Reading "The Stone Virgins" as Vera's Study of the Katabolism of War

Author(s): Annie Gagiano

Source: Research in African Literatures , Summer, 2007, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer, 2007),
pp. 64-76
Published by: Indiana University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4618374

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Reading The Stone Virgins as Vera's Study
of the Katabolism of War
ANNIE GAGIANO

University of Stellenbosch

ABSTRACT

The article addresses Vera's unusual foregrounding of a violent male fi

in The Stone Virgins-that of the dissident war veteran Sibaso, whose ac
murder and rape are depicted in mesmeric detail, as is his inner life.
focus in the text is read as serving Vera's analysis of the deforming, decr
ing effects of war on the individual psyche and on wider social forms
densities of Vera's style and the disquieting shifts in narrative perspec
in this text are interpreted as serving her sustained enquiry into the nat
and effects of war. It is argued here that close textual engagement
this novel disproves standard critical notions about Vera's feminine fo
in her writing, arguing that from the beginning of The Stone Virgins
writer establishes-albeit in a challenging and interrogative context
particular interest here in the results of male subjugation to authority fo
It is argued that in a broader sense Vera contextualizes this focus thro
her cautionary and by no means merely valedictory portrayal of ce
female war veterans, and in her recognition by way of contrast of the
strength of such figures as Nonceba, Thenjiwe, and Cephas.

On the very first page of Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa,

Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, state that "men have rar
the subject of research on gender in Africa."' This they explain
gesting that the male subject in such studies usually features as "a bac
women's experiences" (1). Franloise Lionnet wrote in 1995 that "twentie
black women writers in Africa and the diasporas [.. .] (since the 1970s)
ally place the burden of responsibility for the insidious and gradual de
of gender relations on male characters whose indifference or aggressio
perpetuate the structures of authority that contain, confine and silen
(102). Though a challengeable generalization, the observation underlines
tance of addressing social issues, including "gender trouble," interconn

RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer 2007). ?

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 ANNIE GAGIANO A 65

Vera does in The Stone Virgins). Commentaries on this late novel

text as a primarily "monogendered" feminist statement-for exam
Vera's primary intention in The Stone Virgins is "to shape the natio
perspective," or that of "keeping the possibility of a liberatory or
alive," and that for Vera (in this text) "the heaviness of history's
falls upon women's bodies" (Boehmer 208, 203, 197; emphasis ad
the imaginative effort Vera in this late text, particularly, put into
victimization too, and into indicating its intertwinement with be
involving the violent subjugation of women.
In the first published collection on Yvonne Vera's work, Sign
Muponde and Taruvinga), Kiziko Muchemwa refers to Vera's "fe
enterprise" as allowing "women [to speak] themselves and the w
of "the marginalization and exclusion of men's voices and charact
"author's thrust to recover language, voice and presence for women
narratives" (4-5). While Muchemwa's article presumably predates
of The Stone Virgins, Maurice Vambe comments directly on this
on Zimbabwean orature and English fiction, seeing this final Ver
primarily woman-centered text. Vambe writes, inter alia, that "T
[...] narrativises the war of independence (1972-79) from the po
Zipra female guerrillas" (100). Although noting that "The Stone V
voice to the 'dissident' war narratives narrated by Sibaso," Vam
conventional view of Vera's general enterprise by stating that thi
two sisters [...] who become victims of the post-independence d
Matabeleland" (100; emphasis added). What this introductory ref
novel omits is the fascinating shift the novelist makes in this text f
marginalization of male perspectives in her earlier work to the un
depiction and recurrent foregrounding in The Stone Virgins of th
(Vera, Virgins 107) of a male war veteran (Sibaso). The present ar
follow Vera's textual lead in interpreting this daring and challen
Vera's extensive focus on masculinities in this text is manifes
on in the novel when she makes the "city labourers, black," "[t]he
human focus following her description of the Bulawayo streets.
initially as the live shuttlecocks linking and propping up the co
of both Rhodesia and South Africa. Despite their pivotal contribu
is clear that they remain perpetual "outsiders" (5). And even at th
the novel Vera indicates the ancient downward spiral from mal
humiliation (here, distinctly colonial-racial) into female exploitat
with and caused by male need. The returned migrant workers a
writes, for opportunities to "bury their hurt and make love to
This setting is technically prewar, but Vera's study of what war
women is focused on the larger exploration of what an unaccomm
does to men who then transmit their "hurt" to women. She nu
to recognize the nature of her undertaking when she tells us in
that the short-lived liaisons between returned migrant workers
have everything to do with the sociopolitical context. Vera voic
warning: "as though anything could silence despair and turn it into
noting the dangerous, lurking, social presence of that despair de
"docile" manner of the men (7; emphasis added). The last-quoted

