A Child Called Happiness by Stephan Collishaw
| A Child Called Happiness by Stephan Collishaw | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: A thoughtful examination of the Zimbabwe troubles as seen from both sides of the divide, and placed in the historical context of two family stories. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: May 2018 |
| Publisher: Legend Press | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1787198814 | |
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Mazowe Valley, 2011 – Natalie hears a sharp cry that she thinks at first might be a bird, but turns out to be a baby, abandoned to the birds on the kopje. She is there with her uncle and they take the child, back to his farm initially and then to a local village where it is taken in. They do not report it to the police.
Natalie is new to Zimbabwe and its ways of functioning and dysfunctioning. She has come to stay with her aunt and uncle following an unspecified trauma back home in England.
One strand of A Child Called Happiness follows Natalie's gradual settling into a Zimbabwe that is beginning to pull itself apart. In 2011 racial tensions were beginning to explode again right across the planet, in each place the way of that explosion was rooted in the local history. In Zimbabwe it was fuelled by the political situation, the economic situation, and the simple fact that old grievances were still not being addressed. White-owned farms were being attacked, their owners driven off land their families had farmed for years, driven off, brutally, with nowhere else to go.
But of course, something similar had happened before. In reverse.
Kare kare is the Shona expression that introduces many of the chapters of what happened before. So far as I can tell, the word Kare means something like "ago" "before" "previously" – but also something like in the past historically with the sense of further back in time.
I don't know how accurate Collishaw's research is or whether the Shona people do start their folk tales with Kare kare. If they do, then I guess what it really means is once upon a time…
Once upon a time, to be precise in the year 1896, an old man called Tafara visited the cave above their valley to perform the anniversary funerary rites for his father. It was a night full of omens. He returned from the rites to the youngest of his three wives, who would become the grandmother of the teller of the older history.
Tafara means 'we are happy'. The villagers called the 2011 abandoned child Happiness.
Difference and change and still everything the same, would be a good way of understanding this then-and-now story of how Zimbabwe had come to be what it had come to be by 2011. Collishaw serves the story of the country well by staying away from big pictures and focussing on families and individuals. He serves it well by talking of ordinary people and ordinary passions and hopes and failings. Politics only intrudes to the extent that it must. The big picture isn't the point, the point is that in whatever has happened in Zimbabwe over the centuries since the white settlers did what they did, and what they didn't, there is far more wrong on all sides than there is right on any of them. There is racism. There is brutality. There is injustice. There is political mismanagement and cronyism and corruption. There is terrorism.
And yet, there is also right on all sides. On all sides there is the love of a land, of a landscape, of a country and its traditions. On all sides there is a trying to do the best that one can, given where one, the individual one, starts from. There is recognition that people are just people and many of them need help, protection, education.
Ultimately, there is just people, all of whom are overwhelmed and driven by the history they have been handed. Some respond by trying to make better, others respond by seeking a kind of justice, others are driven by revenge.
What becomes very clear from this tale of two families is that none of the individuals involved would necessarily know into which of those camps they fit.
The reflections of the past in the present are very clear from the outset, but the true nature of the weave is only slowly revealed. Those of us who remember those times, and have looked for news that has not come out of those country in more recent years as the unrest worsened, who still wonder about people we knew would be caught up in it, will find a quietly powerful story here and will know where it is headed.
Those who know nothing about the country, will learn a great deal.
For a more on the struggles on the African continent we can recommend Heart of Darfur by Lisa French Blaker… but for a happier read to prove it's not all bad we loved Twenty Chickens for a Saddle by Robyn Scott.
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You can read more book reviews or buy A Child Called Happiness by Stephan Collishaw at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy A Child Called Happiness by Stephan Collishaw at Amazon.com.
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