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 5-8 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Zinzi has become a master at writing topical phishing emails, from pleas for help by Chechnyan refugees to odes from Somali pirates who want to lay down their rocket launchers. In her Former Life (FL), she was a lifestyle journalist who never had to pay attention to world events. Now, circumstances necessitate a more lucrative line of work: “Normal people don’t have to pay off their drug debts by writing scam letters” (35).
In her inbox, she finds one strange response to her latest phishing email—“When you eat, you are eating things from planes. The plastic forks they leave a mark on you” (36)—and a request to Skype her handler, Vuyo. Vuyo tells Zinzi to meet him at the Rand Club disguised as one of her phishing personas, Frances, a wealthy refugee from Côte d’Ivoire who is trying to access her parent’s accounts. Zinzi pastes the mysterious message into a Word doc before deleting the email.
At the Rand Club, they meet Jerry and Cheryl Barber, two Midwesterners who have already spent most of their savings “helping” Frances. Vuyo provides forged Reserve Bank certificates for reserved funds the Barbers will allegedly receive after forking over a final payment. The setup works, even after the Jerry lifts up the bag that holds Sloth, causing Sloth to tumble to the floor. Afterward, Vuyo compliments Zinzi on her acting skills and reminds her that he has the power to double the interest rate on her debt should she choose not to help him with future setups. He threatens Benôit and mentions her brother, who is dead.
Chapter 6 Summary
Zinzi heads to a popular Zoo City bar, Makhaza’s Place (Mak’s), which is known for its Lagos-style chicken. There, she meets Benoît and his friends, Emmanuel and D’Nice. She places Sloth in a holding pen near the door; Benôit’s Mongoose is already there.
On TV, a music video by a young rapper, Slinger, is playing. Slinger appears to be animalled, with a Hyena walking beside him as he walks between the girls in his video. Emmanuel, who is not animalled, lectures Zinzi for not knowing Slinger’s history. Bored by the conversation, Zinzi tries to leave with Benoît, but D’Nice insists they get another round. D’Nice’s shavi is “soaking up little moments of happiness” from other people (56), and Zinzi feels its efforts keenly. Benoît’s shavi is to dampen the effects of other shavi, and it’s part of the reason that Zinzi feels safe around him.
Another music video plays, this time featuring a pair of twins. D’Nice’s Vervet Monkey gets drunk and knocks over a bottle. In the chaos, Zinzi steals a moment with Benoît, telling him about Mrs. Luditsky’s death and her run-in with the police. Benôit announces that after years of searching, he has received word that his wife and family are alive. Zinzi feels gut-wrenching pain: “I wonder if it’s one more thing I’m going to have to swear off” (58).
Chapter 7 Summary
On her way home, Zinzi hears gunfire. As she waits out the bullets inside an arcade, she reminisces about the three years she spent in prison at Sun City. She hasn’t spoken to her parents since her release from jail, when they saw her with Sloth. Zinzi moved into Zoo City and chose an apartment in Elysium. The barbed wire and broken windows felt comforting, like prison but without the locked doors. Although she initially feared her neighbors, who were all animalled, she became accustomed to the environment. She had to go outside because otherwise, she had no way to find food for Sloth.
During her time in Sun City, she received meals from a Neo Adventist organization that saw animals as “the physical manifestations of our sin” (62). Their explanation for why people become animalled is one of many; another is that animals are witches’ familiars (zvidhoma). The Adventists preached that even the animalled could be saved, but Zinzi has never seen anyone separated from their animal, at least “not without the Undertow coming for them” (62).
She first saw Benoît in an elevator at Elysium Heights, with several other men. When he asked if she was afraid of the men, she responded that they should be afraid of her. A few weeks later, Benoît saw Zinzi lugging a portable generator to her apartment. He later brought his hotplate and knocked on her door: “I know you don’t like lots of people […] How about one?” (64).
Their romance began then, but she didn’t learn about his missing wife and children for over four months. Zinzi was initially angry, but Benôit reminded her that they’d agreed to keep FL out of bounds. He also joked that polygamy was legal in Congo. Later, Zinzi learned that the last time Benôit saw his family, they were running through a forest. The Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR) beat Benôit with their rifle butts, drizzled him with paraffin, and set him on fire. Despite years of searching, he’d never found his family, and he’d presumed they were dead. Now, five years later, his wife has been found.
The next morning, Benoît’s Mongoose enlists Zinzi in helping get a very drunk Benoît up to her apartment.
Chapter 8 Summary
The origins of the mashavi, as gleaned from a synopsis and user reviews of a 2003 documentary, The Warlord and the Penguin: the Untold Story of Dehqan Baiyat: Baiyat “was a New York Film student turned machine gun-toting, motorcycle-riding Afghan warlord who became notorious in the late ‘90s […] for the penguin always at his side” (73). He trafficked opium and used brutal tactics to fend off both the Taliban and NATO forces, keeping the Penguin dressed in customized body armor for protection. He was also thought to be Patient Zero in what was then known as “the Zoo Plague and, later, AAF or Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism” (74).
When the Taliban killed his Penguin, Baiyat, who was thought to have almost supernatural powers, Baiyat was killed under a black cloud in an internationally televised incident. An international panic ensued, resulting in the quarantine and execution of mashavi all over the world. Some thought the animal phenomenon was a result of Pakistan’s nuclear tests. Although Baiyat had been the most prominent mashavi thus far, others came to believe that the actual Patient Zero was an Australian bank robber who, in 1986, had been gunned down with his “pet” wallaby.
User reviews note that some saw Baiyat as a magnetic freedom fighter, while others reviled him. Another reviewer decries the politically correct term “Aposymbiots” and states that God will not help animalled people; they can expect to get what’s coming to them.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Estranged from her family after spending time in prison and becoming animalled, Zinzi had to begin life anew in Zoo City. In her FL, she struggled with drug addiction and accumulated significant debt as a result. These debts left her vulnerable to further exploitation; she has to continue creating Vuyo’s phishing emails, and when asked, she even has to portray the characters she invents in those emails. One bright spot in Zinzi’s life has been her relationship with Benôit. Now, with the reappearance of his family, that love is at risk. Without Benôit, feeling that she has nothing left to lose, Zinzi will start making riskier choices and getting involved with riskier people.
Chapter 8 reveals that the sudden appearance of animal familiars in the 1990s caused global panic, with different responses in different nations. Certain people, like the Afghan warlord Baiyat, suddenly had animal familiars, and when those familiars died, the human was killed by a black cloud (“The Undertow”). No one knows what the Undertow is or what causes it, but after seeing Baiyat killed on live television, people were frightened to the point that mashavi now live in isolation and are sometimes executed.
Zinzi first mentions the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chapter 6. She says that since she acquired her Sloth and taken up with Benôit, she’d been “so monogamous that I make the demonstration banana the AIDS educators use to show you how to put on a condom look slutty” (58). Although in Zoo City being animalled coexists with HIV/AIDS, the two conditions have parallels suggesting that the author views the Aposymbiot as a metaphor for someone who has AIDS. In many cases (but not all), the animal, like AIDS, is ongoing physical evidence of a past choice to commit an act that is stigmatized by society. Society stigmatizes crime in the case of the animalled; often, society stigmatizes both sexual activity and IV drug use in the case of those who acquire HIV.
HIV infection, like being animalled, is a condition that can only be managed, not cured. There are many origin stories and rumors about how it is transmitted—some based in fact, and some not. Additionally, certain religious organizations view AIDS as a punishment from God, like the Neo Adventist group that Zinzi encountered in the novel viewed animals as God’s punishment. The belief that people are fated to be punished for something they’ve done makes society slow to mobilize itself to help them find a cure. Society also treats them as lesser citizens because, in most people’s view, they deserve what they get.
The separation between the animalled and non-animalled also bears no small resemblance to apartheid, a legally enforced racial segregation in South Africa that only fully dissolved in 1994. South Africa was colonized by both the Dutch and the British. In 1948, the minority white Afrikaner party won elections and began classifying all South Africans by race: black, white, and mixed. Different races could not live together and had to use separate buildings and facilities. They also could not intermarry; the passage of apartheid tore many families apart.
The resistance by and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, a member of the African National Congress, which opposed apartheid, garnered international sympathy for the anti-apartheid cause. When Mandela was freed from prison in 1990, he worked with South African president F.W. de Clerk to end apartheid. The two shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Although all were enfranchised, and Mandela became president, segregation remains a reality in South Africa today, both in physical and economic terms.
