TAKUDZWA HILLARY CHIWANZA
The book I Loved A Dictator by Tatenda Unika Kombora, who was 23 when she published it, stands out for its vivid narration of what it is like living under the dictatorship of a global south country. Her voice is unflinching, as she leaves no stone unturned in telling the gruesome conditions of the degraded existence she – and everyone else around her – was subjected to. A novella of powerful words, I Loved A Dictator details life in the polity/country which is likened to a prison (and called the Prison), headed by the Prison Chief who is the overlord of all the prisoners under his iron fist. But where you'd expect the narrator to despise the Prison Chief with everything in her, the opposite happens—she is enchanted by the dictator, and is actually in love with him. A sort of unrequited love though.
The narrator tells us how they are all confined to a life of strict order in the Prison, devoid of any basic human freedoms that make existence a worthwhile endeavour. To the narrator and her people, life is enormously difficult. Yet, she finds out that she has a soft spot for her dictator, whom she extols for being an infallible man purportedly protecting them all. It is a propaganda-induced slumber, where the narrator clearly sees the misery surrounding her but fails to attribute it to the dictator, who is named as the Second Chief R.G—a man of a "British accent and witty humour" whose eloquence "could even move Hitler's heart". So, what we have is a very short book—just under 30 pages and distilled into three chapters—in which the narrator proffers a succinct tale of how she was under the spell of their dictator, but finally managed to extricate herself from the throes of Stockholm Syndrome; waking up from her propaganda-induced slumber to the ghastly horrors of the Prison dictatorship. And this is a fair attempt at describing our status quo in real life.
Using fictional events based on real historical elements of Zimbabwe's political history up to the present day, the narrator shows us the dichotomy of two worlds: the one inhabited by the Prison Chief and his cronies, whom he perennially satisfies with material luxury to buy their loyalty; and on the other hand a world of squalor, misery, despair, and utter helplessness. The prisoners—the masses—are the inhabitants of this latter world. She bemoans the deplorable conditions of a degraded existence that the prisoners are subjected to by Second Chief R.G and his Patriotic Front party—and the narrator identifies herself as part of the massively dejected, downtrodden masses. But for a long time in her life everything was perfectly set up in a way that she could not point a finger of blame where it rightly belonged: the Prison Chief and his party; with their egregious levels of sheer ineptitude.
Life was incredibly hard in the prison. The narrator tells us, "We're always in search of the basics," and adding, "Other freedoms that we should have because we are human seem so much like luxuries that we don't care enough for them." Yet, she was happy to be imprisoned, worsened by her mother who "religiously followed the Chief". She narrates, with convincing authority, poise and poignancy, the dastardly manner with which the Second Chief R.G ran the prison, compounded by the incessant doses of propaganda from the Freedom Channel, a state-owned TV station made for the sole purpose of advancing the interests of the Prison Chief and the Patriotic Front, as well The Voice, a weekly publication of the dictator's propaganda. But this does not diminish her love for the dictator. She tells us, "Growing up, I was very happy to be imprisoned because I believed that everyone in the world was. I loved where I was. I loved our Prison Chief."
She goes on to describe the florid Second Chief R.G, who had taken power following an acerbic and protracted struggle for Independence from the First Chief, who, we are told, had come from a foreign land to assert his colonial rule in the land of the prisoners. The narrator waxes lyrical about how she loved Second Chief R.G—and she makes it a point to use the word "love"— and all the enviable traits about him that obviously blinded the masses from his true colours: a callous, cold-hearted, brutal despotic leader. She details about her meeting the Second Chief R.G in Junior Parliament: "He made witty jokes. I am a sapiosexual! ... There, standing in front of us, was a kind intellect who also happened to be a gentleman."
An astute observer of her milieu, and striving for as much historical transparency as possible, Kombora does enough justice in giving a sufficient description of the Second Chief R.G (as well as his successor E.F Lacoste) and his populist exploits—stratagems he conveniently resorted to in order to maintain his grip on power. Given the short nature of this tale, some details risk being oblique, but they are enough to give the reader a fair and objective account of the historical case at hand and how it cannot be divorced from the present-day state of affairs. Kombora gives us the class formations of the prison and how they resemble the status quo. The Prison was divided into the three parts. There was the E section, the exclusive preserve of the Prison Chief, the Prison guards and their family members; and they had all the luxuries that the prisoners did not possess—TV sets, cellphones, and private schools. Then came the C section, inhabited by the commoners, the masses of the prisoners—and everything bad about society was found there. Lastly there was the R section, "the Chief's favourite place to visit" and where "seventy percent of the population" resided. The R section inhabitants were called villagers.
