A FAMILY AFFAIR. By Sue Nyathi

 

A Family Affair is a big dramatic novel centering a family, the Mafus, and follows the lives of their three daughters, Xoliswa, Yandisa and Zandile. With a narrated time of nearly a decade, Sue Nyathi gives us more than a slice of life of a family, perfect at first glance, but faulty on closer inspection like any other family.

The story starts with an amazing setting, the youngest who has misgivings, Zandile's big fat white wedding flanked and supported by both her sisters on her way to church to marry the love of her life, Ndaba. Soon the tone is set through what Zandile's father's sisters say, BoRakgadi, about the sisters as the bridal party walks down the aisle. Both aunties body-shame Yandisa and reduce Xoliswa's status, an accomplished woman, because she is unmarried and lament their brother's agreeing to have Zandile marry before her older. Zandile has two older sisters, but they both do not expect much from Yandisa because we are the total sum of our experiences right, particularly the negative ones. Somehow society erases you once something bad happens to you even through no fault of yours.

The matriarch and the patriarch of the family, Phumla and Abraham Mafu, have a tight grip on the family using the Bible as both a staff and a rod and are on a mission to create and maintain a picture consummate to their status as founders and drivers of a megachurch. Meanwhile a cauldron is cooking. Xoliswa finds herself in a position totally different from her vision board, Yandisa ends up with a ring which costs her more than she wants to pay to keep, but will not give up and Zandile yearns for more than being a wife and mother. A question is raised by one of her Rakgadis: "Can you have both a family and a career?". Nobody asks men that. That is never offered as a choice to men. They can have both, but for women...a sacrifice has to be made.

Pretty soon things unravel. Devastating secrets threaten to spill out and as with all secrets, they cannot be hidden away forever. The daughters of the family move on to carve lives separate from their parents and we experience their different journeys, some with devastating consequences, with them.

As with all families, our parents had lives before we came along. Had dreams and hopes and had made decisions which devastated their familial relationships and this becomes glaring in the third quarter of the book when the evidence of the beginning of Abraham and Phumla's story unveils itself and Abraham's guilt drives him to an atonement of disastrous consequences. Many of us will find this part of the story so relatable and I chuckled from an encounter my siblings and I had a few years ago and how that situation turned out to be more hilarious than devastating.

As you can imagine, a story this big and this long will cover a myriad of themes. From grooming teenagers and sexually assaulting them, unplanned pregnancies and the rights of a teenage girl pertaining to an unwanted pregnancy. That theme still haunts me as a parent and as a daughter.

The romanticizing of the culture of endurance and silence as a symbol and trope of a "Strong black wife" is carried throughout the narration. From the makoti duties which border on the abusive, to the burden placed on the wife as the sole builder and carrier of the family whose main job is to make the husband happy at all costs. The in-laws expectations and role in the establishment of new families is foregrounded and we experience not only the perpetuation of patriarchal norms and customs whose sole purpose is to oppress, shame and suppress the new makoti, we also see how Zandile's identity and "womanhood" is reduced because of her birthing, childcare and housekeeping choices.

A Family Affair is not only a melodrama, it contributes to the greater discourse on Gender Based Violence, the value and worth of women in the African context, the law of inheritance in the African context, our agencies as black women which are always overshadowed by the demands of the family and how married women often defer their dreams to assist their husbands build careers and still have their contribution minimized.

Sue Nyathi interrogates important women-centric issues against the background of a collapsing Zimbabwean economy. The widening inequality gap resulting in forced migrations and the burden young families carry in supporting elderly parents. We also experience a day in the life of an affluent Zimbabwean. Such big lives mirroring the affluent American reality shows. The shopping across the border. The chauffeur-driven excursions.

A Family Affair is an important family-oriented story and reminds us that in the midst of uncertain political conditions, personal loss, gruesome experiences, we still carry on loving and supporting our parents, siblings and extended families and hope that our children experience better than we did.

This story elicited laughter because we've been hypocritical, as women, and tears because though we cry foul, change is within our reach. Once we stop accepting the perils of patriarchy and start chipping away at their systematic foundations, the world will be a better place for all genders. It is up to the women to fight this because the men have no incentive to see the dismantling of a system which solely benefits them end.

(* Courtesy Lorraine – goodreads)