They both are a must-read, and their publication was supported by the Pamberi Trust.
Mandishona uses irony and humour to counter frustration and despair and to expose double standards. White Gods Black Demons, containing 10 sharply polished stories, explores the dark comedy that lay just beneath the surface of tragedy in Zimbabwean society in the last decade. Everyone comes under the microscope: politicians, new farmers, exiles, people stranded in queues and inflation that eventually killed the local currency. Truth and morality are dispensable in a society where wealth is rewarded with respect, integrity marred by untruth, rumour displaces fact, and power is only interested in its own survival. Mandishona holds a mirror up to reality and without equivocation asks us to look at what is real: the likeness or the distortion, and what it is we want to see in Zimbabwe.
In The Trek and Other Stories – Hoba shows his amazing story-telling abilities.
For baba, farming means little more than erecting a sign boldly proclaiming B. J. Magudu, Black Commercial Farmer, as the new Baas at farm 24; after which he is happy to leave the farming to mama, who has always worked the fields back in their village.
Much has been said over the last decade about the forcible eviction of the white farmers in Zimbabwe, less about the plight of the farm-workers, while the voice of the new settlers, and militia manipulated for a cause, has remained virtually unheard. This short but powerful anthology, The Trek and Other Stories, provides sensitive and illuminating, wry and comic perspectives on those people who occupied the land believing their future was golden, only for it to crumble to dust and disillusion.
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