The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Story 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 3 Summary: “The Crow”

On a Sunday morning when his parents are at church, an unnamed narrator and his friend Chiko go to the river to kill a crow in its nest. Neither boy knows why they want to kill the crow, especially since they associate crows with witchcraft. Nevertheless, they repeatedly shoot at the crow with their slingshots as it flies from one tree to the next. The need to kill the crow becomes an obsession for the boys, even as they acknowledge the madness behind their endeavor.

Finally, a shot from Chiko drops the crow to the ground. Although it has a broken wing and leg, it is still alive. To put it out of its misery, the boys bombard the crow with slingshot pebbles, but the crow still won’t die. In a rage, Chiko hits the bird in the head with a stick, but it is still alive. Ultimately, the boys throw the crow in the river, unsure if it is alive or dead. Crying, Chiko throws his slingshot into the river, and the narrator does the same. In closing, the narrator recalls, “I suddenly smelled hot blood in my nose but I wasn’t bleeding. It is the way I feel when everything goes wrong and I am afraid” (32).

Story 3 Analysis

On the surface, “The Crow” is little more than a raw display of boyish brutality against an innocent animal. Yet taken in the context of the other stories and Zimbabwean rural culture more generally, it is an examination of the tensions between Christianity and precolonial religious and ethnic traditions. While Christianity is overwhelmingly the most common religion in Zimbabwe, many citizens—particularly in rural areas—continue to incorporate non-Christian iconography and beliefs into their everyday lives and their church rituals. So it is telling the narrator and his friend deliberately disobey their parents’ orders to go to church to hunt an animal “associated with the night and witchcraft in our country” (28).

The hunt itself elicits shocking violence from the boys, whose blithe sadism soon curdles into something even more grotesque and despairing. For years and possibly decades after, the memory of that horrible day haunts the narrator whenever “everything goes wrong and [he is] afraid” (32). Just as many Zimbabweans struggle to escape the legacy of the occult despite belonging to a Christian nation, the narrator will never shake the incident of torturing that crow, possessed as he was by an almost supernatural sense of bloodthirsty madness.