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66 X RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

submissive tractability in these men2 that itself augurs ill for the fut
despair succeeding an initial compliance with commanders' ord
manifest itself in the conduct of Sibaso, who "thinks of betrayals b
after a war" and declares, "Everything I fear has already happened
independence he registers nothing but the sensation "I walk. Noth
(71, 97, 108). Cephas, although so tellingly contrasted with Sibaso for
retain passion and compassion despite hurt, is shown to have been d
the rapist-killer) by the exclusionary practices of colonialism-in his
is a "trapped" thought, a "useless remembrance about fences with N
[...] and NO WORK signs," aligned with a "disturb[ing]," even a "fr
of "persecution," " agonies," "urgencies" that are associated in his m
a "whip[ping]" (28). Despite himself, Cephas too stores a "hopeless"
emphasis added). We learn these things about Cephas before the erup
into the text.
Vera pursues her theme of male damage spiraling outward
so frequently in forms of harm inflicted by subjugated men on w
further instances before she introduces Sibaso to the reader. Her evocations of
war-damaged men around Thandabantu Store during the brief lull of 1980 depict
seemingly "solid men" who nevertheless "wear lonely and lost looks" and "guard
their loneliness," remaining inaccessible to the "worship[ful]" women who sur-
round them (47; emphasis added-compare 48). The word "lost" echoes through
these descriptions; the men are deeply "troubled" and plagued by recurring war
nightmares (49). Sibaso may well be pictured as one among these anonymous male
ex-combatants. The female war veterans, who are also present, are sardonically
aware of the civilian women's naYvete--"They watch, from [the] high plateau" of
the Thandabantu Store veranda (and of their own war experiences!) the "young
women" who "think they can cure all the loneliness in a man's arms." The female
ex-combatants recognize the foolish futility of the attempt by starry-eyed younger
women to make the men who have returned from the war forget how they had to
"hold [their] own screaming voice in [their] hands, to fight" (50).
Importantly, Vera's evocation of the ex-combatant women is by no means
triumphal, though it has been so misread (as I believe) by some commentators.3
The female former guerrillas, too, are inaccessible to civilian life, a point Vera
emphasizes by twice mentioning that they retain "their own camouflage"; she
also suggests that there is something "unknowable" about them and that there is
"an unquenchable sorrow around their eyes"-indicating a lasting estrangement
from civic life. The ex-combatant women are said to "know that they are wounded
beings," although they look "undisturbed," "impenetrable," "mighty and serene"
(50-54). The retention of camouflage beyond the ceasefire not only hints at the
women veterans' possible distrust of the supposedly established peace, but sug-
gests a reluctance or even inability to return to the rhythms of civilian life. It also
serves as a masking of their war trauma in the insouciance of their bearing. Not
unlike Sibaso, they carry the signs of "their capacity for harm," even though in
them, unlike in him, this aura of danger is "equal" to their "charity." Like him,
too, they are conscious of bearing the "weighty" burden of "a broken continent"
(54, 52). Sibaso calls Africa "a continent which has succumbed to a violent wind"
and "a continent in disarray" (74, 76). While the soldier-women may be "the most
substantial evidence of survival [...] of courage, of struggle," we are also forced

