Brian Chikwava on the context of 'Harare North'

Harare North is a story that is narrated by a young man who is an ex-Green Bomber and it is nested in the heart of the crisis that has engulfed Zimbabwe since about the turn of the century. Many non-Zimbabweans will probably have come across news about Zimbabwe's problems over the past few decades but very few will have heard about Green Bombers, the government-sponsored militia that became notorious for its role in persecuting ordinary Zimbabwean citizens who were not sympathetic to the governing party's politics.

The Green Bomber is nothing new to history as this kind of political creature has appeared in several guises in many countries over the years, more so in those states that feel threatened by external or even internal events. China has seen the Red Guards during the cultural revolution in action, created to mobilise mass thought and action against the spectre of a capitalist order restored by counter-revolutionaries; Cambodia has seen the village militia during the years of the Khmer Rouge. Today you have to look at the Basij, in Iran, and - one could argue - the Kremlin-backed Nashi in Russia who although nobly founded as an anti-fascist organisation sometimes come across as a chilling political tool, especially with their very Green Bomberesque powers such as the right to stop and check ordinary citizens for their IDs.

Green Bombers in Zimbabwe were initially recruited as part of a government programme to ‘reorient' youths with the nation's history and ‘values'. Later they became instrumental in taking the government's nationalist and anti-colonist rhetoric to the grassroots and have actively mobilised against pockets of civic society that were regarded as disloyal to the country or sympathetic to the external ‘imperialist forces.' This mass coercion plunged the country into a crisis that saw a lot of people move to neighbouring countries, the UK and the US. But as usual with any revolution, sooner or later it reaches a point when it begins to eat its own children in way that were never intended or envisaged by its patrons. It is at this point that the narrator of Harare North has to flee Zimbabwe to seek refuge in the UK, a country that he has been drilled to regard as the Zimbabwe's archenemy. This change of direction in his life convictions are enough to trigger a psychological dissonance of a kind in any young man whose life has gone through a similar route. In London, he has the choice of being the boy of the ‘jackal breed' that he was back home or the browbeaten person that he was before becoming a Green Bomber; between these two personalities, one of them has to be murdered if he is to survive in his new environment. The story is a simple portrait of the havoc the political can wreak in personal lives when fanatically pursued.