Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure (St Antony’s Series) 1st ed. 2006 Edition

Demonstrates shortcomings in Western feminist conceptualizations, and shows how insights from African feminist thinking may enhance understandings of gender, both in and beyond Africa.

Winner of the 2012 gender research award KRAKA-prisen.
This book is about gender politics in Mozambique over three decades from 1975 to 2005. The book is also about different ways of understanding gender and sexuality. Gender policies from Portuguese colonialism, through Frelimo socialism to later neo-liberal economic regimes share certain basic assumptions about men, women and gender relations. But to what extent do such assumptions fit the ways in which rural Mozambican men and women see themselves? A major line of argument in the book is that gender relations should be investigated, not assumed, and that policies not matching people’s lives are not likely to succeed.
The empirical data, on which the argument is based, are first a unique body of data material collected 1982-1984 by the national women’s organization, the OMM [when the author was employed as a sociologist in the organization] andsecondly data resulting from more recent fieldwork in northern Mozambique.
Importantly inspired by African post-colonial feminist lines of thinking, the book engages in a project of re-mapping and re-interpreting ‘culture andtradition’. In this context, the book investigates in particular matriliny [c. 40 per cent of Mozambique’s population live under conditions of matriliny] and female initiation. The findings open new avenues for gender politics, and for rethinking sexuality and gender – in Africa and beyond.

The Cry of the Go-Away Bird’ is the debut novel from Andrea Eames. It revolves around Elise, a white Zimbabwean girl living through her teens on the eve of the Mugabe-sponsored farm invasions at the beginning of this century. The author herself grew up in Zimbabwe before moving to New Zealand with her family at the age of seventeen and there is a strong sense of memoir and personal experience in the novel, which has both positive and negative effects on the narrative.

The main character is drawn very effectively. The natural anxieties felt when emerging into an adult world are uncannily accurate, and allow the reader to relate to Elise and her family as their experiences later become more extreme. However, sometimes the story is so personal that it verges on one-sided. There is more variety, and a more complex array of emotions and motivations among the white characters than the black ones. The black characters are unfathomable and often sinister. Perhaps this is how Elise really sees them, but the novel could have perhaps painted a more complex picture for the reader of the spectrum of attitudes surrounding these massive social upheavals.

Eames makes various attempts to describe the fragile nature of race relations in post-independence Zimbabwe. Often she succeeds admirably, as when Elise’s parents invite a black farm-worker and his wife over for dinner in an effort to make friends. The awkwardness felt by all is palpable and it is a fine piece of writing. Eames clearly has a talent for describing a society in microcosm. There are examples of Eames’ considerable powers of observation elsewhere in the book too. Of the ‘Bush War’ (or War of Independence) it is said, The war felt like a death in the family – someone whose name was never mentioned, who was cut out of photographs. Of Mugabe, Elise says, He was like a hated Headmaster, overbearing and incompetent, towards whom you felt a kind of loyalty. This metaphor demonstrates that Eames is certainly able to express complicated emotions in a clear and artful manner.

There are, however, times in the novel when the writing fails in this respect. Sentences such as We were Whites, and nothing else and The air between us was a different colour, are clumsy and blunt, and have a taste of bitterness that the story does not benefit from.

The action in the novel is heavily weighted towards the last half, when the actual farm invasions and killings of farmers are taking place. In these pages the book does become compelling. Eames successfully renders the panicked atmosphere of a rapidly crumbling way of life, and the events feel both real and shocking.

Overall, though well written, the novel is trying to tell too many stories in too many ways. Elise’s story is cut-off by the dramatic political events occurring, but those events appear as from nowhere and lack real context. The book is still worth reading for a glimpse into this interesting and unfamiliar world, but there may be better novels to come from Andrea Eames.

Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society is an academic journal on African literatures and societies dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue between literary and cultural studies, historiography, the social sciences, and cultural anthropology.