The soft things of life: detection and manhood in South-Eastern Africa

Abstract

This article seeks to address the invisibility of Zambian literature in African literary studies and, more broadly, of much locally published African writing in international literary postcolonialism. It also hopes to contribute to the construction of an argument in favour of postcolonializing and localizing the notion of genre, by asking questions about a group of locally circulating narratives concerned with reproducing patriarchal masculinities. I scrutinize two detective stories by Henry Mtonga, a member of the Zambian police criminal investigations department and a contributor to the literary movement around the journal New Writing from Zambia during its “golden period” in the early 1970s. The stories (“Soft Things of Life”, 1970, and “Hot Matter”, 1971) detail the exploits of private detective Ozi (Lusaka’s “famous crime buster”) and his partner Zombe. The article reads them as textual symptoms of repressed desire; as allegories of a patriarchal Christian nation; and (most significantly) as successive episodes of a potentially endless chain, as key nodes in a regional continuum of fictional forms that spans adventure-based narratives of male sexual maturing such as Gideon Phiri’s Ticklish Sensation (Lusaka, 1973), Bill Fairbairn’s Run for Freedom (Lusaka, 1984), Shimmer Chinodya’s Farai’s Girls (Harare, 1984) and Omondi Mak’oloo’s Times Beyond (Nairobi, 1991).