A tale of two cities

Harare North

By Brian Chikwava

230pp; Jonathan Cape

Sometime in 2008, the BBC described Harare as a city that "runs on hope and ingenuity, not power and water".

If "ambition" had been included in that list, the BBC would still have been correct. Harare seems to be an ambitious city, and in greedily spreading its tentacles beyond itself, has succeeded in colonising England (to the North), and South Africa (to the South).

The unnamed narrator of Brian Chikwava's debut novel, Harare North confidently informs us that London is Harare North, and Johannesburg, Harare South.

The novel begins with his arrival in Harare North, from Harare proper. A staunch member of the Green Bombers (a gang of ruthless pro-Mugabe thugs who go about dealing "bags of forgiveness" to "traitors" back home in Zimbabwe), he tells us he has run away to Harare North to earn enough money to buy his way out of police prosecution back home, and to give his deceased mother a befitting burial.

It is to his credit that he quickly makes the reader feel at home in a city that is relentlessly hostile to him. In Harare North there are varying categories of people, including "Civilians" (non-Green Bomber Zimbabweans, also sometimes called "traitors"), "original Natives" (African immigrants), "English people" and "lapsed Africans" (original Natives who "have live in London from the time when it was OK to kill kings, queens and Pigs" and who "make you feel like you is not African enough").

None of these groups is well regarded by him. The civilians are cowardly, and disrespectful of Mugabe, the original Natives are mostly "illegals" and "asylum seekers", and the English people only want to take advantage of the original Natives. Only two people retain his respect - Mugabe, and himself.

This London, sorry, Harare North, is a city of tramps, cheating wives, baby lenders, British Bottom Cleaners (BBCs), squatters, skunk dealers, Tube ticket touts, incense vendors, homeless people, thieves - and of course, law enforcement agents. It is a town full of, in his words, "xenophobia,hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia and yugoslavia". And "racialism".

And like the immigrants it contains, it has become a character in the novel. It is full of "mental streets", its trains plant ideas in the narrator's head, and days spent in it take on the disturbing quality of living things that "leap quick and die". And when a character moves out of a squat, London moves in, "breathing into his room through them open window".

The narrator doesn't set too many goals for himself, beyond making enough pound sterling to take back home, and concealing his dark past while doing that. He remains an unrepentant believer in the ideals of the Green Bomber movement, but believes firmly in his inherent goodness.

"Me I am principled man," he repeatedly reminds us, even though, as we come to discover, nothing - not blackmail, not deception, not shocking acts of violence - is beyond him.

In his estimation everyone else is a master at "spinning jazz numbers" - redefining themselves. Whether it is Aleck, the BBC who claims to be a shop manager, and who makes himself the landlord of a house in which he's nothing but a squatter, or Tsitsi who rents her baby to immigrant women seeking to con the "council people", or the dreaded Comrade Mhiripiri, Green Bomber chieftain who has reinvented himself in Brixton as "Master of Foxhounds" (MFH), Elder statesman and storyteller extraordinaire.

It is all supposed to be very simple, really, for the narrator, getting a good "graft" and saving as much as he can. But it turns out to be far more difficult than he imagined. Which is why one of the first things he does is lament, "No one bother to give me proper tips before I come to England."

Everything therefore has to be learnt, and mastered, often the hard way. Which keeps getting in the way of making and saving money. To help, he devises a complicated system of similes and metaphors. Money "is like termite." Love too "is like termite". Truth is "like snake" and also "like granite rock".

And life is like frying bean sprouts excitedly only to realise later that what you've been doing is "frying wire nails". "Slaving away in a foreign land is like putting chocolate bars in the pockets of "proper citizens."

It doesn't help of course that some of these proper citizens are no less fouled up than the original Natives. Dave and Jenny for example, who the narrator describes as being "the first poor white folk that I ever get to know; that is if you don't count the one that live in a drum back home in Harare Gardens. Like them immigrants they also have them asylum-seeker eyes..."

It is his roundabout way of arguing that Harare and Harare North are more or less the same place. Only separated by immigrations officials.

And the price of a plane ticket. And of course, memory. Mugabe is a constant presence in both places. In Harare, he is President. In Harare North, he remains President, in the minds of Zimbabwean immigrants an even more urgent presence than Tony Blair; a shadow from which there is no escaping. In newspapers in Harare North, just like in Harare proper, the front pages of the newspapers still bear his face.

By now you will have noticed that the narrator's language is his and his alone. It is some kind of broken English, the borrowed language of a half-literate person filtered through Shona sensibilities, but it is confident, arrogant even, and funny as hell.

I imagine that there will be plenty of debate over the "authenticity" of the language, the barrage of well-worn queries about whether Zimbabweans really speak like this or not. But that, I think, is immaterial to any discussion of this book. Every character needs a language (even if that language is "silence"), and Chikwava is like a brilliant matchmaker who has found the most befitting speech for his ultra-quirky narrator.

The narrator takes us through his often difficult life and times in Harare North, finding and losing graft. He is a fast learner, thoughtful, ingenious, wary, shunning self-pity, and full of cunning. It'd be easy to wrap this up neatly by saying that Chikwava's novel succeeds in convincing the reader that while you can take a Green Bomber out of Harare, you cannot take Harare out of him. But I prefer to think of it this way: that, in the first place, you cannot even get a Green Bomber out of Harare - because Harare is everywhere!

Tolu Ogunlesi is the author of ‘Conquest and Conviviality'.