Junctions

by Daniel Mandishona

Junctions is Daniel Mandishona’s second collection of short stories, following White Gods Black Demons (Weaver Press, 2009). Again, he quarries the richness and variety of Zimbabwean lives to deliver characters and narratives spanning the social spectrum: political ambition and violence; beggars on city streets; family disputes at funerals; rural journeys peppered with mishaps; corrupt policemen and born-again prophets; bus accidents, and township tailors. But if his subjects reect grim realities, Mandishona’s treatment of his characters is achieved with a wonderful sardonic irony, capacious enough to give even the worst offenders a large humanity.

The book concludes with Edmore Chidzonga, an unemployed graduate, reflecting on the new dispensation promised by the 2017 change of national leadership: He remembered how his late grandfather often told him that tsuro haipone rutsva kaviri; a hare can only escape a bush re once. He had spent six years protesting. … For the first time, he felt he had no future.

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