MISSED THIS? Dambudzo Marechera continues to nourish Zimbabweans’ cultural lives — and literary tourists from northern climes - Dambudzo Marechera: The biggest tree in the savannah
, a compilation of his poetry, children’s stories and journals — one of Wole Soyinka’s books of the year in 1996. The posthumous books were all compiled and edited by Veit-Wild.
Some of these people include Robert Muponde, now a Zimbabwean literary scholar based at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the author of the recently published childhood memoir,. Muponde is said to have learnt to type on Marechera’s typewriter. Then there is Charles Samupindi, the late author of the intense tragic novel, the forgotten book about the betrayal of guerrillas of the 1970s struggle for Zimbabwe’s freedom.
Yet Ngara wasn’t just a check on my literary delusions, but my biggest enabler. He loaned me from his own collection some of the novels that were not in the school library. This is how I came to read the US writers James Baldwin and Richard Wright, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, the Ugandan Okot p’ Bitek and many others.
Veit-Wild and Marechera’s first proper encounter was “on a hot October” or when “Harare [is] in heat”, as Marechera would say. October, the hottest month of the year in Zimbabwe, is historically when most suicides take place. In the Gukurahundi genocidal war, the armed militants Mugabe’s North Korean army unit were ostensibly fighting were known in popular Zimbabwean discourse as dissidents. “Is this a trap? With whom are you plotting?” Marechera was paranoid, rightly so, as he was trailed and hounded by spies from the Central Intelligence Organisation . “Go and tell your colleagues from the CIO where they can find me.
Forget sex across the race divide in a land in which former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith once vowed would never have majority rule, “not in a thousand years”, here was a woman taking on the polygamists at their own game . When cohabitation with his lover and her husband proved disastrous — there was an incident in which cops became involved — Marechera moved out. Together with another friend, the Wilds started paying for his flat in Sloane Court, on Herbert Chitepo Avenue, in the Avenues area of Harare.
Yet, in many ways, the most trenchant critique of Veit-Wild remains the one made in the mid-1990s by the poet and university lecturer But ould Marechera be as well known as he is today if the Dambudzo Marechera Trust hadn’t been set up to publishThe fate of the late Charles Samupindi — the gifted author of, who died in 1993 — is instructive; Samupindi is virtually unknown outside of Zimbabwe’s literary circles and even in Zimbabwe his works are hard to come by. is, in effect, an orphan and lies buried in a metaphoric unmarked grave, with no name in the street.
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