"Zeleza's book is simply compulsory reading for every citizen of Africa."
Sunday Nation, Nairobi, October 25, 1992.
"Compassionate and real, the book praises the tenacity of the human spirit without glamorizing it."
New Internationalist, May 1993.
"It is about the test of friendship and the strength of family love. However, once into it, there is still enough bloodshed and violence to grip the attention and make it a compulsory read."
West Africa, 3-9 May 1993.
"From the long tyranny of Malawi's years of Hastings Banda comes an inspirational novel, Smouldering Charcoal. From the very first sentence you know you are in the hands of a writer who will spare you nothing of the humiliation and agony of Banda's decades of night. Very soon, you know also that this is a story of struggle, or a refusal to accept dictatorship, of a striving for light."
Morning Star, November 1, 1993.
"The story is a good one and agreeably well told. The unpleasant sides of the subject matter are handled vividly and strongly, unsensationally, and without gloating. The positive humanity emerging in several of the characters is unsentimentally refreshing. Zeleza is particularly good on male and female interdependence in spite of callow and brutal machismo and glib resentments. The book is gripping at levels of human and cultural and political sympathies." London Magazine, December/January 1993.
"In social science literature, class, culture, and gender seem somehow opposed: working-class unity is analytically undercut by concerns with racism and sexism. However, throughout colonial history, examples abound of so-called Third-World women fighting as women and as workers against imperialism, and of black and white uniting against capitalism and against racism. As Karen Sacks argues, "just as Marxists since Marx [End Page 173] have developed our understanding of class struggle and class consciousness by analyzing workers' efforts to transform their conditions of existence, so too must we examine women's efforts to do the same and see how they relate to class struggle and consciousness." Ousmane Sembène's novel, God's Bits of Wood, and that of Tiyambe Zeleza, Smouldering Charcoal—two novels which reflect historical conditions over the period from late colonialism to the beginnings of independent postcolonial African states—provide us with data necessary to address this question.
Francophone Africa's French-language literary output began in France in the 1950s. If the prime motivation for these early works was the negritude ideology, its source of inspiration was undoubtedly anticolonialism. In Senegal, writers of the colonial period were intellectuals and portrayed their protagonists as such. Though they expressed their sympathy with the plight of the colonized masses, this expression of sympathy was essentially abstract, since these writers consciously or unconsciously wished to be identified with a French consciousness from which they had been excluded. This is hardly surprising. The influence of France has been pervasive in Senegal since the seventeenth century, and at the dusk of the colonial period, a new Senegalese privileged intellectual class that had partially inherited its privilege from the French colonial administration was establishing a new social and economic inequality similar to the one that had prevailed under the French Empire. Alongside this new intellectual class, and enjoying equal privileges, was a new religious class whose influence was derived from Islam. While the colonial administration had operated in an unequal relationship where all Africans were subordinated to whites, Islam denied women any say in either spiritual or domestic affairs and subjected them to the whims and caprices of men. It was against these new privileged classes that Sembène, a self-educated manual worker, directed his devastating irony in God's Bits of Wood. Both colonialism and Islam are significant to the relations between men and women and the interpretation of women's initiatives throughout the novel, which provides a view of how women responded to the oppression of both forces.
Set in the late colonial period, Sembène's novel may be seen, like other novels of its time, as an indictment of colonization and its effects on African ways of life. However, what gives the novel its poignancy is the internal dynamics of the action, which makes it possible to discuss the ideology of the novelist. As Gérard and Laurent have pointed out, "Not only is [this novel] of truly epic proportions, carefully constructed and . . . well-written, but it also exhibits Sembène's uncommon ability to exploit and interpret his [End Page 174] own experience and that of his once fellow-workers, the small people, the under-privileged, the proletarians." Not only does Sembène lay out for us the revolutionary possibilities inherent in the everyday lives of men and women with respect to feminism, colonialism, and class struggle; he also stresses that the oppressive conditions of imperialism under which working-class women lived generated bonds of reciprocal assistance in performing their unpaid labor of housework and child rearing. As the author makes clear, it is these bonds that have revolutionary potential. For Sembène, the characters' motivations in God's Bits of Wood represented a determination on the part of underprivileged workers, and especially women, to effect a meaningful change in their destiny as members of a new Senegalese nation that, in 1960, was coming into being at the fall of empire.
As African states gained independence, African writers mitigated their attack on the evil effects of colonialism and directed it toward the new African elite coming into power. The new African bourgeoisie, which had hijacked the hopes and aspirations of independence and self-affirmation for which the men and women in Sembène's novel sacrificed so much, became the dominant theme in this second generation of African novels, designated variously as political or postcolonial novels. Smouldering Charcoal by Tiyambe Zeleza belongs to this group. If Sembène's novel discusses the possibilities of creating a just and equitable African society, it is because the author, who set his novel in the 1940s and 1950s and who could foresee decolonization at the end of empire, viewed colonialism and Islam serving as spurs to women's efforts to establish agency in their own lives. Several years after the fall of French and British empire, however, Zeleza, setting his novel in the Malawi of the 1980s, sees decolonization as a sham. Perhaps with a few minor exceptions, the political history of Malawi is similar to that of Senegal; thus it is possible to suggest that a kind of developmental continuity between the two novels is true to political developments. The privileged class that we see developing in Sembène's colonial Senegal has taken root in Zeleza's postcolonial Malawi, where the underprivileged classes, especially women, still search for means to establish agency in their lives. In both instances, the Africans are not presented as passive victims. They assert their true independence by initiating actions that are intended to bring about change.
