Perhaps a movie at the cinema on Sunday afternoon. After school, flashy sedans would come and collect the powdered and polished girls one called classmates or, if one is a bit ambitious, potential girlfriends.
So one morning as we majita ba Zola were walking through the jungle towards St Joseph’s College, we did what we were used to doing. As the train carrying students from uptown roared from behind us, we all hid behind the bushes. But that day it all went horribly wrong; one of my classmates saw my head behind that Mongana tree. Later that morning as I opened the door to my class, my classmates awaited me with crackling laughter. One had to find a way to deal with that reality. Majita a Zola had to find devices to deal with that humiliation, others developed an outside layer of care-freedom, others dropped out, others lost themselves in marijuana smoke, my man Keletso became a boxer and took it out onto the poor punching bag, Joel turned to political texts, and I internalised the anger and found another angry man Dambudzo Marechera.
I met him when I least expected. I was studying for my Cambridge O-Level Certificate at St Joseph’s College. I see the black oily smoke of written anger from between the books on the shelves of the library in the Literature Section. Stuffy little room. Few shelves and even fewer books. My fellow Pure Science students scurry around in the Pure Science Section furrow-browed in adolescent excitement. Form 4F, Pure Science Class. The School’s Royal Family. Cream of the School. The Scientists, the future of this country. The future nuclear scientists, doctors, neuro-surgeons, aerodynamic engineers…and they are spread across the library reading bible-sized Pure Physics books, Organic Chemistry textbooks, Eistein’s biographies and algorithm concepts.
The first paragraph in the book Black Sunlight grabs me by the throat. Its fumes entrance me. Here was a man who articulated all that I had been feeling, thinking and experiencing in one small paragraph.
Marechera was born and raised in the squalor of Vengere Township in pre-independent Zimbabwe. His early age childhood was characterised by rummaging though rubbish dumps searching for books. He was academically brilliant and extremely intelligent and thus managed to earn scholarships for his education. He excelled at school and enrolled at University of Rhodesia in 1972 but his independent almost rebellious streak ensured his expulsion a year later after he had taken part in a student protest. He won a highly sought after scholarship to study at New College, which he later lost because of his anti-social behaviour.
It was while at Oxford that he wrote The House of Hunger, a collection of short stories. The House of Hunger received the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He was always an outsider, both as an exile in London and later on when he returned to Harare with his unconventional and anti-mainstream orientation. He experimented with form to depict the rigours of township life, colonialism, the psychological and physical effects of colonial and post-colonial society on individuals. He rebelled against labels such as “African” or “American” writer seeing them as just another move to stifle freedom of thought. His Black Sunlight was even more surreal with characters that were not tired around any specific plot. His books were criticised for being “un African” at a time when “African” writing was all about anti-colonial lamentations or post-colonial celebrations.
While in London, he would hang around street people and listen to their stories. Upon his return to Zimbabwe he found a country that was about to fall into the same trap of authoritarianism that sought to run or expected literature to serve a certain nationalist, if not patriotic purpose. He criticised this tendency that he found in many a newly independent African society. He published Mindblast, a satirical collection of conversations with a critical look at the new Africa and Zimbabwe in particular. He died in 1987. A host of other writings would get published posthumously among them Cemetery of Mind and The Black Insider.
Marechera was often criticised for his challenging writing that was judged to be both “self-indulgent” and “European” in a way, but his idea was to load his writing with enigmas that would only be understood by someone who was truly dedicated to his writing. It is this same characteristic that made his writing so hard to commodify and thus render it unsaleable and open to the whims of market forces. In a world obsessed with quick snaps and quick feeds of eat-as-you-walk products, Dambudzo’s works remain both challenging and rewarding.
At a time where the whole of young Africa is realising the limitations of the independence that the earlier generations supposedly won, and the resultant oppressions under the same independent societies Marechera’s writing remains instructive. His writing remains a journey towards a deeper freedom than the simplistic and face value one. It is perhaps now upon young Africans to seek that freedom which is very individual in nature and go beyond the narrow societal or nationalistic orientation. He explains his main ambition as to break free from all sorts of mind control.
And perhaps at a point when the young African is faced with insurmountable challenges; unaccountable political leadership, neo-liberal globalisation, AIDS/HIV, manufactured media realities, types of censorship and so on, it is time this poet/writer came to the fore away from the crevices of forgotten history. And maybe it is about time he became more than just an obscure hero for angry ghetto boys rejected by the bland din of mainstream society.
