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Getting Entangled
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 87-96
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I MET DAMBUDZO FOR THE FIRST time on a hot October morning in Charles Mungoshi's office. They were drinking vodka. Mungoshi worked as an editor at Zimbabwe Publishing House at the time. I wanted to speak to him about the literary scene in Zimbabwe.
For a moment I felt blinded, stepping into the squat bungalow from the dazzling colours in the streets, the purple of the jacarandas lining the west-east and the bright red flamboyants on the north-south axis of the grid. Like many of the newly founded NGOs, aid organisations, news agencies and the like, ZPH had opened their offices in one of the town houses in The Avenues, hastily deserted by their white owners when Mugabe came to power.
‘Hi there. Is it you, our German book lover?’
The cheerful greeting came from Phyllis Johnson, whom I could barely make out in the dimly lit reception area, but recognising her clenched-teeth North American accent.
‘It is so bright outside,’ I told her. ‘I am overwhelmed by the light and those colours – but it is also really hot.’
Phyllis grimaced. ‘Yes, that's our Zimbabwean spring,’ she said. ‘The land is dry, even drier this year with that odiousdrought, but bang – out of nothing these trees explode into orgies of colour. What brings you here?’
I explained my mission and the interview I was hoping to have with Charles Mungoshi.
‘Charles? Yes, of course – his office is down there. I am sure he’ll be happy to speak to you.’
My knocking sounded hollow on the thin plywood door. ‘
‘Come in,’ someone called, rather flatly.
Would I be regarded as an intruder, I suddenly wondered. What right did I have to come here and ask an eminent writer questions about literature in his country? I had no credentials.
Yet once inside the room I felt at ease. Mungoshi was sitting behind his desk, a pile of folders and papers in front of him. When I introduced myself and explained my endeavour, it was he who seemed rather timid. But he did not have to worry.
‘What a gorgeous visitor you have, Charles,’ I heard a booming voice behind my back. ‘Please, young lady, do sit down.’
Vumba and the Grand Finale
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- Book:
- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 126-135
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THE YEARNING STARTED THE moment we set out from Harare on the eastward road towards Mutare. All the pain, the hurt, the desperation about a love which could not be lived shrank to tiny dots, like drops of blood which, once dried, you do not notice anymore. In their place my heart was filling with longing.
Passing through Marondera, with its huge mills and silos which in the years to come would be filled to the brim with maize, Zimbabwe becoming the granary of the SADAC region; shortly after, Malvatte, the farmhouse where you could have coffee and cake on the lawn, surrounded by orchards and grazing sheep, and fill up on fresh vegetables; an hour later, Rusape.
Remember, Dambudzo? Our two days there, the pain of your return, the passion of our embraces?
‘It is an eagle, an elephant, a whale!’ the children cried out at each picturesque rock formation we drove past in the grassland on our right.
After another hour's drive we had reached the crest of the road. Down below us the city of Mutare, glistening white, spreading far out onto the plain.
What is he doing? Does he feel lonely? How is he feeling all by himself ?Some miles past Mutare, the road began to climb again and we drove, up, up, up, in serpentine loops towards the heights of the Vumba, a cone-shaped mountain of about 1 900 metres at its peak. The higher we climbed, the more it felt like we were entering a jungle, a dense tapestry of foliage enclosing us, slings of lianas and braids of moss dangling down into the narrow bends. On either side vines, creepers and ferns made the forest appear impenetrable. It became so dark and misty we had to switch the headlights on.
‘This is eerie,’ Max whispered. ‘Is this where the elves are hiding? Look, the road is all wet. Has it been raining?’
‘Vumba means mist in Shona,’ Victor explained. ‘It is so humid here that the moisture remains on the road even if it is not raining.’
‘Look – baboons!’ Franz crowed as a mother with a babe on her back bobbed across the road in front of us, quickly vanishing into the thicket. ‘Can we see more?’
The Ghost of Amelia
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 158-163
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The fear of abandonment phobia is characterized by extreme dependency on others. It is commonly seen in adults and children who are also diagnosed with Borderline Personality disorders. Such people live in the constant fear that their ‘world will collapse’ if their protectors or loved ones abandon them.
