The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

The Setting Sun and the Rolling World is a short story collection published in 1987 by Zimbabwean author Charles Mungoshi. Across 17 stories, Mungoshi explores profound cultural divides in his native country between tradition and modernization, rural and urban life, and colonialism and African nationalism. Although the characters are different in each piece, taken together the stories comprise a coming-of-age narrative, as the protagonist of each tale is generally a little older and more experienced than in the previous story. For his novels and short stories, Mungoshi has won the International PEN Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the National Arts Merit Award.

This study guide refers to the 1987 edition published by William Heinemann Ltd.

Plot Summary

Like many of Mungoshi’s stories, the first entry, “Shadows on the Wall,” features a single father struggling to raise a young boy. Having driven his wife away, the unnamed father alienates his newly motherless child, who no longer has the words nor the emotions to connect with his father. Zakeo—the young protagonist of “Who Will Stop the Dark?”—has a similarly fraught relationship with his father, albeit for very different reasons. After Zakeo’s father is paralyzed in an accident—which the locals blame on his wife—he is unable to perform the kind of work Zakeo associates with masculinity. In search of a father figure, Zakeo looks to his grandfather, who teaches the boy to hunt and fish. An even more dysfunctional father-son relationship emerges in “The Mount of Moriah,” in which a medicine man tells a father that the only way to restore his luck as a gambler is to murder his son Hama. Hama’s father drives the boy out to a secluded riverbank to carry out the murder but changes his mind at the last moment.

A troubled father-son relationship also lies at the heart of the title story, “The Setting Sun and the Rolling World.” A young man named Nhamo plans to leave his father Old Musoni and their family’s farm to find work in the city. As Nhamo and Old Musoni debate the merits of abandoning their ancestral home, many of the author’s themes concerning modernization, urbanization, and technology emerge. Old Musoni ultimately fails to dissuade Nhamo, who likens himself to the sun, passing by the old, outdated world of his father.

As many of Mungoshi’s young adult protagonists learn, professional opportunities are not as bountiful in the city as they were led to believe. In “The Ten Shillings” Paul Masaga discovers that there are a tiny number of white-collar jobs in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare for the swarms of young men who spent their family’s savings on formal education. At the same time, Paul lacks the experience to obtain employment performing manual labor at a tobacco-grading shed. Elsewhere, in “The Lift,” two young unemployed men spend their day riding up and down the elevator of Harare’s tallest building to enjoy the illusion of mobility.

Even the young men who find employment in the city often turn to alcohol to deal with the low wages and stresses of urban life. This is true of Magufu, who in “The Brother” squanders the wages he earns for his brother Tendai’s education on booze and women. In “Coming of the Dry Season,” the young urban professional Moab Gwati misses the chance to say goodbye to his dying mother because he spends his entire paycheck on a weekend of drinking and lechery.

The stories also examine Zimbabwe’s colonial legacy. In “The Accident,” which was first published in 1972, when the country was still under minority White rule, a European motorist grievously injures an African pedestrian. While the motorist may or may not have shown malice in striking the pedestrian, the African onlookers all conclude that he did, reflecting the populace’s well-earned mistrust of Europeans. These tensions also emerge in the aforementioned stories “The Lift” and “The Ten Shillings.”

In the final two stories, respectively titled “The Day the Bread Van Didn’t Come” and “The Flood,” Mungoshi explores issues of masculinity and local ethnic and religious traditions. In “The Day the Bread Van Didn’t Come,” Mrs. Pfende falls in love with a bread delivery man after her husband dies and his family brands her a witch, due to her beauty and the bad fortune that befell her spouse. In “The Flood” two men named Mhondiwa and Chitauro participate in a sacred reconciliation ceremony to settle a dispute over the former’s wife. However, the ceremony ends in bloodshed when Mhondiwa stabs Chitauro to death.