On Dambudzo Marechera: The Life and Times of an African Writer By Helon Habila

"I got my things and left."

This, the opening line to Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger, apart from being the coolest opening line in African fiction, is a fair summary of the writer's life. He was always getting his things and leaving; not that he had many things to get-in his last years, homeless and reduced to sleeping on park benches in Harare, Zimbabwe, all he had were his typewriter and a few books. He died at thirty-five, an age when most writers are just publishing their first novels. It is a mark of his genius that, with only three novellas, some short stories, poems, and essays published during his lifetime, he is regarded today as one of the most influential postcolonial African writers. Read More

Who's Afraid of Dambudzo Marechera By Ivor Hartmann

"My mother presented education to us as the gateway out of poverty"

In Dambudzo's brief life, he died in Zimbabwe an aged 35; he achieved fame in 1979 when his first book The House of Hunger jointly won The Guardian Fiction Prize. He had gained some infamy before that, when asked to join a certain society during their annual dinner, he stood up on the table and urinated on it, that being his answer. Dambudzo was born into a large rural poverty stricken family; it was his mother's encouragement and the local missionary school that helped birth his writing ability. Zimbabwe or Rhodesia as it was named before independence in 1980, was in the grips of white colonial power while Dambudzo was growing up. He was deeply affected by his families poverty and the gross human injustices enforced by a minority on a daily basis. Read More

Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987): 20 years later! By Tinashe Mushakavanhu

I was four years old when Dambudzo Marechera died. I am 24 now. People still talk about him. 20 years later, we all talk about him. Every time. If Dambudzo Marechera had never existed, Zimbabwe, would have invented him. Zimbabwe needed Dambudzo Marechera to shatter it's literary lethargy and stir the stagnant pond in it's literary landscape. Except for a very few people who knew him personally, the rest of us know him only as a projection, as we imagine him from what we have read about him. Read More

"My name is not money - but mind" By Bettina Schmidt

Dambudzo Marechera, an uncompromising Doppelgaenger. Dambudzo Marechera's writing has upset the literary scene and its established criteria of 'good' writing. Since Marechera neither lived up to the expectations of others, nor intended to do so, his writing and work is considered un-African, self-indulgent, elitist, immoral, disillusioned, obscene and destructive. Consequently, his work is not perceived as participating constructively in the structuring of an African or Zimbabwean identity and nation-building, whatever this may be. I think the criticism of Marechera's work ought to be viewed positively, since a true writer stands imaginatively outside and beyond social reality and engages his inside in an intricate dialogue. Therefore, of most interest to me is this dialogue itself, since the topic of the inside-outsider dilemma addressed by Marechera on various occasions is a basic condition of the existence of the writer and artist in society. Read More