The characters in Smouldering Charcoal, published 32 years after God's Bits of Wood, have recourse to the same kind of action as a means of meeting their demands and asserting themselves; they also go on strike, withhold their labor. In both novels we identify two principal series of actions: [End Page 175] the initiatives undertaken by the male railroad workers in God's Bits of Wood and the male bakery workers in Smouldering Charcoal, and those undertaken by the women of their communities. The secondary areas of action in both novels deal with the reactions of other parties to the initiatives taken by the workers, and especially by the women. However, whereas men and women in Sembène's colonial world are able to effect a change in their lives through their actions, African workers face a much more indomitable foe in the postcolonial dispensation of Zeleza's world. Although Zeleza restates and rewrites Sembène's project, he analyzes and details a new and much more intractable African condition that Sembène's characters did not and could not foresee.
Kwaku Gyasi, Introduction, “From God's Bits of Wood to Smouldering Charcoal: Decolonization, Class Struggle, and the Role of Women's Consciousness in Postcolonial Africa,” French Colonial History 5 (2004) 173-191
"Smouldering Charcoal by Tiyambe Zeleza, a native of Zimbabwe with Malawian ancestry who is now living in Ontario, is not only a great African novel, but, in some ways, a new kind of great African novel. What surprises the reader most about this work is the startling density of its social critique. So much ground is covered in so few pages. Other fine African novelists cover specific issues at length (such as Buchi Emecheta) or cover a broad range of social issues at great length (Ngugi Wa Thiongo), but I have never seen so many problems of post-colonial (neo-colonial) Africa addressed in one brief novel. Zeleza critiques medicine, education, politics, the prison system, gender relations, economics, the treatment of the exile, and much more — all in a few well-written pages. As a result, I can think of no better book to introduce students to the broad issues of the continent as they manifest themselves today.
No doubt Zeleza’s distinguished scholarly career as an economist and political scientist helps make this book resonate with such depth. The politics are far from naive here. Consider, for example, his character Ndatero, a playwright incarcerated in a Malawian prison (Malawi is where most of the novel takes place). Ndatero explains why he refuses to join a political movement with arguments reminiscent of Basil Davidson’s writing in The Black Man’s Burden:
'You see, that’s where radical movements go wrong. They concentrate all their energies on capturing the state machine. And when they do the state swallows them up and they become reincarnations of the ousted regimes. You can’t wake up one morning and go to a shop and buy a package of democracy. Democracy is a culture. It needs to be nurtured and developed. But what do you see? The radical movements are themselves usually undemocratic. Democracy won’t come naturally after the socialist revolution. It has to be a part of the revolutionary process.'
Politics, and the nation state itself, might be the very problem — leaving us with the current conundrum of how to restore Africa to its best precolonial political structures. Zeleza’s novel does not answer this question — at this point, who can? — but he takes the reader far enough to ask it and want to know the answer.
The most useful political and social commentary of the book should not exclude its remarkable literary virtues. Like Joseph Conrad’s unhappily named Nigger of the Narcissus, Smouldering Charcoal begins in the third person and has an emergent speaker in the final two pages, who reveals (in this case) that we have been reading a manuscript written by one character and edited by some of the others (a more collectivist variation on Conrad’s idea).
The effect is one of an emerging personal voice breaking through the clouds of massive oppression — a stunning and deliberate effect. The story also gains power by the convergence of two parallel narratives: the baker Mchere and his family, representing the struggling workers of Malawi and Africa who are simply trying to get by from day-to-day in a crazy dysfunctional system, and the journalist Chola and his girlfriend Catherine, who represent the politically committed intelligentsia. The two story lines converge when Chola covers a bakery strike and later gets incarcerated with Mchere. The double plot enables Zeleza to emphasize both the individual textures of class problems and the underlying convergences that provide opportunities for unified action.
Finally, the language is gorgeous, if unstintingly realistic. Throwaway lines that will set the reader meditating abound. One example: “Many marriages in Njala were not founded on love, trust, and any such fine sentiments the middle classes often pretentiously cling to, but on mutual contempt; and they survived out of sheer necessity.” This book has the power to haunt any reader for a long time. Anyone interested in a broad coverage of a complex continent, albeit a coverage riddled with penetrating specificities and great literary artistry, should give this novel a close reading. You’ll be glad you did. This work establishes Zeleza in the ranks of the very best of African novelists.
Robert E. Mielke, Northeast Missouri State University, Canadian Journal of African Studies 29, 3 (1995).
