Beaven Tapureta - Cost of Courage

There is a scene in the American movie, Network, where anchor Howard Beale encourages his audience to open their windows, lean their head out, and scream, “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!” The scene, and the movie, have become cultural touchstones for America, a signifier of a turbulent time (the 1970s) when it seemed that all the pots were ready to boil over at the same time. In a similar vein, Beaven Tapureta's Cost of Courage is its own extended “mad as hell” statement, a vicious, biting, savage attack on Africa and its terrible, destructive stagnation in general, and in particular, the swamp of corruption, hunger, violence and terror afflicting Zimbabwe.

Our narrator, unnamed, is an unemployed male in his twenties. There's nothing to him and there's nothing left to him, which is to say the potential avenues of his future are all dark and dirty roads upon which the best of us would fear to tread. He suffers from nightmares, great roaring visceral punches that wrench him awake from an existential misery into an even worse reality.

The crumbling, blasting and splitting of gun-sound, the voices and the sharp squeal of stampeding women and children combined into a festival of ghosts. I ran blindly like a fugitive. Unexpectedly, I found a bloodied spoor which led me to the mountains in a certain black kingdom on whose gates was the name Zimbabwe, written in sweat and blood. The kingdom's gates were locked to the hilt.

Tapureta understands the dark magic of language, its pulse and its seething vitality. His description writhe, viscerally expressing the turmoil of today's Zimbabwe. His narrator wanders the streets and wanders his own memory, recollecting stories and events, sharing them with Brother, a poet (more accurately – a shaman, a mystic, a seer) given to sweeping statements about the Way We Are Now. Brother says to him,

I feel identified by the world. I am a bream swimming from the gloomy waters towards the shores of glory, yet there are storms and hungry sharks following. Very sad indeed.

Brother anchors the narrator, but is also himself drowning in a black sea. He wishes to leave Zimbabwe, indeed must leave, but the difficulties are great and the danger is very real. But the stink and putridity of the corrupt state attacks his sensitive artistic soul, and it is either get out and suffer the potential consequences, or flop on the ground and die like a fish out of water, his integrity dashed aside by cowardice. Brother eventually leaves (But is he dead? Did he escape? Has Zimbabwe simply swallowed him up? Who in Africa remembers a dead black man of thirty?), but the narrator cannot. He is wedded to Zimbabwe in a way he can't quite comprehend, but it tugs at the language of the story. The narrator knows the government is at fault for much of this, but the story only rarely becomes explicitly political, such as in this quote:

My thoughts skirted around the present situation and I began to see everything in policy formats. My being unemployed was somebody's policy. The type of my life was also somebody's policy. My clothes, their shabbiness, the hunger in the ghetto, Brother's daily worries, the deadly night life in the ghetto, the untreated water we drank from the rusty taps and the cholera.

There is a later scene involving policemen, brutality, and the 'cleaning up' of undesirables. Of course, when everyone is hungry, desperate measures must be taken, and it is no accident that when the narrator faints in a bus, everyone assumes he is suffering from starvation.

Tapureta's Cost of Courage is a violent cry, an angry, angry story that views Zimbabwe as rotten to its core, and needing to be uprooted in its entirety to remove the evil. Tapureta cannot see salvation in his country, only torment.

The city is like a home of widowed and orphaned ghosts. Faces bypassing me on the street are smeared with an insipidness too wearisome to look at; they look at me like they want to dig out the very last small piece left of me now. I watch the grey spectacle around me concluding itself into a showbiz of hunger. Elderly beggars have awoken from their beds of flattened cardboard boxes in the nooks of the disused stinking city buildings. Street children snatch food from the unsuspecting ladies cat-walking in and out of the expensive food outlets, fashion ships and hair salons, blind beggars sing religious songs on the pavement to attract alms...

Cost of Courage is a powerful story. Tapureta's language hits you like a fist, and it demands satisfaction. He juxtaposes very well the elemental memory of Brother with the visceral misery of Zimbabwe's streets. We see the small hopes people cling to because they are never going to have large hopes of any kind, and we see the constant boot-stamping on the faces of those below by those who exist high, high above. Anyone with a shred of awareness will know of Mugabe's obscene displays of personal wealth while his country starves and rots, but Tapureta humanises what can only exist to someone outside the country as an abstraction. Near the start of Cost of Courage, Tapureta writes,

I whispered to myself that I was not going to fall or be punched down by whatever or whoever those demons were.

And the rest of the story informs as to who exactly these demons are. They are, as always, us.

Cost of Courage by Beaven Tapureta is a short story from StoryTime's publication, African Roar (edited by Emmanuel Sigauke and Ivor W. Hartmann). This review is part of a series intending to examine each story from the collection, in an effort to broaden awareness of both the project itself, and the excellent array of authors contained within.

Author	Beaven Tapureta
Title	Cost of Courage
Nationality	Zimbabwean
Publisher	StoryTime
Availability: ---Amazon US

See Also

Reviews of other short stories from the African Roar Series