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It is up to me as a black woman writer to write against the persistence of this vision regarding black women, a vision that in southern Africa has its roots in how Haggard wrote Gagool.
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Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu was photographed by Marcus J Jooste
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The student protests in the novel were informed by the protest movement that swept through the United States in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. I am not surprised that you saw echoes of South Africa’s Fees Must Fall movement.
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The creation of half-broken people is Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s fourth novel. Her first, The theory of flight, won the 2019 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Her second, The history of man, won the Windham-Campbell Prize. Her third was called The quality of mercy.
The creation of half-broken people tells the story of women who pass through the City of Kings, and of the men in their lives. Conspicuously absent are the original kings; they have long ago been driven from their land by the ever so polite colonial society trying to establish and maintain a city with straight lines.
Like Ndlovu’s first three novels, The creation of half-broken people is a mixture of historical research, a gripping story and some magical realism. Izak de Vries asked her a few questions.
Siphiwe, well done. You have done it again.
Thank you, Izak. I am glad you enjoyed the novel. It is wonderful to have this opportunity to discuss it with you.
I am keen to start our interview with a sentence on page 229:
Polite society is nothing if not self-preservative, and that is why it let something happen in the City of Kings that it should not have – because letting it happen was so much easier than acknowledging what really was happening.
Could this perhaps act as a summary of The creation of half-broken people? What would you say to that?
That would be a very interesting way to summarise the novel. Polite society is very much concerned with the appearance of things – how things seem to be – and not how things really are. Therefore, polite society is living a non-reality in real time and making the thing that is not real seem real, and that act of alchemy actually makes a lot of violence that everyone has to be silent about, otherwise the illusion will be destroyed. During colonial times, for instance, colonial polite society could focus on the seeming goodness of the civilising mission – church, infrastructure, education, etc – without acknowledging what was really happening: the theft of land and property, the erasure of histories, the silencing of women’s voices, etc. And all this was done, of course, so that colonial polite society could preserve the non-real narrative of itself as a benevolent and civilising force.
Not talking about what has really happened may also have influenced the name of the city, correct? You grew up in Bulawayo. In this book and in your previous books, you refer to the City of Kings. Is this because we need to talk about the loss of the royal household upon which the city was built?
Bulawayo is a city that is very proud of its history and heritage. Yes, we had only two kings, but we were a kingdom once. The current modern city was literally built on the ashes of that kingdom. In my work, I refer to Bulawayo as the City of Kings (which, by the way, is one of the nicknames of the city) not so much to point at a loss, but rather to commemorate the history of the place.
You start this novel with a woman whose name was taken from her, removed in a cruel way. She wants to write, and eventually does. Her first written words are: “In the beginning, there was erasure.” Is part of your own writing perhaps also to replace erasure?
Yes, my creative work, so far, has dealt with the wilful erasures, silences, omissions and misrepresentations that are extant in official versions of Rhodesian and Zimbabwean history. In writing my novels, I have engaged with these various lacunae in the hopes of presenting a fuller, richer, more nuanced picture of our past.
Your writer lives now, in the present. She researches and writes about three women of whom she finds records in the archives. You have clearly done a lot of work in the archives as well. Which archives did you use, and which did your character use?
I like how you say the protagonist writes about women she encountered in the archives; that is a nice way not to give away the entire plot of the book. I appreciate that.
Yes, I definitely did some archival research. I love archival spaces and coming into direct contact with the past through old manuscripts, newspapers, documents, letters, ledgers, etc. In 2003 and 2004, I started collecting archival images for my master’s thesis on film at the National Archives of Zimbabwe in Harare. In 2008, I was able to conduct archival research at Rhodes House at Oxford University for my PhD dissertation. Most of this research has found its way into my creative output. However, the bulk of the research that I drew from to write The creation of half-broken people was conducted at the National Archives of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo in 2019.
Your character works, it turns out, to find out more about her own ancestry. You dedicate this novel to women in your maternal ancestry. Would you like to say more about ancestry as such, without spoiling the story?
Women have been encouraged, throughout various histories, to think of themselves primarily (and sometimes solely) as wives and mothers. We see this expectation the world over. This expectation can be expressed benignly or malignantly, as we are currently witnessing in the misogynistic “Your body, my choice” online movement. But, whatever else we think of women, women have always been, even before the advent of the modern working woman, more than wives and mothers, and yet we rarely have access to narratives about what women have been beyond these traditional roles. Therefore, it is important to unearth and talk about the full, lived experiences of the women who came before us: our ancestors.
I need to ask about the Good Foundation and the various men called John B Good. Your main character has a relationship with John B Good XI; her mother was involved with an earlier number. Clearly, you have had a lot of fun coming up with the name. Are you also asking questions about the various “nice” foundations pouring money into Africa?
Technically, I didn’t come up with the name John Good. He is a character in King Solomon’s mines. I did, however, create a lineage of men with this name, and I had a lot of fun thinking up the “good” things they could do on the African continent.
