The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Tendai is a secondary boarding school student excited to spend the three days before the school year starts in the city with his older brother Magufu, who pays for his education. Magufu recently married, and his wife is in their home village to give birth, as tradition dictates.

Tendai arrives a day early, catching Magufu off guard. Immediately, Magufu says he is going out. He gives Tendai a dollar to buy food and leaves.

After midnight, as Tendai sleeps on the bedroom floor, he is awoken by the sound of Magufu and many guests as they throw a drinking party. Magufu and a drunk teenage girl named Sheila enter the bedroom, and Magufu pressures her to take off her clothes. When Sheila refuses to have sex with him on the grounds that he has a wife, Magufu strikes her in the face. Deeply disturbed, Tendai leaves and falls asleep outside a church.

The next morning Tendai returns to find Magufu and his fellow partiers playing cards. One of the guests, Sando, takes out a bottle of brandy, and everyone grows eager to drink some, particularly Magufu. Sando tells Tendai that his brother is very sick, adding that alcohol is “losing him friends fast, money faster and his health and sanity fastest” (69). After drinking some of the brandy, Magufu gives a letter to Tendai addressed to their father and implies that he can no longer pay for his brother’s school fees.

Suddenly, Sheila enters from the bedroom and announces it is her birthday; she just turned 15. She reminds Magufu of a promise he made to drive her home to Chegutu and to give her four dollars, since she “agreed to do what [he] wanted [her] to do” (74). Magufu denies this and forces Tendai to give Sheila one of his last dollars, which he needs to get home.

In reflecting on that weekend, Tendai concludes that “something very violent had been done to him and that is when he had begun not to care very much for his brother Magufu” (77).