On another occasion, the police suddenly move into the shanty town with bulldozers and guns and destroy all the huts. One day, they find a woman hanging from a tree. While doing this, one of the girls, who, unlike the others, has seen TV, suggests they should base it on the TV programme ER but, to do so, they need new names, names based on her recollection of ER. This involves aborting Chipo with a coat hanger, though only the girls participate in this one. However, they invent another game, from which the book gets its title.
We get a detailed description of the country-game, which shows their knowledge of geopolitics. Their three main games are Find bin Laden, country-game and Andy-over. They also get food and gifts from the Chinese and from an NGO which comes regularly. Bastard has ambitions to extend their thieving activities. They particularly like going to the houses in Budapest and stealing guavas from the trees, though this tends to give them diarrhoea (Bulawayo spares us few details). One of these activities is foraging for food. She will not say who the father is.Īs they do not have school and are rarely supervised, they spend their time in various activities. Chipo, though she is only eleven, is pregnant. (He will later return, very ill, presumably with AIDS and, presumably, dying.) The gang – Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Stina – are led by (the self-appointed) Bastard. They do not go to school because all the teachers have left the country, as have many other adults, in order to find work, including Darling’s father. Darling and her friends go around in a gang. The better-off neighbourhood nearby is called Budapest, while nearby there is Shanghai, where the Chinese are currently building a mall. She lives in the wittily named shanty town of Paradise.
The story is narrated by a ten-year old Zimbabwean girl called Darling. However, Noviolet Bulawayo’s first novel is not a political polemic, despite the fact that she certainly shows the unpleasant side of life in Zimbabwe. Mugabe is not mentioned by name in this book, though there are references to the president. It is no secret that Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is a dismal place to live for most of its inhabitants. Home » Zimbabwe » NoViolet Bulawayo » We Need New Names NoViolet Bulawayo: We Need New Names
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