HOUSE OF STONE

By Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Zamani, the narrator of Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s remarkable first novel, “House of Stone,” has a troubled relationship with the past. For him there is history, and then there is “hi-story,” a subtle but important distinction for a man who wants more than the incomplete, fragmentary tale his uncle passed on to him before dying.

As an orphan born in the violent aftermath of Zimbabwe’s war for independence, Zamani sees the past as riddled with loss and impossible-to-bear gaps and silences that he must “powder away” in order to reinvent himself.

The path Zamani takes as he constructs a new “hi-story” is a circuitous one. If he were an ordinary narrator, he would most likely mine and interrogate memories and photographs to construct the narrative he wants. Zamani, however, is anything but ordinary; when we first meet him he has already woven himself into the fabric of another family, the Mlambos, whose son, Bukhosi, has mysteriously disappeared.

Zamani lives on the Mlambos’ property as a lodger in what he refers to as a “pygmy room.” Following Bukhosi’s disappearance he draws closer to the grieving parents, Abednego and Mamma Agnes, perversely referring to them as his surrogate mother and father and doing his best to fill the void left by their missing son. And yet, to be more than just a lodger Zamani needs intimate access to Abednego and Mamma Agnes’s past, from their childhood memories of colonial Rhodesia to the buried, unspoken tragedies of their lives during Gukurahundi — the post-independence strategy of ethnic cleansing that began under President Robert Mugabe.