{"id":720,"date":"2011-09-25T01:28:24","date_gmt":"2011-09-25T01:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue10\/?page_id=720"},"modified":"2011-09-25T01:28:36","modified_gmt":"2011-09-25T01:28:36","slug":"justin-pfefferle","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/writings\/reviews\/justin-pfefferle\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Pfefferle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fiction Review<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Justin Pfefferle<\/h6>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Trial of Robert Mugabe: A Novel<\/em><\/p>\n

Chielo Zona Eze<\/p>\n

Okri Books, 2009<\/p>\n

$12.00<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In The Trial of Robert Mugabe<\/em>, Nigerian writer and philosopher Chielo Zona Eze gives victims of the Mugabe regime what they never had in real life: a chance to confront the Zimbabwean dictator with stories of their suffering and death.\u00a0 Mugabe\u2019s trial takes place in God\u2019s court, where a series of speakers bear witness to the atrocities that were carried out during the Gukurahundi<\/em>, a period of postcolonial \u201ccleansing,\u201d which led to the slaughter of some 20,000 civilians.\u00a0 Mugabe listens reluctantly as each witness tells his or her story; the stories accumulate to make up a collective narrative of coercion, intimidation, violence, and injustice.\u00a0 The stories have evidentiary status.\u00a0 At the end of the trial, Steve Biko, the murdered anti-Apartheid activist, tells Mugabe: \u201c. . . there is ample evidence to condemn you.\u00a0 Each of the stories we have heard here is enough to send you to eternal hell fire . . .\u201d (148).<\/p>\n

Like the story of Zimbabwe itself, Eze\u2019s work is not as simple as it appears.\u00a0 Less a novel in the conventional sense than a meditation on novelistic form, The Trial<\/em> thinks aloud about the type of literary production that makes sense in response to the life and political career of Robert \u201cGabriel\u201d Mugabe.\u00a0 Mugabe was, in the minds of many black Africans, the angel who delivered them from white-minority rule.\u00a0 But, as one of the story-tellers, Erica Maidai, asks: \u201cWhat is independence without human freedom? What is independence without decency of life?\u201d\u00a0 Her story, like each witness\u2019s testimony, weaves private, personal reflection with public, national history.\u00a0 Echoing the words of Mahatma Gandhi, she explains that she withdrew her support for Mugabe and joined the Movement for Democratic Change because she \u201cwanted to become the change [she] desired.\u201d\u00a0 Maidai ventriloquizes the language of another, tethering herself and her nation to the Indian story of nonviolent resistance.\u00a0 Her personal story is the story of Zimbabwe, but it also speaks to a broader world narrative, indeed a broader world community.<\/p>\n

The novel concerns itself with the notion of story-telling, even as it tries to render \u201cthe people\u2019s stories as honestly as they happened.\u201d\u00a0 This is how Yvonne Vera \u2013 the novelist within Eze\u2019s novel \u2013 describes her responsibility as the official chronicler of the trial.\u00a0 Eze taps into the tradition of African and European story-telling in order to deal with the problem of how best to articulate the inarticulable.\u00a0 Allusions to Tsitsi Dangarembga\u2019s Nervous Conditions<\/em>, Chinua Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart<\/em>, Joseph Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/em>, J.M. Coetzee\u2019s The Age of Iron<\/em>, George Orwell\u2019s essay about colonial rule in Burma, \u201cShooting an Elephant,\u201d as well as Vera\u2019s own novel about Zimbabwe, The Stone Virgins<\/em>, create a polyphonic zone of stories and story-tellers.\u00a0 In this way, The Trial of Robert Mugabe<\/em> literally reaches outward.\u00a0 While it tells a specifically Zimbabwean story, it foregrounds connections to other histories and historical locations by positioning itself in a matrix of related texts and contexts.<\/p>\n

Each story describes the plight of individuals.\u00a0 Yet the novel privileges the collective over any single story or storyteller.\u00a0 For Eze, this narrative principle mirrors a truism about nations and nationalism: \u201cA country,\u201d as Erica Maidai puts it, \u201cis always more than any individual.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Just as the country of Zimbabwe comprises many identities, so too must its story be comprised of many different stories.\u00a0 While they may serve as vessels for personal articulations, \u201cstories do not belong to individuals; they belong to communities. They belong to humanity.\u201d\u00a0 The democratic form of The Trial<\/em> contrasts sharply with the undemocratic, monological character of Mugabe\u2019s rule.\u00a0 When the dictator identified himself with the nation as a whole, he denied the fundamentally polyglot character of such a political community.\u00a0 The trial thus serves as a place of collective recuperation.\u00a0 Instead of demanding Mugabe\u2019s just punishment, speakers ask that they, their stories, and the nation of Zimbabwe be re-valued for their teeming multiplicity.<\/p>\n

The Trial of Robert Mugabe<\/em> is a courageous, highly conceived work that demands its reader to listen to the stories of the victims of history.\u00a0 The punch-line, of course, is that the Mugabe regime continues to collect its victims, even as it couches its policies in the language of decolonisation.\u00a0 The novel serves as a warning to coloniser and colonised subject alike.\u00a0 Using the example of Zimbabwe as a test case, Eze invites us to imagine alternatives to the model of national identity that Mugabe enforces to this day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fiction Review Justin Pfefferle \u00a0 The Trial of Robert Mugabe: A Novel Chielo Zona Eze Okri Books, 2009 $12.00   In The Trial of Robert Mugabe, Nigerian writer and philosopher Chielo Zona Eze gives victims of the Mugabe regime what they never had in real life: a chance to confront the Zimbabwean dictator with stories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":77,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-720","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":722,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/720\/revisions\/722"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}