Despite having given some lifelong devotion to her dictator, political events in the Prison take a drastic turn in the year 0017, when Second Chief R.G is unceremoniously deposed from power. It is at this point that the narrator awakens from her slumber, tasting freedom for the first time. Whether or not this was an illusion was to be ascertained later. In the very moment that Second Chief R.G resigned, all people from the E, C, and R sections were in tremendous unison celebrating the fall of the dictator. In his place was installed Second Chief R.G's "favourite deputy," E.F Lacoste. Sweeping changes were promised by the new government—signalled by the change of name from "Prison" to "Forte". But as the narrator is divorced from her toxic love with the dictator, she is brutally met with the cold reality of how things remain the same despite the much-vaunted change—change bereft of any positive ideological shifts. And she became alive to the red flags of the new Chief. "His predecessor had fooled me for seventeen years. He couldn't do it again for seventeen seconds!" she writes, in reference to the new Chief. Yet, she mourns her loss: "My heart was so shattered that I was left more in search of answers. Who was the man I had looked up to for the past seventeen years, and given my heart and devotion too?"
She tries the "outside world" with her mother, at the recommendation of the new Chief who said anyone could leave if they wanted, but still encouraged people to stay in the Forte. Life outside doesn't bring much reward for the two, and they are forced to return to the Forte, only to find out that things have remained the same—that it is still the same reality prevailing as that presided over by Second Chief R.G.
New freedoms had been given, as a disguise. But the dire material conditions in the Prison, now renamed to Forte, had not changed, and the status quo remained intact. We are told E.F Lacoste was not different from Second Chief R.G, nor from the first colonial Prison Chief. The new Chief doubled down on the propaganda. He opened two more TV stations, which were based in the outside world. "I wondered if they truly believed what they preaching ..." the narrator tells us about the propaganda stories. Because nothing had changed. The political party was still the same. And it is at this point that the author's storytelling skills are not wasteful—for in those few paragraphs she graphically makes it clear that in our part of the world, some things simply do not change.
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| Tatenda Unika Kombora |
But, at least, and as a redeeming aspect for the narrator's consciousness, she becomes an unflappable character—able to see, in a crystal-clear manner, things for what they really are, since she was ultimately able to extricate herself from the perilous entanglement with Second Chief R.G. She has become admirably objective, to the point of even outlining the damning hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies of the opposition, which in the book is referred to as the Prisoner's Union. She tells us the opposition was not any different from the Patriotic Front, and that it was in the game of politics for its own interests. "Yes, we are in prison together, but they live in the lofty parts of the Prison, or most of their leaders anyway," she sharply says. Perhaps these were just the tentacles of Second Chief R.G's dictatorship manifesting in such vivid forms.
There are no resolutions to the contradictions rife in Kombora's book; there's no happy ending; save to only remark about the complicated legacy left Second Chief R.G. In this, she is an unbiased historian, though one could be left with a lingering feeling that her brilliant novella should have just been a little longer. She does good in documenting some of the polity's historical events—for example, referring to the fast-track land reform program as the "Shelter Strategic reform program" in the year 0000, and refers to elections as "referendums". The last chapter sees her detailing the horrors of the Prison in all dispensation in graphic terms.
Hers is ultimately a plaintive tale of obstinate dictators, which concludes with the Prison conducting a "new referendum" in the year 2023 (I think she could have been a bit more imaginative when it came to the year but perhaps she wanted it to coincide with the August 2023 elections). She vows not to vote, disillusioned by strongman politics; a strand of politics that breeds leaders who thrive on the unchallenged hegemony they have put in place for their selfish reasons, watching everything burn to the ground. While this happens, the masses are to be damned, left to resign to a miserable fate.
There is a fundamental lesson in Kombora's novella perhaps: that to politicians, people are merely pawns in the game of politics. Getting these realizations is important for our collective introspection, and I say in this regard I Loved A Dictator transcends it's entertainment value—it is actually a good teaching tool that gets across the points mentioned herein pretty much well to the reader (without succumbing to the scourge of short attention spans). The final key takeaway from the book is that in those few pages, the historical case never gets closed; the contradictions keep unravelling, and this gives the reader ample room to navigate the complexities of African politics. Of Zimbabwean politics.
The book 'I loved a dictator' is being sold by Tatenda Unika Kombora for $10 per copy. You can get in touch with her via komboratatenda95@gmail.com.
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