55 pages • 1 hour read
Lauren BeukesZoo City
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Zinzi December wakes up in her building, Elysium Heights, in Johannesburg. Her lover, Benoît, is sleeping in. Benoît’s animal familiar, a Mongoose, curls up on Zinzi’s laptop, while her own Sloth dozes in a cupboard. Zinzi dresses for work, tying a lime green scarf over her dreadlocks to hide her mangled left ear. She retrieves Mrs. Luditsky’s ring—a platinum ring with sapphires, which she’s been soaking to rid it of its sewer smell—and departs with Sloth to return the ring to her client.
Zinzi has a magical power: finding lost things. She perceives lost things as tied to a person by a string; some ties as inconsequential as spider webs, while others are as thick as steel cables. As she walks, Zinzi distributes flyers that make clear what she will and won’t find: “NO DRUGS. NO WEAPONS. NO MISSING PERSONS” (11). She recalls meeting her current client, Mrs. Luditsky, who lost her ring following an armed robbery at the local mall. Fearing criminals—“the animalled”—Mrs. Luditsky fled into a bathroom and used soap to coax her ring from her finger. The ring went down the drain and into the sewers, where Zinzi retrieved it.
As Zinzi and Sloth head toward Mrs. Luditsky, Zinzi feels her connection with the elderly woman go dark. She sees an ambulance outside Mrs. Luditsky’s block, along with two mysterious characters: Mark, a man with a Maltese poodle dyed orange to match his scarf, and Amira, a woman who carries a bald Marabou stork in a harness on her back. Mark informs Zinzi that Mrs. Luditsky has been murdered.
When Zinzi mentions her talent for finding lost things, Mark and Amira tell her that they, too, have lost something. Amira, “the Marabou,” offers Zinzi a business card: “Maribou & Maltese Procurements” (19). Sloth grumbles in the back of his throat, suspicious of the pair. Zinzi senses no lost things from Mark, “the Maltese,” and she notes that people who have no ties to lost things are either extraordinarily meticulous or they care about nothing. The Marabou’s lost things, in contrast, are tethered to her in crisp detail: leather driving gloves, a book, a Vektor gun. Mark and Amira offer to pay Zinzi handsomely to retrieve what they’ve lost. Zinzi initially declines their offer, but they give her a business card and tell her that she may change her mind.
Chapter 2 Summary
Written in the form of a phishing email: Eloria Bangana, a Congolese orphan, says she has been forced to choose between prostitution or mining coltan, which is used to make cell phones. She says that her cousin Felipe has already been shot in the back for trying to run away. Eloria says she earns seven American cents per kilogram of coltran, but Sister Mercia, who works at the mission, tells her each gram is worth 100 times what they’re paid.
Father Quixote, the man who runs Eloria’s orphanage—the only source of comfort in her life—has been kidnapped, and there is a $200,000 ransom. Luckily, he hid the orphanage’s money, but they need someone to access his bank account so they can feed the orphans. The person who wire transfers the money to the orphanage will receive an $80,000 reward.
The rebels have cut their phone lines, so they send communications using the single cell phone that remains. Sister Mercia says they must pray for their message to find the right recipient, “someone who is good and kind and strong” (25).
Chapter 3 Summary
Zinzi waits with Inspector Tshabhala, who is preparing to interrogate Zinzi about Mrs. Luditsky’s death. She considers feeling out Tshabhala for lost things, but all police stations are equipped with regular ultrasound: “magic blockers.” Such sound waves had been used to explain away magic in the past, until an Afghan warlord showed up with a Penguin in a bulletproof vest, proving the existence of the supernatural.
Tshabhala starts the interrogation by stating that Mrs. Luditsky’s ring could have hardly been worth the murderous crime. She notes than Zinzi’s fingerprints were all over the murder scene. Zinzi says Mrs. Luditsky made tea for her two days before—“undrinkable.” Sloth bites down on her shoulder as Zinzi speculates about how Mrs. Luditsky’s death may have happened.
