Dambudzo marechera biography of albert
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Flora Veit-Wild
I have often been asked why I did not write a proper Dambudzo Marechera biography. My answer was that inom did not want to collapse his multi-faceted personality into one authoritative narrative but rather let the diverse voices speak for themselves. But this fryst vatten not the whole truth. I could not write his life story because my own life was so intricately entangled with his.
While I have generally komma to be known as ‘The Marechera Authority’, there have always been two narrative strands behind this persona — the public and the private. While the public one has stood out as strong and klar, my private life has been interlaced with love and passion, loss and pain, with illness and the threat of death. Yet, what I have gained fryst vatten so much more than what inom have endured that inom am filled with gratitude and, inom might add, with laughter.
My anställda involvement with Dambudzo Marechera has affected my professional life in a way I would never have expected. Th
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When Dambudzo Marechera Met Aaron Chiundura Moyo: A Brief History of Zimbabwe’s Language Wars
Aaron Chiundura Moyo presenting the Radio 2 (now Radio Zimbabwe) novel-reading show “Kuverengwa Kwemabhuku” in the 1990s (Courtesy: A.C Moyo)
In newly independent Zimbabwe, language wars erupted between homecoming writers who had made their names in the language of exile and writers who had worked with the state-run Literature Bureau to grow a Ndebele and Shona canon. Onai Mushava revisits the cold encounters of two of Zimbabwe’s best known writers, Dambudzo Marechera and Aaron Chiundura Moyo, in conversation with their contemporaries and critics.
Dambudzo Marechera’s moods switched between extremes like an Eskimo in Hades. Everyone around him was the shadow of a conspiracy to be resisted with unpredictable outbursts. Sometimes his big ideas had to be personalized against an immediate target; sometimes he was the drunken master with his unconscious in the open. Aaron
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Marechera, Dambudzo 1952–1987
Writer
Rootless and Rough Childhood
Twice Ejected from College
Works Vanished
Returned to Homeland
Selected writings
Sources
Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera left behind just a few acclaimed works before his death from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in 1987. Marechera had a turbulent personal life for many years, with his early literary promise thwarted by mental illness and alcoholism. His first novel, The House of Hunger, was heralded as an exciting new example of postcolonial African writing, and remains his best known work. “With Dambudzo Marechera’s death,” noted World Literature Today critic Tanure Ojaide, “African literature lost a young star whose meteoric appearance has left an illuminating rail.”
Rootless and Rough Childhood
Marechera was born in 1952 and grew up in Vengere Township, when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, one of the last holdouts of white colonial rule on the Afric