This September Sun

"I particularly like this book because of how it moves over a very long time span. We have two wars—World War II and then the Zimbabwean war for independence—somewhere in there. It shows really well how history isn’t just a static force. You can’t just say that stuff happened and then it’s over and it’s gone. The effects of these things that happened long ago still reverberate today. And I think, for me, that is why I had to choose this novel. I suppose what I’m trying to describe is causality. The fact that historical events have a bearing on individual lives today. I like the link that she has, with the semi-contemporary setting of the novel. “Africans were supposed to have been timeless: they never developed, they never advanced, they never had any ideas until the Europeans came along…History really starts when the Europeans conquer Africa.” Partly, I think a lot of it had to do with the construction of Rhodesian identity and, later on, white Zimbabwean identity. It was important for the book to take us right back into the past, into her grandma’s time, and how people came over and they settled. It shows how this affects young white Zimbabweans who might, to a certain extent, suffer questions about their own identity in a country that might not really value them as proper Zimbabweans, as it would its black citizens. There is the scene where the main character, Ellie, is in London which should be some kind of ancestral homecoming type thing for her. But she doesn’t really fit in there. It doesn’t really quite work out for her. Exactly. I suppose I’ve gone for the grand narrative, but I also think that where this succeeds is in juxtaposing small domestic-type histories together with grand national histories. It’s a big question about white Zimbabwean literature. When the farm invasions were happening, there was this huge outpouring of memoirs by white Zimbabweans . For example, David Coltart—who was the Minister of Education, and is a member of the opposition now—wrote a book that detailed his experience when he was conscripted as a member of the Rhodesian army and some of the horrible things that they did under the Ian Smith regime. “It’s enriching, following debate about who we are—particularly when we’re thinking on the grand level of what nations are, in so far as the nation state continues to be important to us.” Some of these memoirs were pretty honest about what happened historically, but with others it was more like, ‘horrible stuff is happening to our people’—but you don’t really get a sense of where it’s coming from, historically. You are certainly sympathetic of these things that are happening, without a wider awareness of exactly what is the core cause of some of these disputes that happened. And I think Bryony, in her own books, refers to the “Whenwes”: these mostly self-published, glorious military books about how great the Rhodesian army was and how they were fighting terrorists and they would have won if they hadn’t been betrayed by the British and the South Africans. There is that hardcore Rhodie strand which is unrepentant and unsympathetic. But then you’ve got contemporary writers who are very sensitive about how exactly this particular tribe in Zimbabwe came about."