The Mad, by Ignatius T. Mabasa, reviewed by M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review

Reproduced from https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/zimbabwe/mabasait.htm#ours 

The complete review's Review:

       The Mad features a number of variously related figures, its chapters shifting in perspective from one to the next, various voices coming to the fore, whether in the first person or in action and dialogue in the chapters presented in the third person. 
       A central figure is the teacher Sekuru Hamundigone -- or rather former teacher, as he's recently been fired --, and much of the early part of the novel has him traveling from rural Bindura to the capital, Harare, soliloquizing -- or ranting -- to the others in the kombi they are travelling in. He claims: "I'm a genius but they call me mad". Given his behavior -- and babbling --, it's easy to see why he might be considered mad: as someone notes: "Ah, can anyone understand Sekuru Hamundigone ? He himself is sick. I can't follow his conversation". 
       Hamundigone is a familiar kind of figure, a war veteran traumatized by what he has experienced in his long-troubled country -- and also the 'wise fool'-type, who recognizes how wrong much has gone in the country since, someone who recognizes that: "The madmen are those who see madness in others when they cannot see their own".
       He laments:

I have been through much and much has been through me. Zimbabwe has mauled me so that even today the wounds remain unhealed and septic like the scars that I brought back from Mozambique after the war. Zimbabwe has scooped out my spirit, the same way you do when digging a grave. It has left a gaping hole that can't be closed. I have seeen so much in life for which I have no words to explain.

       His references show he is an educated teacher, up on both contemporary local writing as well as his Shakespeare -- complaining, for example, in the kombi:

I can't read my Mungoshi since there are no lights in this minibus. So what do I do ? You guys are blessed, you don't see bloody daggers before your eyes, you have no problems that steal your sleep and you can easily drift off even during travel on a bumpy road.

       He laments about those in power:

We know those who are mad. It is those who claim to have fought in the war of liberation when they did not. They are mad those leaders who claim they saw too much bloodshed during the war of liberation and want to offer libations of more blood. [...] The madmen tear up children's clothes to make their suits. They have cataracts in their eyes, not natural ones but cataracts that cause them to see mirages and fail to fix problems.

       We eventually also learn the reason that Hamundigone was fired -- not because of any perceived madness, but rather because he: "was straying from the accepted path", as he: "was no longer teaching the kids the authorized syllabus". He takes pride in having: "taught my kids to get to the root of ideas, the root of creativity", having taught them critical thinking -- but that was no longer acceptable in the system. 
       Interestingly, Hamundigone is flawed -- and failed in his role as a teacher -- in another way, as he had also at one point knocked up Magi, one of his daughter Cleodia's classmates, when he was her teacher. Magi had the child, and the matter was apparently discreetly covered up (with a private pay-off); it's not why he was fired. (Unsurprisingly, Cleodia, who now works in a bank in Harare, and Hamundigone are estranged.) Magi is now a student at the University of Zimbabwe (while her mother takes care of the toddler) -- though with much of her focus on trying to find a man who can support her (with Magi defending her choices by noting: "I just did what every other girl here at college is doing"). 
       Others figuring -- and coming to voice -- in the novel include Hamundigone's sisters, Charity and the widowed Maud, and Maud's young son, Reuben, and her lover, Bunny, who is, in turn, Magi's brother. The fear of HIV and AIDS is, understandably, widespread -- though the most detailed description of an STD (a character whose: "penis was covered with pimples and sores") is of a different sort (but comes about in a particularly shocking way). Money is always an issue (though, while inflation was already very high in the time the novel is set in, the economy had not yet succumbed to the devastating hyperinflation that came in the 2000s). Characters deal with rape, and several die. 
       The Zimbabwe here never recovered from the long fight for independence and the involvement of the conflict in Mozambique; as Magi puts it

      The war never ended. It morphed into other types and we are right now dodging bullets being fired by poverty and corruption.

       Among the minor characters is a dog, left for Mai Jazz to take care of "by her white employer when her employer fled the country and returned home to Britain". The dog, named Salisbury, is much-loved by Mai Jazz's employers, and they even go so far as to pre-pay for two years' worth of the fine pet food he is used to eating at the local pet store. Mai Jazz cashes that account in soon enough ("saying the dog had been run over by a bus"), and re-names the dog 'Harare'; for quite a while: "he refused to eat sadza and refused to answer to the name Harare" -- but, eventually, the dog gets the picture:

Salisbury realized that life had changed and began eating dusty sadza and feeding from bins. He became the Harare we now know. He had arrived in Zimbabwe. 

       An appropriate little allegory, in a city and a country that was, in many ways, going to the dogs .....
       And this city of Harare itself also figures prominently -- and as, for example, Bunny notes: "Harare is brutal" (while Magi comes to find: "It is like this with most people in Harare; they are like phantoms"). 
       There is some verse in the novel as well -- Bunny, for example, turning to it as he reflects on life and finding, among other things, that:

Life is a weeded plot
Where weeds sprout again tomorrow
And the day after
Until life is no more
All you have harvested being only questions.

       The Mad is a slice of such life, offering scenes from the lives of a rich cast of characters, but without easy or definitive resolutions to most of their situations (except, of course, those that don't survive ...). The madness of the place and times does not find a cure.
       Often -- and often for understandable reasons -- the characters bewail what happens to them, in language and outbursts that can verge on the histrionic, such as Magi explaining that: "I am emotionally roasting like a pig on a spit". Yes, quite a bit here drips with excess -- so also Hamundigone's behavior and outbursts under the cover of 'madness' (though as one of his sisters notes: "One good thing about him is that his madness is only verbal") -- but the characters are pushed to extremes by their, and the nation's, circumstances, as well as those they look to rely on, including the women looking for a man they can rely on (who pretty much all prove to be unreliable, and worse) or when Heaven is asked to take care of young boy Reuben for a few days .....
       Translator J.Tsitsi Mutiti discusses some of the translation issues and approaches she took in rendering the Shona into English in an introductory Note, and while aspects of the novel can be difficult for the foreign reader to follow, that is not primarily due to the language and references, which seem to be conveyed well. 
       In Bunny's description of Hamundigone, Mabasa surely is also suggesting that the story can only be told in this not-straightforward way, polyphonic and variously shifting in ways that can, yes, be confusing while getting to the (often ugly) roots of the matter:

It's hard for me to say whether he is mad because some of the things he says are true and significant, but the way he talks is confusing, so it is hard to say he is sane.

       Indeed, one surely might expect a novel titled The Mad to be more than a little mad as well -- and it is (with a madness that extends to another of the word's meanings, as there is much justified anger on display here, too). As Bunny prefaces his remarks about Hamundigone, however: "I now accept him just as he is" -- as the reader should this novel.

- M.A.Orthofer, 10 March 2026