The History of Man narrates the complex life of Emil Coetzee in colonial Zimbabwe. It is against this colonial backdrop that the tragedy that is Emil’s life rolls out, tarnishing everything and everyone it comes across. In many ways, it is a tale about identity & dreams; deferred, denied & fulfilled.
I was taken aback by this book because it is a narration of the lives of white protagonists by a black African woman. The black characters in the book also exist in the background of the white protagonists. This emphasizes the brutality of colonization and depicts how it relegated black people to non persons until it had no choice but to identify them as citizens during the war.
Emil’s resistance to imagining different from what he knew holds him back and prevents him from fully loving those he cares about. His relationships with his son, Courteney, Marion are burdened by his refusal to embrace that which is different from what he is used to. His outlook on life is saddled with the burden of how the future would be. Although he imagines the future to be better, he does not take it upon himself to make steps to ensure that the future is different. He cannot imagine black people in power but imagines that may happen in the future. This theme of cognitive dissonance is also illustrated by the character of Courteney and many liberal minded people like him. Courtney, unlike Emil, is able to imagine a multi racial system of governance and champions the cause. In the same breadth he is a member of a club that does not admit women or people of color.
“What made a man a man….What makes a man a man is his life’s story”
The book also highlights matters concerning education, both informal and formal. Emil’s formal education shapes who he becomes but in the end he realizes how it falls short and struggles his whole life with the informal education that is uncomfortable, challenges him to see the world outside of his bubble. Whenever he is confronted by a different world, Emil reacts violently. Emil grapples with issues around his own identity and concerns himself with being a man of history. He find no irony in the fact that even though he would not be able to trace his own lineage and history, he makes it his business to document the history of the Africans.
Aside from being a brilliant novel, the History of Man narrates the history of land ownership and all the complications, social and political, arising from black people being violently dispossessed of their land. It details how the colonizers imposed themselves and their systems on a people who had their own culture and order. It also details the horrors of war and the level of sophistication in warfare by the “uncivilised” African. Ndlovu narrates the amount of coordination and training required for the Africans to fight for their independence.
The book mirrors real life in that there is no justice but an abrupt end to the war. Emil who had led the removal of the Africans from their land, who had been engaged in affairs with his friends wives and had tortured Africans walked away from the war free to start over. Instead, it was those who had had championed social justice and other noble cause who died in the war or lost those dear to them.
Although a work of fiction, I appreciated how Ndlovu uses names of people who contributed to the liberation struggle in detailing how the war was won by the Africans. People like Dumiso Dabengwa and many others are memorialized in this book. This wonderful body of work is a heartbreaking story of vicious systems and the brutality they inflict on communities.
