The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

If there is an overarching character arc to Mungoshi’s 17 stories, it is that of a young man who leaves behind his rural ancestral home to pursue opportunities in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital and largest city. Characters like Nhamo in the title story are eager to abandon old rural family traditions and embrace industrialization and modernization, to fulfill the promise offered by Western visions of wealth and prosperity. Yet again and again, young protagonists find that the career opportunities in the city are grossly overstated. In “The Lift,” “The Ten Shillings,” and “Some Kinds of Wounds,” characters who believed an education would secure them a white-collar job in the city are swiftly disabused of this notion and left in various states of homelessness and dependence on elders. As Paul thinks to himself in “The Ten Shillings,” “Education, it awes us as did the bicycle, the motorcar and the aeroplane. It is a Western thing and we throw away brother and sister for it but when it fails we are lost” (108).

However, even those characters who are fortunate enough to secure steady office jobs often succumb to depression, depravity, and chemical dependence. This first emerges in “The Brother,” when fresh-faced Tendai excitedly visits his supposedly successful brother