The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Story 17Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 17 Summary: “The Flood”

During a massive rainstorm, Mhondiwa, who works on a gumtree plantation, comes to his coworker Chitauro’s home to settle a dispute and drink homebrewed beer. The meeting is a reconciliatory tradition overseen by the elderly Old Makiwa.

In a flashback, Mhondiwa loses his job as assistant foreman or “boss-boy” to Chitauro. Chitauro tries to be friendly, assuring Mhondiwa that he too will lose the job in a few months because their superiors are fickle. Yet Mhondiwa remains silent, slashing at gumtree branches until his hands are covered in lacerations and bruises.

After work that day, Mhondiwa comes home to his wife, who already knows about his demotion. She tries to pick a fight with him in public, but Mhondiwa refuses to indulge her. Instead, he walks away, gets exceedingly drunk, and viciously beats Chitauro. When Mhondiwa returns later in the evening, his wife claims that Chitauro is their children’s biological father—which may be true, or it may be that Mhondiwa’s wife said it to hurt her husband. Whatever the case, Mhondiwa responds by beating his wife for the first time in his life. The next morning, his wife is gone, and she took Mhondiwa’s sacred lion skin belt with her.

In an even earlier flashback from when he was a young boy, Mhondiwa finds his parents and baby brother dead from smoke inhalation owing to a fire left burning too long. Forced to journey through the jungle to alert his grandparents, Mhondiwa is pursued by a small black animal. He falls and is knocked unconsciousness. He spends the next two weeks delirious in his grandparents’ home. A medicine man named Muganu administers excruciating remedies to exorcise the spirit of a hyena from Mhondiwa, including rubbing herbs and oils into open incisions and into the boy’s anus. Even after Mhondiwa recovers from his delirium, Muganu continues to administer violent treatments until he is satisfied the hyena is exorcised. At the end of the process, Muganu gives Mhondiwa a lion skin belt, telling him, “The belt is your guide, your spear and shield in all matters and everywhere you go” (197).

A final flashback depicts the moment Mhondiwa meets his wife. At a wedding, she approaches him and asks if he is the boss-boy. When he says yes, she brings him to a shed where she gives him his first taste of beer. Later, he wakes up in her arms and asks where he is; she replies that he is “at home, at home, at home” (198). Three weeks later, she returns and says she is pregnant and that they must marry. Despite the fact that she gives birth only five months later, Mhondiwa is too inexperienced to suspect the child is not his.

Back in the present, with the rain continuing to fall, a very drunk Old Makiwa repeats the phrase, “Rain to ease the gravediggers’ task” (200), before passing out. As Chitauro tries to insist that the two of them are friends, Mhondiwa has a vision of the black animal that chased him through the jungle after the death of his parents and brother. He grabs a knife and stabs Chitauro to death. The rain stops, and Mhondiwa feels “at peace with the world” (202).

Story 17 Analysis

In a final climactic story, Mungoshi presents a stage on which the collection’s chief thematic preoccupations play out most vividly and dramatically. Like “The Victim,” “The Flood” takes place on a tree plantation, a hybrid of opposing forces including rural and industrial, African and European. Although Mhondiwa and Chitauro are by most measures thriving professionally in a modernized environment—at least compared to their counterparts in other stories—they remain steeped in old traditions and superstitions. The reconciliatory beer ceremony is rooted in ancient traditions and overseen by Old Makiwa, an elder who spends most of the story lamenting the new religious and economic ways while getting increasingly drunk. Mhondiwa’s psychological turmoil stems as much from his demotion and his wife’s presumed infidelity as it does from the loss of his lion skin belt, which he views as essential to his manhood as the biblical Samson’s hair. More generally, Mhondiwa’s suffering is rooted in the extraordinary abuse he suffered at the hands of the medicine man Muganu, whose ritualized violence only compounded Mhondiwa’s trauma of discovering his parents and baby brother dead. Finally, the rain that rages outside is an elemental mirror of the rage and resentments playing out inside Chitauro’s hut. This adds yet another supernatural layer to the story, particularly given that the rain stops as soon as Mhondiwa exorcises his rage by murdering Chitauro.

Yet while Mhondiwa and Chitauro project their suffering onto one another in the form of mutual hatred, neither seems ready to address their true enemies. These enemies include the fickle White foreman who demotes and promotes boss-boys without rhyme or reason, and Muganu who traumatized Mhondiwa years ago through ritualized abuse. The old ways are no longer sufficient in the face of modernization, if they ever were.

This loss of the potency of old traditions is narrated by Old Makiwa, who functions here as a drunk Greek chorus. When Chitauro asks him if he ever saw such an unseasonable deluge of rain, Old Makiwa replies, “In the old days, yes, but then it had a special meaning” (181), later adding that the Earth is no longer a sacred place. By the end of the evening, the rain holds no spiritual symbolism for Old Makiwa; rather, it is little more than “[r]ain to ease the gravediggers’ task” (200), which he repeats like a mantra before passing out from too much alcohol. This mantra foreshadows that the story ends in death, existing as an acknowledgement that human life is fragile and trifling in a world where modernity has washed away the most valuable old traditions, leaving behind only useless trinkets like Mhondiwa’s lion skin belt.