History and the Ideology of Narrative in Charles Mungoshi's Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva

It has been acclaimed as stylistically Mungoshi's most innovative creative work. Critics Emmanuel Chiwome (1996) and Vitalis Nyawaranda (2005) have each drawn attention to the use of the technique of 'stream of consciousness' in the novel. Other than merely asserting that Mungoshi borrowed this technique from the Irish writer James Joyce (1916), no critics attempt to vigorously analyze this technique in relation to the history that made its use possible in a colonial context in Rhodesia. Furthermore, no single study has attempted to understand the 'content' of this technique in the overall ideology of narrative in Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva. This essay argues that questions of history, ideology and narrativity are central in giving Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva a fractured form that ruptures the modes of representation of classical realism typical of pre- and post-independence Zimbabwean fiction. The essay suggests that the 'content' of 'stream of consciousness' in the novel is manifest in its capacity to authorize a multiplicity of meanings from ideologically contrasting, conflicting and sometimes decentred perspectives all promoting alternative narrative voices.