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 ANNIE GAGIANO 67

to notice that "they carry this dark place in their gaze"

inarticulate pain or horror that they, too, have brought back
ing back to these earlier portrayals of what the war exper
veterans, the reader is led to recognize the tragic inevitabi
of Sibaso's human nature.
One commentator hitherto has noted that in The Stone Virgins, Vera in a sense
revises the use she made of her own earlier depiction of the Nehanda figure (in
the eponymous novel).4 The image of "bones rising" is not, here, a reassuring one
signifying the unquenchable spirit of resistance of the Zimbabwean people, but
resembles a death's head gloating over the fact that, in 1981, "the ceasefire ceases":
it is war triumphantly reclaiming the terrain as Nehanda's comforting and inspir-
ing words are chillingly rephrased: "Guns rise. Rising anew. In 1981" (59; emphasis
added). From these eerie words Vera plunges straight into Kezi, into the horrifically
detailed and choreographed rape-and-murder scene which occurs as Sibaso bursts
into the Gumede sisters' lives to behead Thenjiwe before raping and mutilating
Nonceba. Vera is not interested in "war movie" stuff-male camaraderie; dem-
onstrations of daring and endurance; military strategizing or exciting pursuits.
Implicitly, she has chosen to depict war by painting her canvas with images more
like Picasso's Guernica; in other words, she confronts her readers with material that
will not be recorded in the history books; doing what historical accounts cannot
do: immersing us in the horrors of individual experiences of war. In this space, we
have aggressors and victims who are yet both in the space of victimhood5-both
broken by the war; both silently "screaming." Sibaso is shown to be horrifically
abusing Nonceba, but when we are told that "he scoops her being, her saliva water
to cleanse a wound" (64), the image demonstrates Vera's multiple, complex per-
spective at work. She is "de-othering" the aggressor-perpetrator to move us with
a sense of Sibaso's own deprivation and unassuageable need as a person uncared
for, unloved, unhealed-even as we are frightened and horrified (as Nonceba
necessarily is) by his "capacity for harm" (54). When Sibaso, while he continues to
damage and invade Nonceba's being, "cradles her like a wounded child" (65), this
image evokes the child and family life Sibaso will never have, perhaps the kind
of childhood he never had (since his mother, we are told, died in childbirth (107)),
as well as his own thwarted capacity for tenderness. Even this man, we are twice
told, "could heal. [... ] He just could," while his "pulsing" temple registers both
the turmoil in his mind and his life-warmth and human awareness (65). Yet we
are made to sense these even as Nonceba bleeds from the attack and Thenjiwe's
decapitated body lies sprawled in the dust.
Vera gives readers the strongest clue to an important aspect of her purpose
in writing The Stone Virgins in her startlingly empathetic depiction of Sibaso.
Although the sections exploring his memories, thoughts, and sensations are cer-
tainly contextualized and balanced by depictions of Thenjiwe's love-passion, Non-
ceba's trauma and tentative recovery, and the acts and thoughts of the passionate
and gentle Cephas, the lengthy and numerous sections of the text depicting the
man Sibaso "from the inside" (as so many hitherto published commentaries have
noted)6 can leave no attentive reader in doubt as to the significance and importance
Vera ascribes to this representative figure. What, then, does he represent?
"His name is Sibaso, a flint to start a flame," is one of the things Nonceba says
of him (73), registering his hardness or harshness as well as the way he has been

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68 A RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