The Good Foundation has had what it considers a good relationship with the African continent for more than a century. During that good relationship, the Good Foundation, through the activities of the Good family, has been able to extract various artefacts from the continent and place them in the Good Museum, as well as collect various manuscripts and place them in the Good Library. Many African scholars – or, rather, scholars who study Africa – have benefited greatly from what the Good family has been able to collect and extract from the African continent. The Good Foundation’s goodness has not stopped there, however; it has also created a scholarship – the Fulatha Scholarship – for African students.
I do wonder, though, at the benevolence, the paternalism, the niceness of an institution that has benefited so advantageously from its exploitation of the very continent it purports to be aiding. To put it simply, money would not need to be poured into Africa by these “nice” foundations if they had not exploited Africa, her people and her resources to begin with.
As with your previous books, we see the lines blur between hard-core history and imagination. Gagool, a character from H Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s mines, is a rather important part of your story. Why did you select her? And does her presence implicitly comment on how white writers saw African mystics in the past (and possibly see them in the present)?
I selected Gagool because I remember reading King Solomon’s mines when I was in primary school and being very affected by the character – negatively so. She was evil and animal-like, and it did not help that the book was illustrated. She gave me nightmares. But that, of course, was what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to scare and disgust the reader with her myopic and atavistic, evil ways. It was when I was in high school, I think, that I realised that Haggard had been describing an old Matabele woman, someone who could have been my ancestor. This, of course, made me feel ashamed of my initial reaction to her. It was when I was at university that I realised many things: that I was not the intended reader for the novella; that Gagool was described in racist and misogynistic language that served to “other” her as much as possible for the reader; and that this way of thinking of black women as dangerous, ignorant and evil still persists. It is up to me as a black woman writer to write against the persistence of this vision regarding black women, a vision that in southern Africa has its roots in how Haggard wrote Gagool.
Even the Quatermain family is back. Yet, no “Umbopa” can reclaim a leadership role in your book. The City of Kings remains kingless. Instead, Sethe Mhabi takes charge of the growing “native location”. Her highly learned brother does arrive to write some important letters, but Sethe is an absolute tour de force. How much of her is fiction? Does a similar person feature in the archives?
I don’t want to give away too much where Sethe is concerned, so I will simply say that she is a product of my imagination and an amalgamation of various characters I came across in archival records.
Agatha Christie also makes an appearance ….
When I am researching or outlining a new novel, one of my favourite things to do is to find out what famous (or infamous) person was in Bulawayo during the timeframe in which the novel is set, and then find a way to include them in the story. And so, Agatha Christie and her husband Archibald make an appearance. As does Daisy Hancorn-Smith.
Daisy, yes… And the car – my word. A red and black 1934 Citroën Traction Avant. Yes, those in the know, know that it is the car that started a revolution: front-wheel drive. But also, it is an obvious vehicle for a wedding venue. Are you a petrol head?
I am definitely not a petrol head. I just like the look and “character” of the car. Now, I am curious to know more about this car that started a revolution. You sound like a happy petrol head, though.
Cars bring me to Ezekiel. What a human being. He can fix any broken thing. But he discovers that half-broken people are a lot harder to handle. Without spoiling the story, please would you tell how you came upon his character?
Ezekiel and Elizabeth have been with me for many years, from even before I wrote my debut novel. I used to think that the story of Ezekiel and Elizabeth would be the first story I completed.
Elizabeth is the one who came to me first. I had been reading a lot about “stray” women – women who were perceived to be unattached to a male guardian, or who were not married to a husband – and how they were treated by colonial administrators. Elizabeth was obviously a character that needed gentle handling, and that is how Ezekiel, the fixer of broken things, came into my imagination and into her life.
For those who have read The theory of flight, you know that Ezekiel and Elizabeth first appear in the City of Kings story world as Vida’s parents.
The back cover explains that many characters are half-broken people due to health or societal issues. I do not want to talk about the end, but it did strike me that time and again your female characters use their emotional intelligence to survive hardship. The novel is a celebration of women in a man’s world, not so?
Most definitely. It is a celebration of women defiantly surviving the hardships created by the realities of living in a man’s world.
The student protests of 1970 feature prominently in the early part of the book. The novel ends in 2020 at the onset of worldwide lockdown restrictions. Am I wrong to think that “your” students’ demands sounded similar to the ones we heard in South Africa during the Fees Must Fall movement?
The student protests in the novel were informed by the protest movement that swept through the United States in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. I am not surprised that you saw echoes of South Africa’s Fees Must Fall movement, because the systemic injustices being fought against had their root in the same thing: a capitalist system built on white supremacy.
France saw massive student protests in 1968, China in 1989. Your protests of 1970 and the references to the New Country, as well as the names of the various Johns B Good, places a part of this novel in the US. You often spend time in the US. Are you at times seen as an “exotic creature” like your protagonist was?
Ha! I spent 18 years in the US. As a black woman, while I am sure I was seen in many different ways, I am not sure an “exotic creature” was one of them, since there are already many black women living in the US; so, I definitely was not seen as something rare. I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say this, that my protagonist is seen as an “exotic creature” because she is something that polite society has never quite known how to acknowledge.
Thank you for another wonderful read!
Thank you for another wonderful interview.
See also:
An interview with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, winner of a Windham-Campbell Prize for 2022
The African Library: The theory of flight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Quality itself, a review of The quality of mercy by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu