Robert Mshengu Kavanagh

The Love Doctor Robert Mshengu Kavanagh

Adam Kok is a fictional character. A Griqua, descended from an all too intimate follower of the legendary Griqua chief, Adam Kok. His ancient forebear handed down the line his own taste for other men's wives, including the chief's, and the chief's modern namesake followed dedicatedly in his forebear's footsteps. Having participated in the armed struggle against the apartheid regime, Adam Kok came to live in Zimbabwe, where he married the beautiful and upright, Rudo. Although he died a few years back, Adam used his job as a popular human interest journalist for a Harare newspaper to good effect. Adam was a great lover of women, a latter day Don Juan or Giacomo Casanova, an Africanist, a staunch Griqua patriot, an Epicurean when it came to Scots whisky and a frequenter of drinking holes, a man whose iconoclastic effusions were a cocktail of the truth people do not like to hear, and pure evil. A photographic negative, whose whiteness forced one to think of black and whose blackness made one think of white - an immoral scoundrel. Though almost all the stories relate the unabashed Utilitarianism of Adam's philosophy of life, many of them tackle issues of current importance in Zimbabwe, in Africa and the World. The narrator sets up a dialogue between his friend, Adam, and the reader in order to explore these issues. The result is a dialectic between Adam's own scandalous thoughts and deeds, the idea's of his wife, Rudo, who is a devout Catholic, the reader and the narrator himself, who is a socialist. In the process a fascinating cross-section of Zimbabwean as well as global social life and textures emerges. The original idea was inspired by Stuart Cloete's tales of Jean Macaque. His witty, iconoclastic and amoral depiction of scandalous situations in the capital of love, Paris, seemed to ring some serious bells when it came to the goings-on in Harare, the Sunshine City, and also a capital - if not of love - let us say sexual adventure.