The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Story 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 2 Summary: “Who Will Stop the Dark?”

Zakeo is a 13-year-old boy whose father is paralyzed from the waist down, owing to an incident in which he fell off a roof and broke his back. Given how strong and capable he believed his father was, Zakeo thinks his mother must have been vaguely involved in the fall, possibly through witchcraft. Angry at his mother and depressed at the sight of his father weaving baskets all day, Zakeo spends most of his time at school or his grandfather’s house.

One day, Zakeo asks his grandfather, whom he calls “Sekuru,” if he will teach Zakeo to hunt since his father is in no condition to do so. After a successful day of catching worms and fishing, Zakeo comes home very late. Early the following morning, his mother arrives at Sekuru’s and tells him to leave Zakeo alone; the more time Zakeo spends with Sekuru, she says, the less interested he is in going to school or following her orders.

That same day, Zakeo skips school to trap mice with Sekuru. Sekuru tries to tell him he needs to go to school. Zakeo responds that the other children bully him because his father is paralyzed and his mother is the head of the household. When Zakeo starts crying, “[t]he old man, who had never seen any harm in boys crying, let him be” (22).

Upon arriving home late that evening, Zakeo receives a vicious beating from his mother. Despite the searing pain of the lashes, Zakeo refuses to cry, which only makes his mother beat him harder. She eventually stops whipping him and collapses into tears. Zakeo passively accepts a hug before escaping her embrace. He leaves without saying anything except, “You don’t know anything” (25).

Zakeo spends the night with Sekuru. As they fall asleep, Zakeo asks if Sekuru will teach him to hunt. Sekuru replies, “Yes. When the moon becomes your mother’s necklace” (27), certain that Zakeo will be at school the next day.

Story 2 Analysis

Unlike in other stories involving difficult father-son relationships, the relationship between Zakeo and his father is largely defined by its absence. The father exists as a periphery figure, weaving baskets in the background while Sekuru and Zakeo’s mother loom large as the boy’s parental figures. The biggest impediments to Zakeo’s ability to have a healthy relationship with his mother are functions of deeply patriarchal traditions and belief systems in rural Zimbabwe. For example, Zakeo internalizes the messaging he receives from classmates who tell him, “[Y]our father is your mother’s horse. Your mother rides hyenas at night. Your mother is a witch” (22). The accusations of witchcraft are particularly worrisome for Zakeo, who comes to believe that his mother was vaguely responsible for his father’s accident. Again and again in the collection, when bad fortune befalls a man, the wife is reflexively labeled a witch—especially if she is a woman of great beauty. This reflects pervasive male anxieties over women with agency, which are passed on to the youth through the influence of fathers or, in this case, schoolyard bullies.

Meanwhile, Sekuru offers a balanced model of masculinity that is traditional without being overly toxic. While Zakeo’s father can only weave baskets—a pursuit that is repeatedly characterized in feminized terms—Sekuru teaches Zakeo to fish and hunt, two activities that his father cannot do because of his injury. At the same time, Sekuru does not chide Zakeo for crying publicly. He also works to disabuse Zakeo of the notion that his mother is a witch. Yet ironically, by encouraging Zakeo to obey his mother and go to school instead of learning to hunt and fish, Sekuru abandons the boy to toxic, patriarchal forces that will only further damage his relationship with his mother and, in the future, with women in general. Unfortunately, the divide between his mother’s modern view of education as the gateway to prosperity and Sekuru’s old-fashioned belief in relying on nature and the land for sustenance cannot be bridged.