ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Chinongwa is the debut novel of Zimbabwean author Lucy Mushita.  It is a powerful reminder that sentimentalising traditional lifestyles risks obscuring the very real harm done in patriarchal societies in Africa and elsewhere.

Lucy Mushita grew up under apartheid in a traditional village in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and her novel derives from her childhood experience witnessing the ostracism of a woman who had been a child bride.  Chinongwa is the story of such a child. First published in 2008, it was then published in France in 2012, in Zimbabwe and South Africa in 2022 and now at last here in Australia where Mushita gained her MA in Creative Writing.

(Mushita went to France when  Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980, and then spent time in the US and Australia.  Now she divides her time between Australia and France.)

This is the blurb:

In the village where Chinongwa lives, her family, displaced from their lands, are very poor. One desperate solution to hunger is to trade young daughters into marriage. At first, to their shame, her father’s and aunt’s attempts to marry off their youngest child fail. No one is interested in this small, thin girl. Eventually, a childless woman, Amai Chitsva, offers Chinongwa as a second wife to her own husband who is old enough to be the girl’s grandfather. Chinongwa is forced to grow up very fast and rely on her survival instincts. She does her best to do what is expected of her and become a good wife and mother, but being very young, very alone, and a girl, the odds are stacked against her. Eventually, after spending her whole life doing the bidding of others, all Chinongwa wants is her independence. But how can one gain such a thing as a woman? Will she ever truly be free?

These are the opening lines:

Chinongwa Marchwa was nine, but her age was not vital, just her virginity.  Though she was not yet washing, her fruits were already protruding. That was a relief for her family. Anyway, she was the only one they could use. (p.3)

The first part of the novel traces the child’s bewilderment and fear about her future, though really, Chinongwa, (born in 1910) has no idea what is in store.  She knows that her older sister was traded off to a brutal man so she fears that kind of violence, but in her innocence she is more indignant about child marriage being a fate only for girls. She feels that she has no value, that nobody except her mother loves her, and she despises her father for being unable to provide for the family, even though displacement from their land is actually a result of colonisation.

Since her poverty makes her scrawny in a culture that values fatness as a sign of health and prosperity, suitors are not forthcoming, so she embarks on a humiliating journey with her father and her aunt, to find someone who will have her.  It is another female humiliated by the traditional values of this society who offers to ‘help’.  Amaiguru is a woman who married for love, to a man who did not mind that her ‘womb had failed to open’ in her first marriage.  He’s an older man, (a healer), who already has two children, Wangi and Tawa, but in his absence Amaiguru impulsively gives in to the idea that he would like a second wife who can give him more children.

Anyone reading this today will recoil at the way Amaiguru acts as a procuress and engineers the relationship that results in Chinongwa giving birth to her first child at the age of eleven.  But the novel makes it clear that Amaiguru’s actions were intended as an act of generosity to her husband.  It was meant also as a kindness to the child and to her starving family, to whom she gives some of their cows in exchange, with a promise of some millet when her husband returns.  More importantly, the novel shows that she was not infringing any of the customs of her community.  Some did not approve because of particular aspects of the transaction, or because they rejected her as a childless woman — but nobody thought that child marriage was wrong or immoral. If Chinongwa had not ended up with Chitsva it would have been someone else.

It’s a mindset that readers today will find confronting, especially when we read in this interview at the Johannesburg Review of Books that while the author had thought she was writing about child marriage as something from bygone days, it still happens today and that girls are still groomed to believe that they have no other choice but marriage.

I finished this manuscript in 1997 or 1998 and sat on it until it was published in 2008. When the 1998 and 2008 financial crises took place, I didn’t realise what was happening in Zimbabwe because I was not there. But recently, while talking to my niece, Tadiwa, she told me a man had married his daughter off to his best friend during those times. For me, the practice of child marriage was history; Chinongwa’s story is, after all, set in the early twentieth century. It seemed to be something that came about because of colonisation. I was convinced that it was no longer a practice of the current era. And sadly yet it is.

My take is that as long as there is no debate or conversation, nothing will change. As long as there is no debate about how this patriarchal system came to be—why, for instance, you need to give a family cows to prove that you love a woman—nothing will change. Today, I think we could use the word ‘grooming’. Little girls are groomed for marriage from birth. We are thinking, ‘Oh she’s beautiful’, and not how intelligent she is and what profession she can pursue. I don’t know about your generation but for us, we were told things like, if you walked very fast as if you were possessed, no man would marry you. Or if you do this or that, no man will marry you. So everything you did, you had to make sure that you were doing it so a man would desire you. How can we get to a place where women realise that they don’t need this?

In the beginning, Amaiguru mothers the child, who is a playmate for Wangi and Tawa and an orphaned cousin called Shamhu. But even at this time girls are treated differently.  Chinongwa doesn’t understand what scribbles on a page are for, but she resents the fact that boys get to go to school and girls don’t.  And there are endless prohibitions on behaviour to which girls must conform or they lose their ‘value’.

It was not any flaw in the writing that made me keep having to remind myself how young Chiningwa was when reading about how Amaiguru teaches Chiningwa how to do the tasks that women do in this rigidly gendered society: not just to cook, to clean, to care for the chickens and so on, but also how to seduce her husband. It seemed inconceivable that any society could condone the abuse of children like this.

As time goes by, resentments grow on both sides.  Chiningwa has to do most of the work, but she is not accorded the status of a second wife.  Her husband doesn’t give her money, she is dressed in Amaiguru’s castoffs, and she has to make her children’s clothes from those castoffs.  For her part, Amaiguru is still not accepted in the village because she has no children of her own.  Chiningwa is only twelve when Amaiguru subjects her to a public shaming ritual, and things go downhill from there.

Do read the interview at the Johannesburg Review of Books, it reveals the lived experience that informs the novel.  You can also view the author in conversation with Kidi Bebey on You Tube. 

Lucy Mushita is published in English, French, Italian and other languages. Chinongwa received the Prix de Ville d’Hagondange in France in 2013.

Author: Lucy Mushita
Title: Chinongwa
Publisher: Spinifex Press, 2023, first published in 2008, then in 2012 in France, and then revised for publication in Zimbabwe and South Africa in 2022.
ISBN: 9781925950816, pbk., 235 pages
Review copy courtesy of Spinifiex Press

Available in Australia from Spinifex and good bookshops everywhere.