instrumentalized and dehumanized to serve a destructive purpose. S

confirms her assessment when he describes himself in the last of t
this novel depicting him as "an instrument of war" who has lost ev
of pity," even "toward [him]self"; neither "surrender[ing]" nor "fight[
another," yet taking on as his final assignment the task of "find[ing]
water to bury a man" (129-30). The man he will thus "still" and exti
can only be himself. Sibaso is Vera's exemplification of a man who e
alistically but becomes so permeated with its destructive powers that
is irrecoverable. Sibaso, who would have been eighteen or nineteen w
started, emerges as a terribly lonely figure when it ends after four
cannot find the father he goes back to seek, obtaining only confus
his father possibly died in prison, detained because he (Sibaso) had
liberation forces. It is the measure of the subtle complexity of Ver
she does not allow us to lose the sense of both a human loss and a
resulting from the process of malformation undergone by Sibaso-
which I draw attention in the title of my article.
Conceiving of Africa, as a result of the let-down that "independ
to be, as "a continent which has succumbed to a violent wind" and o
as "a country with land but no habitat" (74), the man Sibaso is one of
commodated millions, whose societies do not afford them a sense of
recognition. The sense of social agoraphobia (as one might term it) t
to him stresses Sibaso's intense experience of lostness, his feeling o
forgotten. He says of those in power after independence for whom
that "[t]hey remember nothing" (89). He feels as if he has "evaporat[e
ing "a strange sensation of being invisible" and of transience (93-94)
ing the deprivation of domestic, sheltering space so indicated is t
opposite experience that is merely its flip side: a feeling of claustroph
by means of Sibaso's numerous images of confinement and impris
experiences (war)time as an "avenue" down which he is taken to "d
"history" as a room with a "ceiling" against which he knocks his h
ness as a "wasteful" but inescapable "posture" in which he and those
"sealed" and "trapped" (74-75). In the cave where he and his comrade
and his fellows hear "nothing outside [their] own suppressed voice
know, too, that they are "not heard"; when he is there alone, he likens
carcass immured" in a "merciful burial" (92, 94, 97). Vera never allow
to forget the harm and horror Sibaso inflicted on Thenjiwe, Nonceb
but neither does she caricature him. His contaminated and contort
is agonizingly present whenever his thoughts are evoked.
The apparent title allusion to Thenjiwe and Nonceba as example
sacrificed to male power pursuits and dominance is evident and note
the commentators as well as pointed out by Vera herself in the text
one aspect of the complex "stone virgin" symbol casts Sibaso, too, a
the sacrificed San maidens of ancient times that he sees painted on
the cave where he lurks. Even though male, the consequences of h
especially his exclusion from and permanent unfitness for domes
or civilian life7--equate him to the presumably adolescent maiden
Sibaso believes were curtailed to glorify a dead "king" (95). Sibaso
himself whether such deaths should be seen as a self-sacrificial form

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 ANNIE GAGIANO 69

or as "suicide"; he decides that their end was suicide, so

essential distinction between an honourable, dedicated, l
death and a leap into death that is a form of servitude,
wasteful of life. These thoughts seem to underlie Sibaso'
pronouncement that "the life of rulers is served, not sav
given a pointer here as to how and why Sibaso ends his
rejecting the "servitude" to which war had reduced him.
Something about the maidens painted on the Gulati ca
taunts Sibaso. By her pointed allusion to these ancient tim
only the sense of shared or recurrent victimhood and of h
their images evoke in Sibaso, but his feeling that, unlike
an inextinguishable lifelink. Images used elsewhere in th
this point. Although he would have wanted to "grow ope
Sibaso's lightly greying hair signifies to Nonceba "cemete
bloom" (70). In contrast, even in the midst of the rape,
vulnerability is likened to that of a "bent stem" and "a ten
such images of plant life not only link her with the ancient
another iteration of the pattern of women sacrificed or w
("blood-lit tendrils on a rock" (95)), but point to such wom
This notion is also contained in the images of sap-filled p
Sibaso's strange comment, "not dead," as he looks at the p
His awareness of this life power may be the source of th
awed fear that makes him thrust Nonceba from him afte
"falls" down, but survives the violation and mutilation he
Sibaso's awareness of "betrayals" (ofhimself? by him-ei
or of ideals he had held dear?) contrasts glaringly with h
mutilated woman Nonceba's enduring purity, as expressed
solitude of a flame" (71). This image again links her with
shape and form of a painted memory" (71)-a notion cont
sense of forgottenness and obliteration. While Sibaso on
"one who remembers harm" (89), his sense of having bee
most clearly articulated in the sarcastic expression "the
the male mate of a certain type of female spider, he has b
be destroyed; ingested.
Frightening, terrifying as Sibaso is shown to be, it i
the delicately conveyed poignancy with which Vera simu
depicts this man. The monomanic aggression that is irre
by war is a "purg[ing]" of his humanity, a "desecration" t
violation of kindness" (74). This expression plays on "kin
simultaneously of any person's human nature or kind, of
(like a kinship) of all human beings, and of human beings
duty of compassion or kindness, telescoping into a single n
for others (humaneness) and the notion of humanity (hu
the "violation of kindness" hence suggests that the murd
Thenjiwe before he rapes and mutilates Nonceba is a per
ity was killed, and whose nature was violated and distor
what initially seemed a sacrifice of self for the ideal of n
confirmed on pages 108-11 of the novel). The relentless c

