博客來＂High Class Natives - The Ballroom Dancers and the Mbira Players＂ is a musical stage play.
Set in late 1970s Rhodesia, ＂High Class Natives＂ explores the tumultuous clash of cultures within the Choto family, encapsulated in the fight for identity amid racial oppression and political turmoil. Living in Beatrice Cottages, an enclave of relative prosperity within the African township of Salisbury, the family grapples with the impact of war, colonial legacy, and their divergent futures.
In the story, the recently widowed Choto family patriarch, Majasi, finds himself living in Beatrice Cottages at the home of his oldest son, Rwizi. His village home was burnt to the ground by the Rhodesian Army forces in Mhondoro African Reservation after they had killed his old wife as punishment for her having obliged some guerrilla fighters who were passing through, who had brought some meat with them that they needed cooked for a meal.
When the story begins, we hear, in a private conversation between Rwizi and his wife in their bedroom, Rwizi’s wife, Sally, makes it clear to her husband that she has no intention of accommodating his father nor his young brother in their house any longer than she must, and it is only to help him out with his relatives. She justifies her inhospitality on the premise that Rwizi’s family’s presence in their home is going to be disruptive to her aim to raise their6 year old son, John, to be a European cultured person.
Rwizi finds himself in a hard place torn between his obligation to his father and to his wife.
Rwizi owes his father a lot. It was his father who sold most of their family’s small cattle herd to pay for his higher education which enabled him to land the management job in the Revenue Department of the City of Salisbury. It was also his father who loaned him the money for the down payment on the Beatrice Cottages house they live in. Not only does Rwizi love his father and brother wholeheartedly but according to Shona native tradition, it also behooves him, as his duty as the oldest son in the family, to ensure the health and welfare of the whole family. Nonetheless, he has an equal obligation to his nuclear family and the society-page-life that his wife aspires to.
