The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Story 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 9 Summary: “The Setting Sun and the Rolling World”

Old Musoni is an aged farmer who tries in vain to convince his son Nhamo to stay on the family farm. Although Nhamo’s precise destination is unclear, it is implied that he plans to move to the city to make his way as a young professional. When he insists that this is his “only way out,” Old Musoni replies, “There is no only way out in the world. Except the way of the land, the way of family” (99).

Having resigned himself to Nhamo’s departure, Old Musoni instructs his son to visit the medicine man to obtain some good luck charms for the journey. Nhamo says he will, though he privately vows to set the charms on fire as soon as he leaves the village. He reflects, “Charms were for you—so was God, though much later. But for us now the world is godless, no charms will work” (101).

As Nhamo looks up at an airplane in the sky, he likens himself to the sun: a beam of floating energy that will leave behind the likes of Old Musoni and the world to which he clings.

Story 9 Analysis

In the title story Mungoshi continues to examine some of the most profound cultural divides in late 20th-century Zimbabwe, including those between tradition and modernity, old and young, and rural and urban. Old Musoni’s distaste for modernity is symbolized by a jet plane flying high above him and disturbing his work. In lamenting the new world that comes with the influx of technology and Western culture, Old Musoni reflects, “Lions had long since vanished but [I] knew of worse animals of prey, animals that wore redder claws than the lion’s, beasts that would not leave an unprotected homeless boy alone” (99). He characterizes the jet plane as one of these encroaching animals, calling it a “white metal bird” (99).

By contrast, his son Nhamo cannot resist the city’s lure—a fact he blames on Old Musoni himself. Had Old Musoni not sent him to school, Nhamo would have never learned of the wider world and the opportunities that await him beyond the confines of the family farm. His rejection of old rural traditions extends to the spiritual traditions Old Musoni practices. In the new world order as envisioned by Nhamo, the charms of a medicine man are irrelevant; the only thing a man needs is “his feet and guts” (101). Full of the confidence of youth, Nhamo invokes the story’s titular metaphor, as he obeys the physical, celestial laws of the sun and leaves Old Musoni behind.

Yet if Old Musoni is stuck on “the rolling world” from Nhamo’s perspective, then from Old Musoni’s perspective, Nhamo is “the setting sun,” descending rather than flying, and bringing cold and darkness in its stead. When read separately from the rest of the stories, this ominous implication may be brushed aside. Yet in the context of the entire collection, the story exists as a major turning point, positioned at the midsection of the book. The stories that follow, most of which are set in Harare, depict city life as far more unforgiving than Nhamo expects—and certainly more unforgiving than the rural landscape he leaves behind.