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70 A RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

of Sibaso's youth, and soon his very life, is unmistakably evoked in

emblem of the desiccated, "crushed" spider Sibaso finds in his unive
the copy of Mutswairo's novel Feso that is all he retrieves from his
after the liberation-it, too, a house now occupied by a stranger (110
mentioned novel (Feso) contains an inspirational evocation of the
Nehanda's exhortatory promise to the MaShona that her "bones"
a promise that the symbolically dead, crushed and desiccated spid
copy of the text seems to mock, confirming the ex-combatant's embit
feelings about the idealistic hope that had initially made him join t
war effort.
It seems that the "walls of Mbele"-the cave in which Sibaso and his com-
rades hide-also carry traces of exploded bodies: "a thundering testimony to a
sorrow to rival [their] own" (92; emphasis added). This registration of "sorrow"
surrounds or hovers around the "feline imagination" (107) that Sibaso believes
he has acquired in his role (taught to him by the war) as social predator. Nonceba
calls him "the man Sibaso majestic in his own discovery of the human heart-
malevolent" (107), a paradoxically balanced description by means of which Vera
communicates Sibaso's demonization as vividly as she does his victimization and
horrified awareness of his own lost humanity. When Sibaso enters the bomb crater,
the "aftermath of ambush" filled with "chaos and ash," with parts of exploded
bodies and "dead voices," we see in his actions the echoes (albeit perverted) of a
shelter-seeking child in need of comfort, communication, and cradling arms. Wha
he finds here is a whistle that belonged to one of the men blown up in the ambush;
in putting it to his own lips, Sibaso imagines he is giving burial to the dead man
His obsessive question about the death ("Was he alone? Was he alone?") conveys
his own deepest fear-but also a certain bitter fellow-feeling and compassionate
understanding (97, 96). Like a cornered cat, Sibaso has become a blast of aggression
yet he is still able to mourn for men like himself. And although he is predatory
Sibaso's terrifying awareness of himself as the hunted prey of others is perpetua
and inescapable-a condition that can only be ended by his death.
I am not for a moment suggesting that Vera sees Sibaso (or anyone who acts
as he does) as the only, let alone the primary victim of war's desecrating and
irresistible force. The woman who "screams" incessantly in the hospital to which
Nonceba is taken is doing so, Nonceba is told, because two soldiers threatened
to kill her two sons unless she killed her own husband with the axe the soldiers
had put into her hands. By retaining the anonymity of these "soldiers," Vera indi-
cates that it is war that is the enemy of human life and community, and that the
labels of enemy "sides," the justifications of "causes," or loyalties to "leaders" are
irrelevancies, ways of obscuring this one, dark truth. Just as Sibaso's name shows
him to have been of the same "ethnicity" as the Gumede sisters, but indicates that
that did not stop him from beheading one and grievously harming the other, the
military men can have no rational agenda in their grotesque and fatal game with
a family in a region they have been sent to subdue. Just before the hospitalized
woman axed her husband to death as she was implored to do by her husband
himself in order to save their sons' lives, "she fell down and wept for her sons as
if they had already died, and for the heart of the soldier which she said had died
with the war" (80). This kind of weeping is what Vera's whole text does, and in
grieving as much for combatants' destroyed humanity as for the desecration or

