THE HOMER AWARDS: A New Literary Prize Born in GREECE
Talking Location With … author Tina Beattie – ZIMBABWE
30th April 2022
#TalkingLocationWith … Tina Beattie, author of Between Two Rivers (Troubador, 2022): Zimbabwe
A Love Affair with Africa
A friend who read Between Two Rivers emailed me to say, ‘the love that for me survives from the book is your vividly and intimately described love of Africa, its people, landscapes and seasons.’ I realized that was true. The book is indeed a love story beyond the romances and struggles of its characters, for it expresses my love affair with Africa. I was born and grew up in Lusaka, Zambia and have also lived in Kenya and Zimbabwe.
I began writing Between Two Rivers in the early 1990s, soon after moving from Harare to Bristol in the UK with my husband and four young children. It took many years of rewriting until I decided it was ready for publication, and I was delighted when Weaver Press in Zimbabwe accepted it. I wanted to offer it back to a country that has enriched my life in so many ways.
The Past is Another Country
The novel’s title comes from the geographical location of Zimbabwe, between the Zambezi to the North and the Limpopo to the South. It is also a metaphor for those who live between different worlds. The unidentified narrator (whose identity is revealed in the last chapter), quotes Heraclitus in the Prologue: ‘No one steps in the same river twice’, and goes on to say, ‘We flow and change with the passing of time. The past is another country and I am another person, a character in a story that is mine and not mine.’
The novel is set in the turbulent years from the 1950s to the 1970s, during the end of colonialism, Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), and the downward spiral into a guerrilla war. It explores how three women’s lives are forever changed by a conflict that engulfs them all – Scottish doctor Morag, English wife and mother Jenny, and Jenny’s Shona maid Beatrice.
Conflicts and Characters
I faced many dilemmas as an author. In evoking the past, I was writing about a society torn apart by racism. I had to use offensive dialogue to create credible characters. I wanted to resist a simple story of heroes and villains by exploring the chaotic complexity of violence. Towards the end of the book, Morag and her friend Matron Mwanza lament the toll that war takes on innocent lives. Matron Mwanza asks, ‘How many wars must these men fight before they find another way? … They buy guns after they have big ideas.’
As the novel unfolds, the setting shifts from colonial Salisbury (now Harare) to a mission hospital in the Eastern Highlands, a region which bears the legacy of those who sought to recreate the Lake District in the heart of Africa. Troutbeck Inn features in the novel, and the lakes are still called ‘Connemara’. During the 1970s this mountainous area bristled with danger as guerrilla insurgents crossed the border from Mozambique and local people were caught up in the confrontation between the nationalists and the Rhodesian army. By the 1980s it had become a place of peace and natural beauty for a weekend away. I still have cherished memories of visiting Troutbeck, Nyanga and the Vumba with our children.
Evoking Africa
No description of Africa is possible without evoking the sounds of nature. Soon after arriving in Salisbury, Morag stands on her balcony listening to ‘the pulse and screech of the African night. The trees brooded in darkness, their leaves stirring in the breeze so that the shadows shifted and sighed like wandering ghosts. Would she ever feel at home in this strange and turbulent world where nature was a roiling force just beneath the glossy façade of colonial life?’ Much later, those sounds become shot through with terror: ‘Something caught her attention. What was it? A shiver in the air, a faint rustle from just outside the window. … There was a swish of movement, and then nothing. … It must have been an animal – a hyena or a jackal scavenging for food, or maybe an impala.’
I don’t think those of us who have lived there ever lose the longing for Africa – its beauty, its drama, its people and its wildlife. We postcolonials are multicultural nomads in a changing world, but that vast continent never lets us go. As I write in the Author’s Note at the end, ‘The birthing pangs of Africa’s future may be intense, but I believe they are ultimately about new life – the human tribe made new in that beloved continent where humankind emerged from the evolutionary flux, and my own life began.’
Tina Beattie
Flickr photographs courtesy of Hayward Scott and Andrew Ashton
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