And now, the valour of our people and the glory of the Mthwakazi Nation lives on not in any history book, or in any official account, where we are nothing but savages without culture, without history or glory or anything worth mentioning or passing on
I heard the stories from my father, passed down to him by his father, my grandfather, and which I shall one day pass down to my children.
Even though there was no petrol, people were driving. Even though the country was experiencing hyperinflation, my mother was able to secure chicken portions with her whole salary, without doing anything illegal
Relaying ordinary narratives was a way to reclaim that space in the national identity for ordinary citizens and born-frees. If I’m going to do Zimbabwean history some justice, I need as many perspectives as possible
Fiction allows me to make up events that happened but feel emotionally true…House of Stone took me six years to write, about 17 drafts. My aim was to fail spectacularly rather than succeed safely
Zimbabweans and Nigerians are famous for just having PhDs PhDs, but that really opened my eyes to the importance of teaching, right, and not just teaching fiction, the craft of fiction but art is also a way to think together to build empathy, diversity, right? I think the humanities are really good at that and cultivating stewardship, citizenship, and that’s really what I’m interested in in the classroom
The massacres are horrible when you read the transcripts. They speak of torture, starvation, families being forced to kill their family members, bury them, dance on their graves, it’s really atrocious. What’s really horrible is that there’s been no reckoning with that. The victims have gone unacknowledged. They did not receive any help, any social… and I’m thinking of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa as a comparison. So we have a lot of wounds. So that’s really what I wanted to sit with. And make sense of and try and understand
I remember during my writing of House of Stone, I went to therapy, and I took the book for therapy, I needed to also make sense and work through what excavation this issue was doing to me, to my psyche, to my body, my emotions
I think we also underestimate just how difficult it is to talk about this history and work through it. We need structures, we need state support. It cannot just be people looking through history. We need help as to how to look at that history and how to heal from that history
You know you will disappear. Like you’re causing trouble. You can’t go to the village and start asking these sorts of questions without causing trouble. Many activists in Zimbabwe have, you know, disappeared or paid the price. But for me the structure of House of Stone mirrors exactly what you’re talking about… the difficulty of excavating history
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