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 ANNIE GAGIANO X 71

life loss they cause, Vera shows the true center of her concern and h
in failing to recognize both gendered and ethnic even-handedness
Maurice Vambe's reading of The Stone Virgins (in this critic's othe
scholarly and important study of oral influences in Zimbabwean
goes seriously astray, when he imputes to Vera an ethnic (Ndebele
The Stone Virgins (105).
The screaming of the traumatized woman blends in Vera's n
"screaming voice" expressing their own revulsion, horror, and fea
combatants were forced to mute (50) in order to fight in the war
taking in writing The Stone Virgins, Vera said that she had found
difficult"-not only because the text contains "the worst scenes
devastation that [she had] ever imagined," but because her "mind
with an even more macabre and gruesome history" ("Person" 2).
indicate any kind of "fiction versus fact" battle, but the difficult
and moral, of navigating the novelistic enterprise over and throu
spectacular horrors-scenes and events of a type that can neit
without falsification and romanticization occurring, nor allowed
perception by sensationalizing and vulgarizing its human impor
Vera is also refusing here to set up a simplified gender binary of
and female victims-hence, her emphasis on the harming and inar
ing undergone by the perpetrator figure of Sibaso as well as the i
between his behavior and the "deliberate industry" of the soldier
old and very young villagers at Thandabantu Store. When these s
shown slowly, sadistically, and methodically torturing the shop
Vera is depicting an innocent male victim of military terrorism
"wounds of war" leave "everyone [. ..] damaged" (86).
Such a death as the shopkeeper Mahlatini's "would not be regi
annals; even in dying he is aware that he is nothing to the soldier
and that their razing of the heart of the Kezi community, Thand
something they have already "forgotten" even as it burns down b
123). Vera is not challenging or competing with historical account
Matabeleland events, chronicles which have their own legitimate
and function, but she is doing what historians do not and cannot
native" rendition of what this time was like. Histories and journ
inevitably to some extent normalize war and wartime atrocities;
is to "denormalize" it; to immerse us empathetically in its horror
refuses facile identification of perpetrators, enemies, or victims
complicating such simplifying and biased categorizations.
Cephas, for example, is a man from the "eastern highlan
devoted lover to one and a nurturing friend to the other Gumede
whereas Sibaso is evidently Ndebele like them. Vambe in his comm
Stone Virgins imputes an ethnic bias to Vera's rendition of the 19
events, accusing her of "participat[ing] in the reinvention of trib
105), whereas Cephas, identified by Vera herself in an interview as
ful man to our human dignity" of "all her characters" ("Person"n
identified as "a man from Mashonaland" in another interview ("P
novel his humane nature explicitly contrasts him with Sibaso, an
sumably Shona-dominated 5th Brigade soldiers who so horrifically

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72 4 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

Mahlatini. Wartime atrocities are perpetrated by any of those "bem

war, Vera suggests-whether on the "winning" or the "losing" side,
their ethnicity may happen to be.
Another frequent point of discussion in responses to The Stone V
issue of its historicity-or otherwise. Terence Ranger, himself a lea
who has focused on the Zimbabwean region, eulogizes Vera's n
remark as the following: "It is a book that confronts the reality of Hi
transcends that reality by means of confrontation" (206), whereas t
literary critic Maurice Vambe castigates Vera's alleged "refusal [...
the 'historical causes' of the civil war in post-independence Zimbabw
that by doing so she "runs the risk of dehistoricizing the dissident
the black government against so-called dissidents between 1981 an
even imputes to her "the technique of non-disclosure of the histor
the civil war" and suggests that she "[may] have wittingly or unw
her literary tract to subserve the conclusions of conventional histo
et al., 2000)" (103-04).
Nevertheless, debates about historical and/or political adequ
equacy of The Stone Virgins miss its deeper point, which is Vera's f
the decreating nature and aftermath of war-what I call, in my es
katabolism of war. She denies the validity of any military-political
rationale to (particularly) the Matabeleland conflict and, although re
inevitability and validity of the earlier anti-colonial, anti-racist up
as the second chimurenga, is predominately aware of the seemingly
cleavage which any war almost always establishes between combat
ians-even those supposedly on the same side. This point is illustra
portrayal of the inability of the awestruck young village women to
male war veterans' post-war trauma, and of the corresponding co
gap between civilian men and female war veterans at Kezi (47-55).
Nana Wilson-Tagoe provides a convenient account of the nature
discourse:

