The Hairdresser of Harare

Review of The Hairdresser of Harare - The Times

Times, The (First Edition)
Tuesday 07 September 2010 p18

Quick Review: The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu

THE protagonist of Tendai Huchu's first novel is an ambitious, young, single mother, Vimbai, who battles with the difficulties of living in modernday day Harare while making a life for herself and her daughter. She copes with aplomb. Her voice is clear, and the insight into life in Zimbabwe refreshing. The salon, her place of work, is a gathering place of personalities. A place where a white farmer's wife delivers the hair products a ruling politician cannot live without. Here Vimbal meets the young, talented and gorgeous Dumisani, who joins the salon and usurps her role as best stylist. As their friendship develops he draws her into his wealthy and politically connected family who make their money in a morally dubious way. The book was mostly a pleasure to read, but it becomes annoying when Vimbai confronts, and challenges, her prejudice towards homosexuality. To interrupt a perfectly good story line with pages of didactic writing is a pity. Jackie May

The book is published by Jacana and is available at Exclusive Books for R125.

Review of The Hairdresser of Harare - Cape Times

Jacana

Tendai Huchu's Hairdresser of Harare is almost an excellent book. Huchu has a light touch and a gentle but keenly observed social commentary of contemporary Harare is subtly interwoven with the very human story of Vimbayi, a young woman struggling with work, family, single parenthood and a new man in her life. Vimbai is a beautifully drawn heroine, one the reader cares deeply for.

Unfortunately the twist in the tale is all too obvious and when the climax comes, it is over almost before it has begun, and one is left feeling a little done by.

Karen Jeynes

Getting Published - Tendai Huchu

Getting Published

‘Abandon hope all ye who enter this profession’ – it is a pity nobody told me these lines when I first put pen to paper and proclaimed in a boisterous voice that I was the rightful heir to Dostoevsky, Orwell, Hugo and every other literary giant on whose shoulders I would profess to stand whether I had read them or not. I mean how hard could it be? You write, mail it off to a publisher who says you are magnificent, offers you a six-figure advance preferably in Zimbabwean dollars and within a month your first name has changed to JK.
Then followed five years of euphoria and despair and if I am to be honest more of the latter. That was necessary and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. In those five years I found my voice and knocked back copious amounts of alcohol in the search of inspiration. Then on Christmas day 2009, I got an idea that was like an embarrassing itch that you can’t scratch because you are on your first date with the one who could be the one. I forgot about festivities, got a friend’s laptop and began to write. Vimbai’s voice was spinning in my head, she had a story to tell and demanded to be heard so for a fortnight I was her slave. I did nothing but eat,write,stretch,eat,write,stretch,eat,write,write,stretch. Oh and did I mention sleep? Probably not because I saw so little of it. That’s how the first draft forThe Hairdresser of Harare was born.
I revised it as best I could and shot it off to some publishing houses. Then the waiting game began. Euphoria, delusions of grandeur and despair followed in rapid succession until I got an email from Irene Staunton from Weaver Press. She liked the premise of the story and asked to see the first chapter. She enjoyed that asked to see the rest. In the period I waited for a response I became mildly schizophrenic until I got her email, which said she loved it and then my condition morphed into hebephrenic schizophrenia. The symptoms were self evident, 'reality distortion' (involving delusions and hallucinations) and 'psychomotor poverty' (poverty of speech, lack of spontaneous movement and various aspects of blunting of emotion).
Contract signed, The Hairdresser of Harare had a publisher in Harare. When I got my draft back it had more red lines than black text. Irene had been editing. I was quick to realize just how fortunate I had been. It seems my publisher was a type of diamond prospector, the sort you only find in Chiadzwa. She was an old school publisher who took a chance on a very rough piece of work and was willing to invest her time and resources into polishing it, not because of its commercial appeal but simply because she liked it. The text went back and forth between us so many times that I felt sick in my stomach every time I saw the name Irene Staunton in my inbox.
With each revision the story was improving and several months later when I got the lastest draft I could barely recognize it. It was sharper, clearer and read like a real novel. I admit now that though my name alone appears on the cover there is my editor and an army of proof readers, copyeditors and sub editors lurking in the text who my readers will never know about. That’s only the half of it, my journey continues, interviews, talks and all the other soul sapping aspects of modern writing are to follow.
If there is any advice I can offer a new writer reading this, it is – do not give into despair and self doubt, find your own voice, stay away from cheap cider, don’t take yourself too seriously, revise and polish your work until your eyes bleed and if you do all these things then maybe, just maybe, Lady Luck will give you a helping hand.

