Dingani Masuku Character Analysis

Son to Eunice, husband to Thandi, father to Marcus and Krystle, and adoptive father to Genie, Dingani grows up with an occasionally drunk and abusive father in a colonized African country implied to be Zimbabwe. As a child, Dingani witnesses his mother tell colonial spymaster Emil Coetzee that her husband and his friends are African nationalists plotting rebellion against the government; afterward, Eunice will only tell Dingani that his father—who later dies in a colonial prison—disappointed her and that they shouldn’t meddle in politics. As a result, Dingani grows up terrified of disappointing his mother: he is a perfect student, pursues the career (medicine) that she selected for him, and largely avoids political engagement. Yet one night, he praises Golide Gumele’s airplane-building project to a few politically engaged friends and mentions that Golide’s family took care of his son Marcus while he and Thandi were in the U.S. Shortly afterward, the postcolonial government’s secret police arrest Dingani, and the paranoid postcolonial leader, The Man Himself, interrogates him about Golide’s activities. Though at first Dingani tells the truth as he knows it—Golide is building a plane to fly his wife Elizabeth Nyoni to Nashville—he eventually breaks down under interrogation and says that Golide is plotting rebellion against the government. Shortly after, government soldiers massacre the residents of the farm where Golide lives. Wracked with guilt but in denial about his culpability, Dingani tells no one what happened but insists on adopting Golide’s orphaned daughter Genie over Eunice’s objections. Only after Genie has fallen into a coma at age 39 does Dingani admit to the rest of his family the role he played in the massacre. Thus, Dingani illustrates the intrusion of colonial and postcolonial politics even into the lives of “apolitical” people and the selfishness and destructiveness lurking within many family relationships.