Narration in history is bound to representational practices that attempt to

produce continuity and closure through the structuring of stories and events.
The nature of historical representation-its focus on the single fact, its single-
voiced narration, its search for causation and conclusions, its structuring of
coherence-pushes it inevitably towards continuity and closure. (156)

By contrast, literary discourse of the kind Vera employs in The Stone Virgins select
vivid, exemplary, and emblematic details, pursues resonance, exhorts, evaluates
actions and events, and interrogates and challenges readers morally, psycholog
cally, philosophically, and socially. In the Vera interview published in the Sign an
Taboo collection, she explained-concerning reconsiderations of the Matabeleland
atrocities, such as her novel-"Why we're revisiting the horror of this is to ask
how it was possible" (225). Such a question evidently exceeds the issue of causalit
which is the primary consideration of the historian to analyze the origins, effect
and metaphysics of war.
When Vera depicts the "expressionless" faces of the soldiers torturing Mahla-
tini to death; when her narrator notes that instead of protecting civilians, "a

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 ANNIE GAGIANO 73

multitude of soldiers are disturbing the peace of the land"

and "the men loose in the bush" are "equally dedicated to
acting in accordance with a particular "sort of obedience,"1
war in which they were all casualties" (123, 135, 146, 161),
and exposing these horrors. She is also implicitly investiga
becomes possible for people to act in these ways against a
other people. Human life-individual as well as communal-
cultivation and nurturing and this truth, too, is engraved o
of Mbelele cave, described by Sibaso: "In all the ages, five t
thousand, four hundred years and yesterday the rain dan
the air," do their "winnowing dance," and display their "h
life prospering. However brief, this particular section is a
a description by means of which Vera allows us to measu
the denaturing and necrotic qualities of warfare. On the
this evocation of an ancient pre-Shona, pre-Ndebele lifesty
itself and endured into the very "yesterday" of Zimbabwe,
actions and effects of war: that "uproot[s] trees," breaks o
and singes the earth, "discard[ing]" human limbs with its
Here, Sibaso shelters amongst the "afterbirth of war" whe
voices," "crack[ed]" bone, and utter loneliness (96). The ut
dedicated life is established with stunning force in this dre
munal life evoked by the image of the rain dancers and their
equally with the "atrocious [...] but purposeful," even "rit
the soldier-terrorists who "ris[e] like locusts from the bush
"in a ceremony of their own," proceed to "intimidat[e] the l
and their might" (124, 145, 160).
Vera's engagement with the question of war is far large
scene and period of conflict and social destruction from
convincingly) arises, and in investigating this both bafflin
she is more prophetic than historic. She phrases and fram
logue in terms that have a local or national frame of refere
continental, indeed international resonance and urgency. "
we have betrayed our own dreams as a country," she said i

We feel that we have failed ourselves. And that we have a new

is to create social change within this new environment which
our independence. So, as a writer you cannot be detached from
implicated in that process of change. ("Place" 169-70)

Writing thus of the post-traumatic stress disorder fro

nations like her own suffer, Vera's is a challenging positio
power-blame as it does male-blame. Of Zimbabwe's woes,
(2004) interview that "we [Zimbabweans], by our silence or
created the problem. Not the President [...] our understan
has to change as well" ("Place" 171). In line with Vera's nov
essay warns that "a traumatised privacy cannot be reconcile
lic condition which continues to rely on war" (380). Hence,
suggests finally-perhaps emblematically indicating a simila