New Novel - The Hairdresser of Harare

Bulawayo Burning: The Social History of a Southern Rhodesia African City 1893-1960, by Terence Ranger

Launched by the guest of honour, Angeline S. Kamba

Book Café, 23 November, 2010

SPEECH

I can’ help but feel I am most likely here under false pretences!

When I was first asked if I would be guest of honour at the launch of a book by Terry Ranger, a book whose title was: Bulawayo Burning, I laughed and remarked: sure, if Bulawayo is burning, I must be there to find out who’s burning it and why they’re burning it! I did not know what I was letting myself in for!! My first reaction of enthusiasm was based on two things 1. I am almost a Bulawayo girl. 2. I have known the author since I went to the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to do my PCE – Postgraduate Certificate in Education, after I had obtained my BA degree from Roma which was then a Catholic University, and is now the National University of Lesotho, that was in 1958. You see, I am now at a stage when I readily admit my age. (Incidentally, I became the second African girl student to enroll at the new university, the first having been Sarah Chabvunduka, now Mrs Kachingwe who was then a second year undergraduate student.)

Hence I am pleased to be reunited with the author – a great friend and great teacher. Terry Ranger was in the first crop of academics to teach at that new institution. He did not teach me – I am not a history student, I know nothing about historiography, what I learnt during my curatorship of the National Archives of Zimbabwe. In that period I learned a great deal from my interface with eminent history researchers – the Bhebes, the Mudenges, David Beach, Prof. Roberts, etc.

None the less Terry would get to know me because one of his great strengths was his ability to reach out to other people, perhaps even more so in the early days of that multiracial institution when a lot of good people of goodwill were committed to see the inter-racial aspect of the institution work. Frankly it does not surprise me that he has produced this work, which is a detailed and intricate social history of Bulawayo – covering the years 1893 – 1960, the year that I married Walter Kamba!

Gathering and putting together the material can’t have been easy, particularly in terms of the volume of information and evidence as the author himself admits. Again, I was struck by his gift of reaching out to various informants, again I thought, trust Terry to fill others with enthusiasm to the point where they wanted to tell him everything in the greatest detail.

When I started reading the book, or shall I say when I started to read it ‘physically’ as we say in my old profession of librarianship, and more specifically in cataloguing, which entails looking at the foreword, introduction, table of contents, bibliography, index, illustrations before actually reading the book, I wished I had turned down Murray’s invitation. Would I be able to digest so much detail, what would I make of the litany of characters, the good and the bad!

I mentioned earlier that I was almost a Bulawayo girl – and that was the real point of the attraction of book for me. I am a Kalanga girl born in Plumtree and hence Bulawayo to me as a young girl was ‘the city’ that people aspired to go to, even though they associated it with the bad. You would hear grownups talk about a young woman who had gone to the city to whore – it sounds much stronger when said in Kalanga – ‘wakanda ku doropo ku no hura’, it seemed at the time that was the only reason women went to Bulawayo. In 1947 when my father became Headmaster of Luveve Primary School, we were told never to go anywhere near the Location/Makokoba as it was a bad place. By then, I had, in any case, been banished to Boarding School at Empandeni. The little that I saw of the city was when my Dad took me to purchase items which I required for school. I could not believe my eyes when I saw Makokoba – how could anyone live in a place like that? Better to be in the wilds of Plumtree, more so if one was lucky enough to be shielded by the Mission farm environments of Thekwane and Dombodema, which we were.

But then again a lot of Kalanga males looked more to the South than to Bulawayo. When I was later banished to Lesotho both for my secondary and university education, I used to spend all my short vacations with various uncles and cousins in places like Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Kimberley until I returned home on some long holiday – (1956?) and with two friends who were also studying at universities in South Africa, we got vacation jobs in the Bulawayo City Council under Dr Hugh Ashton, for whom we developed great regard and respect. That was during the development of more decent accommodation such as Mpopoma, which was in fact where we worked, mainly paperwork and interviews of residents. Dr Ashton was pleased with our work. I am not surprised that despite the problems that he endured in his dealings with a thoroughly non-progressive and right-wing administration of the likes of Macintyre and others in the latter period, he never lost his sense of balance and fairness. Hence I feel that I have seen something of the Bulawayo that Terry has portrayed – in fact he could have interviewed me, but then again I am pleased that he used my old institution the National Archives extensively!!