Tshabhala shows Zinzi grisly pictures of the scene, which reveal a bloody struggle and a body with 76 stab wounds. The inspector implies that Zinzi’s violent past and animal familiar prove she’s capable of such an act, but Zinzi reminds her that she was only an accessory to murder. Tshabhala tells her, “The difference between you and me? [...] The Undertow isn’t coming for me” (31). She confiscates the ring as well as Zinzi’s payment for the job, and she asks Benoît to sign an affidavit swearing to Zinzi’s whereabouts at the time of the murder.
Chapter 4 Summary
A March 2011 column in the tabloid The Daily Truth, entitled “Crime Watch with Mandlakazi Mabuso”: The article, called “Mall Rats,” says that a pack of gangsters, one of whom reportedly had a lion as their familiar, robbed Killarney Mall and Eastgate. In Linden, a young mother’s baby as kidnapped, but the villains dropped the baby off, still in its carseat.
The column also mentions a rotting stash of perlemoen—a protected species of snail that gives off a mucus that serves as a powerful aphrodisiac—which were retrieved by police after the neighbors smelled the stench. Also, a soccer star—“a good striker off the field as well as on” (34)—is charged with assault for beating his girlfriend.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Chapters 1 through 4 introduce the novel’s structure and its first-person narrator, Zinzi. Zinzi tells the story throughout most of the book, but certain textual artifacts from her fictional world—phishing emails, newspaper articles, and more—add context to her environment and to the prejudices faced by the animalled.
In Johannesburg, there lives an underclass of people who have animals that live with them and travel wherever they go. Although no specifics are given about why people acquire certain animals or how, an animal indicates that someone committed a crime in the past. Despite living in a condemned building and a sleazy apartment, Zinzi has an upbeat and energetic outlook. When her latest client dies, Zinzi meets two people who will pull her into a dark and intriguing world.
The plural word mashavi, used here to describe those who are animalled, comes from the Shona religion, which originated in Zimbabwe, although many Shona also live in South Africa. In that faith, mashavi are wandering spirits, either animals or foreigners outside of society, who confer a magical ability or quality on a human host. The singular shavi speaks of both the animal and the quality that it gives an individual; in Zinzi’s case, her shavi is the ability to find lost things, which is given to her by Sloth. Zinzi lives in a community of mashavi in Johannesburg—Zoo City—and has a mashavi boyfriend, Benoît, who works as a security guard.
Being animalled isn’t an accident; animals are a living, breathing scarlet letter, evidence of an ugly past that leaves their host marginalized and isolated. All who are animalled appear to have a criminal history, and the animal phenomenon is thought to have originated with an Afghan warlord and his familiar, a Penguin. Zinzi mentions that she was an accessory to murder, although the crime Zinzi committed has yet to be revealed. Zinzi also has a damaged left ear that she tries to cover up, a connection to that crime.
Mrs. Luditsky’s behavior reveals the non-animalled community’s revulsion for those who carry animals, as does the ostracization that mashavi experience. Zinzi’s apartment building, Elysium Heights, is a rundown nightmare of a home in a neighborhood where poverty and prostitution run rampant. Prejudice is also stoked in the media, as demonstrated in a tabloid gossip column in Chapter 4, although later, the author, Mandlakazi Mabuso, will prove helpful to Zinzi later on. Inspector Tshabhala mentions a significant reason for this anxiety when she notes that a force called “the Undertow” will eventually come for Zinzi. The Undertow’s nature, and the reason that both the animalled and non-animalled fear it, will be revealed in later chapters.
Despite Zinzi’s history and the loyal Sloth that tries to keep her out of trouble, Zinzi still resorts to criminal activity to make money. Although she hides it from Benoît, she writes phishing emails as a side hustle—and, as will later be revealed, to pay off her drug-related debts. Although Zinzi typically doesn’t search for missing persons—and although Sloth registers his misgivings—the promise of earning money to pay off her debtors will prove too tempting to ignore. She initially finds The Maltese and The Marabou unsavory, but the chance to pay off her debts will influence her future decision to work for them.