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74 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

as a whole-that Nonceba and Cephas aid each other and may hea
from the trauma of Thenjiwe's murder, the dead woman herself
as she is unforgettable. Equally significant is the unerasable eff
mind of the crazed Sibaso-although dead, spirits such as his hau
their hatred and suffering, joining the chorus of screams induce
Innovative and committed efforts of recreation, like Vera
petually required in violated societies. Nonceba and Cephas
of wounded recovery and sorrowful rescue and nurturing tha
in The Stone Virgins in order to demonstrate how much more
important-"deliverance" (165) is than political or military libera
she shows through Sibaso's harsh learning, how all war, even li
katabolic in effect: "This is the end of creation, the beginning o
words of Sibaso that express this central truth. Aristotle taugh
war that we may live in peace," but it is necessary for novelists in
to counter that aphorism with the discovery that peace can onl
engagement in the arts of healing, of gentleness and life-fostering
derest branches" may "meet" to "[weave] a nest" of "livable plac
(and Cephas's) well-known conclusion to The Stone Virgins (165;

NOTES

1. At least two major studies of (aspects of) African masculinities have app
respectively edited by Ouzgane and Morrell (2005) and by Richter and Morrel
since the text edited by Lindsay and Miescher, from which I quote.
2. Even though little of Vera's final novel Obedience (reportedly unfinishe
been made public, a fragment read by Terence Ranger at a commemoration
author's life also focuses interestingly on migrant workers. In the latter text, th
postcolonial Zimbabweans: the novel is apparently set just before the 2000 e
in Zimbabwe. In the extract, the narrator notes the "compliant grins" of the m
workers, indicating how political "slogans leave the tongue stuck to the roof
mouth"-an image suggesting a choking or silencing, as much as an unpalatabil
The Stone Virgins, I believe, the commandeering of masculinities by power is s
function by means of men's tradition of "obedience" to male authority.
3. See, for example, Ranger 207: "Vera uses the arrival of ZIPRA female
las-who take over the men's place in the store-as a symbol of the promise o
formation"; Vambe 105: "the existence of female Ndebele guerrillas strutting
Thandabantu township is provided as evidence that Ndebele women gave shape
new nation"; also the reference made (much less emphatically) by Driver and
son to "the direction [Vera's] writing takes in gesturing towards the warrior w
signs of the (positively) transgressive" (195). (These last two critics do, howev
note here Vera's indication of "the need to include men in the Zimbabwean fut
4. Lene Bull-Christiansen (207, 210-14); this critic writes (for example) tha
figure Sibaso [... .] who [... ] should represent 'Nehanda's bones risen' [...] can
viewed as a cruel parody of the spiritual battle represented in Nehanda" (214)
contend that it is the already dehumanised Sibaso who invokes Nehanda (107;
59, a reference analysed in my main text, above).
5. This is a point of focus, particularly with reference to Sibaso, in my "O
sor's Mind" article.

6. See, for example, Ranger 209, 212, Driver and Samuelson 185-86, Chan 374,
379, and Primorac 151, all of whom make this point about The Stone Virgins, mostly in
similar words.

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 ANNIE GAGIANO X 75

7. In another article ("Oppressor's Mind") I trace how Vera ind

courtship, marriage, and family life enacted by Sibaso in the very co
Nonceba, in the passage from the novel starting at the foot of page
the bottom of page 65.
8. Compare the 2002 Vera interview where she states that in The
"wanted to capture the moment of betrayal when one human being t
deliberately and consciously, into the enemy of another being who t
her own kin" ("Person"n.p.).
9. Compare in this respect Njabulo Ndebele's well-known essay
covery of the Ordinary, where South African authors are warned a
izing the features of apartheid society (especially the essays "Turkis
Thoughts on South African Fiction," "The Rediscovery of the Ord
Writings in South Africa," "Redefining Relevance," and "Against Pa
Future"-respectively 11-36, 37-57, 58-73, and 133-44 in this collec
10. The trope of the screaming voice to indicate the "insupport
caused by war is maintained in Vera's reportage concerning the tor
keeper (burnt; flayed with burning plastic)-in the statement that
helpless animal" and "died of the pain in his own voice" (123, 121).
11. Compare Sibaso's wry remark elsewhere that "a man imitates
him, with all his weaknesses" (97).
12. See Muchemwa, who writes: "The novel gets its title from S
goes beyond the limits of Shona and Ndebele mythology, to the S
Zimbabwean history and memory" (200).

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