The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Themes

The Effects of Urbanization and Modernization on the Soul

If there is an overarching character arc to Mungoshi’s 17 stories, it is that of a young man who leaves behind his rural ancestral home to pursue opportunities in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital and largest city. Characters like Nhamo in the title story are eager to abandon old rural family traditions and embrace industrialization and modernization, to fulfill the promise offered by Western visions of wealth and prosperity. Yet again and again, young protagonists find that the career opportunities in the city are grossly overstated. In “The Lift,” “The Ten Shillings,” and “Some Kinds of Wounds,” characters who believed an education would secure them a white-collar job in the city are swiftly disabused of this notion and left in various states of homelessness and dependence on elders. As Paul thinks to himself in “The Ten Shillings,” “Education, it awes us as did the bicycle, the motorcar and the aeroplane. It is a Western thing and we throw away brother and sister for it but when it fails we are lost” (108).

However, even those characters who are fortunate enough to secure steady office jobs often succumb to depression, depravity, and chemical dependence. This first emerges in “The Brother,” when fresh-faced Tendai excitedly visits his supposedly successful brother Magufu in the city, only to find that Magufu has become a full-blown alcoholic and a violent rapist since moving from the countryside. In a less stark example, Moab in “Coming of the Dry Season” wastes the money he was supposed to spend on a bus ticket to visit his dying mother on a weekend of drinking and debauchery. Mungoshi draws a direct connection between Moab’s unhappiness in the city and the severing of ties to his homestead. For example, each time Moab encounters a smell that reminds him of the dry season back home, he cannot help but shiver. Shivering is a common involuntary response to thinking of one’s home; for example, in “The Flood” Mhondiwa shivers when he thinks of older, more traditional interpretations of an unseasonable deluge, rooted in the witchcraft of his home village.

Much of the moral corruption of city-dwellers stems from an emphasis on money over family. In “The Mount of Moriah,” this is certainly true of Hama’s father, who is prepared to murder his own child to regain his good luck. While Hama is too innocent to believe his father capable of filicide, he pulls no punches in his condemnation of money. The narrator says of Hama, “[H]e violently hated what the word [money] did to his ears: it was the sound of breaking crockery and furniture, of belching and vomiting, the stink of beer and stale vomit, the sound of a fist against a mouth” (81). Interestingly, sound also plays into a character’s conception of money in “The Day the Bread Van Didn’t Stop,” as Mr. Pfende revels in the influx of customers, even as his wife curses his eternal soul in the next room: “And the sound of the coins, clink-clinking into the till soothed him. For the time being, things are all right, he felt” (179). In both cases characters caught in the urban rat race neglect their familial duties in favor of fleeting spurts of cash.

How Generational Rifts Form Between Parents and Children

Many of the other broader divides Mungoshi explores in the book are conveyed through fraught parent-child relationships. The most vivid and explicit example of this is the rift between Nhamo and Old Musoni in “The Setting Sun and the Rolling World.” Nhamo vigorously rejects all the values Old Musoni holds dear, including the importance of family farming passed on through generations, a reliance on old spiritual traditions pertaining to charms and witchcraft, and an intense distrust of Western technologies brought over by European colonists.

Yet these rifts also develop when parents want their children to leave home. In both “The Brother” and “Coming of the Dry Season,” sons are sent to school and later to the city to earn money to send home to their families. However, once these young men discover how stressful and even traumatic it is to function in the city, profound resentment grows toward their parents. Magufu, for example, becomes almost entirely alienated from his family, treating his younger brother Tendai as little more than a conduit for telling his father, to whom he no longer speaks, that he won’t be sending money home anymore.

Ugly resentment almost festers inside Moab: “It seemed [Moab] could never do enough for [his mother]. [...] [H]e had promised himself he would send her some more money—which he had done—yet there seemed no end to the things she needed” (114). Moab’s resentment grows so toxic that he goes out drinking instead of coming home to say goodbye to his mother on her deathbed. Even after his mother’s death, Moab projects his negative feelings toward her onto other women, including Chipo, who wishes only to ease his financial burden and to be loved by him. It stands to reason that Moab’s rift with his mother will continue to poison his relationships with women long after her death.

It may be easy to attribute these rifts to larger cultural divides or to socioeconomic pressures surrounding money. To be sure, those factors play a major role in the book’s many dysfunctional parent-child relationships. Yet the collection’s earliest stories suggest that these rifts may be rooted in much older, long-simmering conflicts that have little to do with politics, culture, or economics. The two protagonists of “Shadows on the Wall” and “Who Will Stop the Dark?” are too young to concern themselves with urban-rural divides or arguments over superstition versus reason. Nevertheless, profound schisms form between these characters and their parents over more personal betrayals. The unnamed narrator of “Shadows on the Wall” resents his father for driving away his mother, thus rendering both parents as no more substantial than shadows. And in “Who Will Stop the Dark?” Zakeo blames his mother for depriving him of a father who is capable of taking him hunting and fishing. Thus, while cultural forces play a major role in the generational rifts seen across the 17 stories, they may all be fundamentally rooted in personal trauma.

The Durability of Superstition in the Face of Modernity

By the 1970s and 1980s, when Mungoshi wrote the stories included in The Setting Sun and the Rolling World, Zimbabwe was a predominantly Christian nation. Moreover, industrialization and modernization were well under way, as cities like Harare drew more and more individuals away from the countryside. Nevertheless, the rituals and beliefs of older traditional faiths continue to be a powerful influence in the country, as seen in most of these stories. Perhaps the most toxic and pervasive manifestation of these older traditions is the tendency to label virtually any woman who wields even a modicum of power or who fails to fit into expected gender roles as a witch. For example, in “Who Will Stop the Dark?” Zakeo’s mother is called a witch after her husband is left paralyzed in an accident. This happens in part because bad fortune is often blamed on whichever woman happens to be in the vicinity of an unlucky incident. However, she is also branded a witch because she is forced to take control of her family’s finances as the head of the household, a role generally denied to women.

While Zakeo’s mother is forced to put up with mere rumors, Mrs. Pfende from “The Day the Bread Van Didn’t Come” faces far more dire consequences due to accusations of witchcraft: She loses her children. Other women accused of witchcraft include Mangazva’s mother, who earns the label merely because she is forceful in negotiating better work conditions for her alcoholic son—something she is forced to do because her son and husband are feeble in mind, body, and spirit.

Aside from the misogynistic tactic of labeling formidable women witches, old spiritual traditions and superstitions emerge in other ways. The uneasy juxtaposition between traditional spiritualism and modernity is at the heart of “The Mountain,” as a skeptic and a true believer make their way up a mountain rumored to be home to all manner of supernatural creatures. Nharo insists that despite the difficulties of building roads and other modern infrastructure on the mountain, those roads will inevitably be built, driving away whatever spirits remain on the crag. Yet as soon as a goat begins to follow them, Nharo is overcome by superstitious instincts, making a detour to his grandmother’s hut so she can perform a ritual to rid them of the goat’s spirit.

Finally, in “The Flood,” traditional beliefs, rituals, and superstitions become central to a dispute that is nominally over nonspiritual concerns, including an unfaithful woman and an assistant foreman position at a tree plantation. While Mhondiwa is tormented by his wife’s infidelity and abandonment, it is her theft of his sacred lion skin belt—a gift given to him by an abusive medicine man—that sends him over the edge into violence. Moreover, Mhondiwa’s murder of his professional and romantic rival Chitauro is almost preordained by the elemental rains outside, which to Old Makiwa signal a momentous act of imminent violence.