Folklorising the Newsman: The Memoirs of Geoffrey Nyarota

Abstract

Summary Geoffrey Nyarota, the author of Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman (2006) is well known in Zimbabwe's media and political circles as a troubling and troubled, and now self-exiled journalist. His name is controversially folklorised as synonymous with the growth, tensions, and fate of the Zimbabwean story as told by newsmen. He is not known as a writer of books. His memoirs, advertised as long-awaited, and their arrival coinciding with the much-hyped long “winter of discontent” for Robert Mugabe's political party, is uncannily in active conjunction with the politics of the times. Nyarota's memoirs are not an ordinary collation of life histories, recollections and musings, but are in many ways an attempt at self-folklorisation. This places him in direct competition for authorial resources with the metanarratives of the nation, along which he writes his story, and against whose grain he also writes. What then should we learn about this newsman? While his memoirs help us to understand some of the ways Zimbabwean nationalism has congealed into a frightening narrative and space, Nyarota's story is a metanarrative of some sort, which should be undone to reveal the figure that hides behind it as a truth-seeking, but forgetful and compromised newsman. This essay traces not only the conflictual relationship between the personal of the memoir-writer and the public histories, but the very similarities – however they are established in conflict – between the narrativised histories of the nation and of the person. It is not just the notion of the self-in-society in autobiography, nor its susceptibility to chronology and multiple lives that is of interest to this essay, but its similarities to what it disavows. Is the nation therefore a sum total of its memoirs?