as far as to say that he is history’s collateral damage, but in this case both its victim and perpetrator. The war has eaten away at him like a disease on the human mind. But it is Vera’s women, whom even though being the victims of history, are able to rewrite it, even in such simple acts as in the naming of children.
Cephas
Vera gives us Cephas Dube as a figure of comfort and consolation. Cephas visits Nonceba in hospital and reintroduces himself to her. Although her relation to men has completely changed at this point, Nonceba allows Cephas into her life and doesn’t shut him off completely. Cephas encourages her to leave the village of Kezi, warning her that ‘Kezi is a naked cemetery… where no one is buried and everyone is betrayed? There is no certainty of life, only death.’ Upon seeing her condition he offers to help her. He provides her accommodation in the city, in a well-furnished apartment. Nonceba is reluctant. She is already being nursed by an aunt of hers. But she eventually agrees. Cephas helps her escape Kezi, a place she once considered home, which has now become a scar to her.
Cephas turns out to be genuine in his concerns for Nonceba. And the choice of introducing him late in the story, almost as a deus ex machina figure, is of interest and some concern. We can assume that Cephas stands in to undo the damaging figure of Sibaso and present us an alternative masculinity – one that is not grounded in power but in care. But we could also assume the troublesome idea of having Nonceba associated with the damsel in distress trope and Cephas arriving as her knight in shining armour. Now, some might find Vera’s choice of direction quite strange here. But what we can note is that Vera’s goal was to move Nonceba from one location to another. And we soon see this have an effect on Nonceba. Her new life in the city slowly rehabilitates her.
In the city Nonceba is no longer greeted by the rural landscape of Kezi, the dried riverbed, the sunbaked soil, and the parched trees. All that is gone, including the marula fruit, with all its imagery and significance. All that exists before her now are streets and buildings, which go by the names of City Hall, Four Winds, Montrose High and Eveline High, Grifford High, Haddon and Sly, the Pharmacy at the Kirrie Building, Woolworth’s, Stella Nove Photo Studio, Fifth Avenue and Wilson street. It is this new world that is far away from Kezi that gives her a new start and allows her to move forward. Vera writes, ‘She will have to find the sources of sound inside her, a pure and timeless sound. Then she will open her mouth and let the sound free. Words will flow, then language. Only then will she discover a world in contrast to her predicament.
Portia Zvavahera
She will restore her own mind, healing it in segments, in sound.’ Vera ends with a hopeful note. She posits that life can be preserved and that deep wounds can be healed. She does this through the idea of relocation, the move from Kezi to the city.
Vera Today
History is remembered in different ways. It can be learnt from books and historical records. It can be heard from stories that have been passed down. But it can also be understood from one’s own experience of being in the world. For Vera this latter way of remembering history is the most important, because one can rationalise these abstract and macro historical events to such a point that they seem detached. But when these events are personalised a different form of remembrance takes place, history becomes an embodied thing. So history is not something that happens to other people, but history is something that happens to you. The Stone Virgins deals with the twin problems of national independence versus personal independence. Vera suggests that both these forms of independence do not always coincide. And what happens at the state level, the overarching narratives that govern a whole nation, doesn’t accurately reflect the concerns of those on the ground. As is shown in The Stone Virgins, the idea of national freedom can be a stifling occurrence, causing social and psychological disruption.
There’s an interesting remark made by one of her characters, she writes, ‘He lags behind and picks a coin from the bus stop; his brow furrows as he tries to discover whether the face of this coin says Rhodesia or Zimbabwe.’ Two worlds are captured in this quote, two worlds that have caused a great sense of disruption to the people of this land – one being the troublesome past of colonialism, the other being the looming dangers of a newly established state. Vera also says that, ‘during war, there are two kinds of lovers, the one located in the past, and dead, the one in the future, the living and more desirable. The past a repast, the future a talisman. This kind of truth also belongs to the fantasy of a continent in disarray.’
An issue one might point out in Vera’s novel is that there isn’t a satisfying critique of colonialism. The only recollection we get from this period is found in the white names of the city’s streets. The discussion doesn’t further implicate the idea of these names. They’re just left there, as if they were always part of the landscape, as if they were naturally there like the hills of Gulati or the trees in Kezi.
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
Now, Zimbabwe’s colonial past was just as detrimental if not worse than the period of its civil war. Many will argue that the troubles that came with independence were initially provoked by the commercial interests of the British in that land. And regardless of where one might want to pin the blame, be it the intertribal rivalry between the Shona and the Ndebele, or the cost of political factions, the colonial period wasn’t something reducible to street names. One might say this is Vera’s way of diminishing its amplified legacy, a way of taking power from it. But the reality of its damage still remains, even if its consequences are silently felt or have begun to fade. Ugandan theologian Emmanuel Katongole makes this critical point in, The Sacrifice of Africa: ‘The phenomenon of widespread violence in postcolonial Africa – military coups, civil unrest, state repression, insecurity – must itself be placed in the narrative of the politics of competing elite interests and power struggles. The nation-state project in Africa has not questioned this story of colonial violence and dispossession, but has, in fact, neatly reproduced it.’ He also says, ‘that the key actors of Africa’s post-independence history – Idi Amin, Bokassa, Mobutu, and Mugabe – were but colonial “types” that is, mimetic reproductions of colonial actors like Kurtz, Leopold, and Ian Smith.’ He ends by saying that, ‘one cannot understand these actors without locating them in a social history.’
It is this social history, a history that stems from a grander colonial imagination, that the period of independence only bears a part. These things are intimately connected. And there is no critical observation of Africa’s current state without it. And maybe the underlying pain that remains unnamed in this book is tied to the historical nightmare of the Gukurahundi*, a wound so fresh its trauma completely overshadowed the colonial past. Outside this lack of colonial criticism there are some other concerns too. These are more to do with characterisation. We start with Thenjiwe: Why does Thenjiwe suddenly give in to the pursuits of Sibaso, so carelessly for that matter? Why does she introduce him to Nonceba, so soon after they met? After Thenjiwe’s murder why weren’t the authorities immediately involved? And why did she decide to live with Cephas, another male stranger, alone in the city, where she might once again be vulnerable? These are some of the issues that could come up for a reader that is willing to dig a little deeper into the text. Now Vera might not give us all these answers, and she doesn’t have to. What she gives us, in this lucid and poetic work of art, is a genuine human experience as felt through the lives of her women.
*Gukurahundi was a series of mass killings in Zimbabwe, committed from 1983 until the Unity Accord of 1987.
Right now many African nations are facing an epidemic of gender related forms of violence. These violent acts are not only found in homes, but they are an everyday reality for women in war torn regions like the Congo or Sudan. And when it comes to this worrying issue there has not been a timely message than that told in The Stone Virgins. The voices of Nonceba and Thenjiwe reverberate throughout these war-stricken regions. Their voices cry out for help in a world that is comfortably silent. It is the voices of warmongers, killers, and the serial rapists disguised as freedom fighters, high officials, and presidents, that will be heard when history finally decides to pen itself. And the voices of these women will not be heard, not in these formats at least. But they will be heard in such spaces as The Stone Virgins, a space where the myth of fiction is more real than the reality of a one-sided history. Vera helps us retrieve a particular aspect of humanity, which had been lost to a world that was utterly devastated by the libidinal urges of broken men. And her most important contribution has been to remind us that before we are men or women, we are wounded beings.
Portia Zvavahera
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