An ugly duckling in Malawi

Second-Hand Love
Walije Gondwe
Macmillan (Pacesetter series)

Reviewed by Irene Madonko

It’s not easy being an ugly girl – not that I speak from experience. But this is what we discover as we read the first chapters of this hilarious, but mushy, book. So when the protagonist, Masozi, is constantly reminded of her unfortunate looks even by her relatives, we are compelled to not only sympathise with her, but join her in her angst to overcome her inferiority complex and the other hurdles that spring up.

First stop is that her little sister Chimika is extremely beautiful and almost revered by her father, and, where neighbours rain compliments on Chimika they reserve all the rude remarks for her. It’s at this early stage that Masozi is faced with the option to either hate her sister and draw the lines for sibling rivalry, or to accept she is not as beautiful and join in loving her. Hard as it may seem, she opts for the latter, and this is where her strength to go through life against all odds in the quaint Malawian countryside develops. "It doesn’t matter if I’m ugly," she says to her mom, "so long as I become educated."

'It is from Second-Hand Love that we learn how beneath a village’s ugly duckling there lies a magnificent swan'

One must applaud Gondwe for her witty humour that peppers her description of poor Masozi’s otherwise glum moments. And at times it becomes hard to suppress giggles like when Masozi says each time people called her names like ‘Boggie’ and ‘Friend of flies’, she’d get satisfaction from secretly inventing blemishes on their faces.

Next stop is her school years, and here our unattractive girl brazenly accepts that – at a school with a ratio of one girl to fifty boys – the boys would rather fight over the rest of the girls than make do with her. Another predicament is that when she attains her Cambridge certificate, her father discourages her from progressing with her education because he is convinced that a woman should not be too educated. So long as she can read and write, the next thing is for her to marry. Fearing that with her kind of looks she was in danger of waiting at home forever, Masozi fights on to continue studying.

Gondwe also takes us through some amusing customs of Malawi back then, like how it wasn’t uncommon for a man to abduct a woman he fancied without having made a request to marry her, and carry her off to his home where he forcefully ‘made her into a woman’. After this the man’s family would send negotiators to the woman’s family to marry her, and the family would accept.

Further on, the fighting continues and sees Masozi battle to rescue Chimika from a beastly man and later deliver village orphans from misery. Top marks for Gondwe’s artistic presentation of Masozi’s conquests, because it is from Second-Hand Love that we learn how beneath a village’s ugly duckling there lies a magnificent swan.

Irene Madonko is a Zimbabwean journalist studying in London