A vibrant collection of stories that artfully combines humor and horror in its depiction of the struggle to survive in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

An Elegy for Easterly
by Petina Gappah. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $23.

Reviewed by Alexander Nemser

President Robert Mugabe’s reign of nearly thirty years has made Zimbabwe an emblematic country in crisis. The country, once the British colony of Rhodesia, was liberated from British rule in 1980 by the guerrilla warfare of which Mugabe was one of the leaders. About a decade ago, President Mugabe forcibly reclaimed the majority of the country’s arable land, which had remained in the possession of the country’s white minority, and instituted a policy of farmland redistribution to the native citizens. As a result of the chaotic redistribution plan, the country’s agricultural exports fell, and its economy went into decline.

In response, Mugabe’s government printed trillions of Zimbabwean dollars, causing the country to experience hyperinflation. Over the last few years, the inflation rose astronomically to two-hundred and thirty-one million percent. In 2008, a UN report noted that only 6% of the population was formally employed. Thousands of uncompensated civil servants left their jobs; schoolteachers all around the country migrated to South Africa to work as maids or grape-pickers. The University of Zimbabwe had no functioning sewer system. Dissidents were jailed and beaten. Half the country was in need of emergency food aid.

The hyperbolic disaster of Mugabe’s presidency provides the backdrop for Petina Gappah’s collection of sharply-written short stories, “An Elegy for Easterly.” Here are the daily lives of the country’s mechanics, bankers, students, housewives, traveling salesmen, beggars, and madwomen, everyone lost in the flood of currency. “It is three months since inflation reached 3,000, 325 percent per annum,” comments one narrator, “making billionaires of everyone, even maids and gardeners.” Together, Gappah’s stories compose a panorama across the widening social strata of the country, from those forced to relocate to temporary houses made of “pole and mud, of thick black plastic sheeting for walls and clear plastic for windows, houses that erupted without city permission,” to those in the ruling elite living “in the heart of the golden triangle” of the capital Harare, who come home to driveways lined with “four-hundred metres of birds of paradise.”

Running through the stories are the details of day to day life: the voice on the radio repeating over and over that Zimbabwe will never again be a colony, and that inflation will decrease tomorrow; the give-away cracked red lips of the AIDS virus; the shadow of China’s economic interests cast by the “zhing-zhong” plastic products filling all the stores; the private flights taken to South Africa by the wives of high officials just to buy groceries.

Gappah has an eye for representative images, a gift for transforming scenes into symbols by means of a few phrases. In one of the book’s strongest stories, “The Mupandawana Dancing Champion,” the Why Leave Guesthouse and Disco-Bar hosts a dancing competition in a small rural “Growth Point”—larger than a village, but not yet a town. And in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, where every act plays out the ongoing struggle of authority and opposition, even the dances are politicized. The sexually suggestive kongonya is identified with the ruling-party, represented locally by a man referred to as “the honorable,” the member of parliament of the area. On the night of the contest, Gappah writes,

There was kongonya, more kongonya, and naturally more kongonya—ruling-party supporters in Mupandawana are spread as thickly as the rust on the ancient Peugot 504 that the honorable’s son crashed and abandoned at Sadza Growth Point.

The image provides a subtle miniature for life in this provincial township: the car, European, but manufactured in Kenya or Nigeria, invokes the government’s patronage system of control by gifts which contributes so blatantly to the wild inequality of resources (it is a standard practice of the Mugabe government to offer E-Class Mercedes to incoming ministers with opposition leanings); as a product of industrial technology, the car also recalls the general dilapidation of Zimbabwe’s infrastructure, built on hopes and foreign currency, now left to decay publicly; even the idea of a Growth Point is representative of the air of false promises, as the narrator comments that “townlets” are given the name Growth Points “merely to divert us from the reality of our present squalor with optimistic predictions about our booming future.” “The only real growth,” the narrator continues, is in the lengthening line of young people waiting to board buses to the capital, and, conspicuously, “in the number of people waiting to buy coffins.”

Author Petina Gappah confronts the culture of death.

The book’s best stories center around the culture’s confrontation with death. These stories are paradoxically also the funniest, and Gappah’s book is, in the end, a localized and defiant contribution to the literature of laughing at dying: the dancing champion in the story mentioned above turns out to be the Growth Point’s coffin maker M’dhara Vitalis, who used to work in a furniture factory in Harare. Fired three years before he planned to retire, Vitalis received no actual pension, but instead three pairs of shoes manufactured at another factory which closed at the same time. All the pairs are half a size too small. Nonetheless, Vitalis appears at the competition wearing trousers with flared legs, a bright-green shirt under a jacket with two vents at the back, and, on his feet, “one-third of his pension.”

In one of the book’s most vivid scenes, the aging coffin-maker dances all the contestants off the floor. Later, after many nights as the one-man dancing spectacle of the place, Vitalis gets to the ground, and rolls and shakes. The thrilled crowd assumes he is showing off a new and never-before-seen move. But, as Gappah writes, “It was only when the song ended, and we gave him a rousing ovation and still he did not get up that we realized that he would never get up, and that he had not been dancing but dying.”

The dancing coffin-maker, whose name declares his identification with the force of life, stands in for the spirit of Gappah’s collection: a group portrait of the “new Zimbabwe, where everyone is a criminal,” where two bananas cost a million dollars, and where the house of mourning sounds with laughter at the new joke of the living.