Historian or not, I was spellbound by the book, even when I had to keep going back to sections already read to check on facts and characters. The early part of the book revealed to me the importance of Bulawayo as the foremost colonial port – the contact point between the British and the Matebele’s royal descendants of Lobengula and Mzikikazi, the savage nature of early colonialism which showed neither respect nor compassion, the destruction of royal settlements, and of course later the coming of other African players – from various neighbouring countries and regional localities Manicaland, Bechuanaland, South Africa, Mashonaland, clearly attracted by what they perceived to be opportunities for a better life in terms of jobs in industry, railways, domestic work, etc., despite horrific accommodation and the inhumane treatment at the hands of the whites. I finally understood the reason why Bulawayo, even in its earliest days has always been somewhat a cosmopolitan city, not necessarily in the modern way, but nonetheless a city where cultures merged and despite the periodic conflicts, one cannot help but be struck by the tolerance . I think Bulawayo was an early player in terms of acceptance and respect of diversity particularly multi-ethnicity. One of my recollections as a young girl on my school holidays at Luveve where my father was Headmaster is the fact that I heard more languages spoken, where I would have expected to hear mostly Ndebele. One heard more Shona, Nyanja, a bit of Kalanga and Ndebele.

The savagery of early colonialism was daunting – the treatment of ‘natives and kaffirs’ by the whites totally unbelievable. It is surprising that there wasn’t more violence. None the less it was only a matter of time before the natives found their voices and insisted on more humane treatment, better conditions of living, better accommodation and better-paying jobs and a voice in decisions regarding their lives and their affairs, despite the determined opposition of the likes of Macintyre .

The emergence of a character like Sipambaniso, his courage and strength of character remains remarkable, particularly in view of the fact he was no advocate of violence, but believed in dialogue. His influence in the then peace and governance issues was truly remarkable. I had to keep going back to look him up again and the various roles that he played. He stands tall in the history of Bulawayo.

The fact that Terry claimed some close complementarity between his work and Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning made me curious enough to quickly read Yvonne’s book which I had never read, even though I had gotten to know her well, and indeed saw her just before her death. Makokobas the main arena of Butterfly Burning was largely the ‘doroba’ that had been painted as the bad doroba/city in my childhood, and could now understand it better, as I read its establishment and growth in Terry’s more substantial history.

Indeed, even as I discovered that Bulawayo was the initial bedrock of colonialism, I became convinced that it was also the foundation of the struggle for people’s rights. What is striking is that a lot of the people who had suffered so much humiliation at the hands of the colonial government – both local and central became outstanding statesmen in arguing the case for better treatment, better accommodation, better social amenities.

The period from the early fifties becomes even more fascinating as for me the characters become real people, with people I knew, or knew about from my Dad, but it is fascinating also in the sense that it is the prelude to the struggle that finally wins us independence and gets us to where we are today.

The likes of Jerry Vera, the Samkanges, Grey Bango – a relative of mine as I am a Bango too, Charlton Ngcebetsha who was close to my Dad, Masotsha Ndlovu, Jason Moyo, William Ngwenya, Jasper Savannu, Mike Masotcha Hove etc. etc. They made the history of our contry

Thanks Terry for taking down Memory Lane!

"Like very good dark chocolate this is a delicious novel, with a bitter-sweet flavour."

Weaver Press has just released a new novel from Tendai Huchu titled The Hairdresser of Harare. Read Tendai's exeriences on Getting Published. The novel tells the story of Vimbai, a hairdresser, the best in Mrs Khumalo's salon, and she knows she is the queen on whom her workmates depend. Her situation is reversed when the good-looking, smooth-talking Dumisani joins them. However, his charm and desire to please slowly erode Vimbai's rancour and when he needs somewhere to live, Vimbai becomes his landlady. Read more