Reading Doris Lessing’s Rhodesian Stories in Zimbabwe

Abstract

In the new Tabex Encyclopedia Zimbabwe (1987) Doris Lessing is awarded a place in the canon of Zimbabwean writers not because of her merits as a writer, nor because of her reception by Zimbabweans, but because of the way she was read by her fellow settlers. She and Arthur Shearly Cripps are singled out for their opposition to the racial policies of colonial governments which ‘led to their both being viewed in an unfavourable light by the local white community’ (p. 219). That she is mentioned at all is obviously a concession. Zimbabwean literature is defined as ‘the works of Zimbabwean Africans who through their prose and poetry have expressed the human and cultural aspirations of the nation and its people’ (p. 219). Such a definition disqualifies Lessing on two grounds. Not only is she white but almost invariably in her writing blacks either look back to tradition and the past with nostalgia or aspire, not to a new nationhood, but to a more central place in the settler society which had marginalised them for so many years. What the Encyclopedia’s entry does do by including Lessing and Cripps is recognise that the liberal narratives of a few writers subverted the dominant discourse of settler novelists. That discourse wrote Africa ‘as a primitive continent and a place of adventure, with African nationalism as a threat to the colonial status quo’ (p. 219).