Literature & Ideas
Landmark
Dambudzo Marechera
1952 – 1987
The House of Hunger, and the Guardian Fiction Prize
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Zimbabwe Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
His first book won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979 and broke every convention African writing was then expected to observe. He was dead at thirty-five and has never stopped being read.
Charles William Dambudzo Marechera grew up in the Vengere township at Rusape, one of nine children; his father, a mortuary attendant, was found dead on a road when Marechera was eleven, and the family was evicted into a squatter camp. He stammered badly in Shona and largely stopped speaking it, which he later described as choosing English as a weapon rather than a gift.
He was expelled from the University of Rhodesia for his part in student protests, won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, and was expelled again — offered a choice, by his own account, between a psychiatric examination and leaving, after he attempted to set fire to the college. He wrote The House of Hunger largely while homeless in England.
It was published in 1978 and won the Guardian Fiction Prize the following year. It is not a novel and barely a collection of stories: a torrent of a narrative about township life, violence and a mind under pressure, in an English of enormous force that owes more to Joyce and to Beckett than to anything in the African canon of the period. He was told repeatedly that African writers were supposed to write about the nation, and refused, insisting he was a writer who happened to be African and that he would not be conscripted into anyone's programme.
He went home to independent Zimbabwe in 1982 and found no place in it. Black Sunlight had been banned; Mindblast was written while he was sleeping in Cecil Square in central Harare. He died of an Aids-related illness in 1987, at thirty-five, and was buried in a pauper's grave before being reinterred.
He is now the most studied writer Zimbabwe has produced, and the one young African writers most often name.
He was expelled from the University of Rhodesia for his part in student protests, won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, and was expelled again — offered a choice, by his own account, between a psychiatric examination and leaving, after he attempted to set fire to the college. He wrote The House of Hunger largely while homeless in England.
It was published in 1978 and won the Guardian Fiction Prize the following year. It is not a novel and barely a collection of stories: a torrent of a narrative about township life, violence and a mind under pressure, in an English of enormous force that owes more to Joyce and to Beckett than to anything in the African canon of the period. He was told repeatedly that African writers were supposed to write about the nation, and refused, insisting he was a writer who happened to be African and that he would not be conscripted into anyone's programme.
He went home to independent Zimbabwe in 1982 and found no place in it. Black Sunlight had been banned; Mindblast was written while he was sleeping in Cecil Square in central Harare. He died of an Aids-related illness in 1987, at thirty-five, and was buried in a pauper's grave before being reinterred.
He is now the most studied writer Zimbabwe has produced, and the one young African writers most often name.
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