THE MILITARY ASSAULT

THE MILITARY ASSAULT ON THE ARTS FACULTY – at the end of the book

Life imitates Art? Compare the ending of the book to what might have actually happened.

From the end of the book, where the squatters are living out their dissident and intellectual lives in the abandoned Arts Faculty:


I was standing at the window, transfixed by what I was seeing. The walls shook, cracking in many places, and plaster dust fell. Then Helen twisted my leg from under me and I fell flat on my face. As I did so, half the room was torn out like wrapping paper; the spine-chilling room thundered dinningly at the core of all my senses, tearing out in a split-second chunk after chunk of deafening silence. I had too late jammed raw palms into my ears. As the bricks and burst water pipers showered down, I was, like a puppet, jerked backwards by the leg, scraping my face and elbow and chest on the bare floor. The bricks and pipers and ceiling beams smashed down where an instanct before my body had lain; shattered and plunged through the sudden hole there. Screams rose from the workshop below; earth-cursing screams. I rolled with Helen on the floor till we lay directly underneath Owen’s mural which still was untouched. But before we could take a first breath, another salvo scraped the roof from overhead, hurling it away like a paper-thin thing. It seemed the mind-wrenching bang had sucked the heat out of the sun, so cold was the horror. I clenched my lips against the rising hysteria. The rubble falling crashed down upon us but it was like feathers compared to the terrible explosion. I felt the sharp and human-hot breath escape from Helen’s lips and when I looked down at her clinging convlusively tight to me where her face had been there was a red spurting wound.

[…] When finally I looked up, I saw coming towards the city centre, towards us, coming over the rabble flattened landscape, the thousands and thousands of face-blackened paratroopers.
There ewas dead silence, no shots fired at the advancing deadly insect-multitude. The very sky behind htem was lit up with transcendent flame.

As I looked at them, they seemed to cut a swathe through all that barred their way, and to glory in the ruin that marked their path.

I picked up the machine pistol that had fallen from Helen’s arms and, even as the flies fought fiercely to glut their appetite on Helen’s blood, I creadled the gun into position and waited for them to get in range. [ends] ( p 114- 115)

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Compare the assault on the “Faculty of Arts” to the covert operation called Operation Quartz, of 1980 -- standby plan of colonial interests to assassinate Mugabe and remove his henchmen from power. Could Marechera have known, along with the ZIPRA supporters who were forewarned, about the possibility of such an event taking place around the time he wrote his book? Or, are we dealing, on some level with shamanistic prescience? Quartz, an initiative by Rhodesian military forces, would have occurred after the end of the interim government’s rule during 1979, and would have been directed against the pockets of resistance to the puppet government that had remained all along. It is interesting that Marechera was intellectually trying to foment a pocket of resistance to the situation in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia at that time by his writing The Black Insider. Although the supporters of Mugabe and the squatters in Marechera’s fictional, abandoned “Arts Faculty” had very different ideas about what it was they were resisting, the pattern of guerilla dissidence and artistic/intellectual dissidence are implicitly paralleled through the narrative’s strange sense of historical timing. Owen’s mural (see pg 23, 34, 114) also symbolically signifies a visual arts aspect to the building.


The covert part of the plan - Operation Hectic - was to be carried out by the elite troops of the Rhodesian Special Air Service (SAS). ‘A’ Squadron of the SAS would assassinate Mugabe, while ‘B’ Squadron would take care of Vice-President Simon Muzenda and the 100-man contingent of ZANLA based in the Medical Arts Centre. ‘C’ Squadron was designated to take out the 200 ZIPRA and ZANLA men with their commanders (Rex Nhongo, Dumiso Dabengwa and Lookout Musika) based at the Audio Visual Arts building of the University of Rhodesia. As far as possible, the ZIPRA men would be given an opportunity to escape, and had possibly been informed of the plan beforehand.

[…]Eland armoured cars would support ‘A’ and ‘B’ Squadrons, while the Rhodesian T-55 tanks would support ‘C’ Squadron by pounding the Audio Visual Arts building into rubble prior to the attack by the troops. At first it was intended that all eight of the T-55 tanks would be used against the university buildings, but later four of them were sent to Bulawayo to assist the RLI Support Commando in the attack planned for a large Assembly Point in the area.

[….]The SAS teams would use this breach to storm the building and clear it of terrorists, marking each cleared room with a sheet draped out of the window. The SAS men were well-prepared for their task, equipped with AK-47s, body armour and stun grenades, similar to those used by their British counterparts. The operation would be over before the terrorists were aware of what was happening."
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-- The paratroops falling on the bomb demolished “Arts Faculty” — the face blackened insects — are actually Christians. And they are demolishing civilisation through demolishing the house of the intellect. The outcome of this demolishment emphasises the protagonist’s Jezebel-like (in terms of an earlier reference in the book) palm of the hand [– the Bible said that only the palms of her hands remained intact, the rest of her (presumably of a different skin colour) was eaten by dogs. ] This is a reference to the racialistic aspects of the Bible’s teachings. Helen of Troy’s face — the face that launched a thousand ships — is also demolished. Does that mean the end of civilisation or the end of war?
I realise that this book was said to be written in 1978 (but probably more likely 1979), but somehow (shamanist premonition?) the military destruction of the Arts Faculty, in order to get rid of Mugabe’s supporters, really resonates with the never used backup plan of the colonial powers to restore their own power, called “Operation Quartz“. It is dated 1980.