I LEAVE IT TO SPECIALISTS TO DECIDE whether the ‘Borderline Personality’ syndrome, to which the above quote from a medical handbook refers, might have applied to Dambudzo's psyche or not. What I am sure of, however, and what many examples in my narrative reflect, is that my friend was horrified at the prospect of being left alone.
When he could not accuse me of expelling him – because he had his own flat – he hissed the flag of abandonment.
In August 1984 my family and I went on our first visit home to Germany.
When I told Dambudzo that I would be away for a month, his world collapsed. He thought he would never see me again. Although his fear was utterly irrational and, for me, incomprehensible, for him this was reality. All through his life he seemed to re-enact the dejection he had lived through as a child: his father's violent death and his mother's turning to other men in order to make a living for him and his siblings.
The ‘Amelia Sonnets’, which he wrote in anticipation of my departure, talk about his fears of abandonment. The ordinary objects around him, the dust, the crockery, the cockroaches, turn into symbols of absence.
A band of near-molten steel tightens
Around my iceblock head. The clock ticking
Hurls loneliness’ searing arrows. The dust
In the neglected flat, glows like radioactive
Particles under my bare feet. Though noon,
I stand in my nightshirt grinning inanely,
Afraid to draw the curtains on the bright
Nightmare of daylight.
…
All that's left of Amelia is all this pottery
Silent, soothing, yet eerily arranged around my memories.
Absence, loneliness, abandonment become premonitions of death. In apocalyptic scenarios heaven and hell are invoked, ghosts and skeletons embrace each other in lecherous dances, foul flesh and rotten bones haunt the figure of Amelia.
On my seventh drink she appeared in strips
Of rotting flesh and faintly gleaming bones – Her
Hollow eye sockets instantly found me.
Acknowledgements
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 278-279
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The Mozambican Bogey Man
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 50-54
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DURING OUR FIRST WEEKS IN Harare Victor often hitchhiked to his workplace, which was on the other side of town. On top of the persisting drought, Zimbabwe was experiencing a severe shortage of petrol. Where to find fuel was the talk of the day. The newspapers were full of crisis news and images of endless lines of cars queuing at the petrol stations. Some days not a drop was available; on others the disbursement was rationed to ten or fifteen litres per car.
It was easy to hitch a lift in those days, in the general air of hope and of trust. It wasn't unusual to see big groups of people walking along the roads and, at the approach of a car, hundreds of thumbs stretching out. If it was a white man hitching, he did not even have to stretch out his thumb before a car stopped. The black ladies with heavy bags of flour on their heads and snotty-nosed babies on their backs might have to wait a while longer but they, too, would be sure to find a place on the back of a pick-up eventually.
After our first days in the Oasis Hotel, we moved to a house-sit at Danhiko School, a vocational training centre for disabled ex-combatants. It was one of the first-hour projects funded by a Norwegian aid organisation. The house, which belonged to the American director of the school, was messy and chaotic but it came with three major assets: a typewriter, a dog and a car. Our own typewriter was in the container with all our furniture which would arrive much later. And our car was in for repairs from the damage it had sustained on board the ocean liner from Bremen to Durban.
Our weekly letters to our parents, in which we reported all the details of our new life, could now be typed. Max, we told them, had recently declared that he liked blacks better than whites. He wanted to know all about their lives and why they were so much poorer than white people were. He observed how women carried heavy loads on their heads and wondered why we would often see them sitting at street corners, staring at us. His brother had different concerns: ‘Franz's main addressee is Bingo, the German Shepherd,’ we reported. ‘“Sit down! Out! Off! Eat!” are his first English words.’
How to Live On
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 208-209
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AT THAT POINT, IN 1987, medical knowledge about the development of the illness was still rudimentary. Assumptions of the general public, those who were infected and those who were not, had little foundation. One theory was that among those who tested HIV positive some were only carriers of the virus whereas, in others, it might take between one and ten years until they would have full-blown AIDS. The most significant indicator was the number of helper cells in your blood in relation to the killer cells. If the helper cells dropped below 200, opportunistic diseases would normally begin, we were told; from 100 downwards to zero you were on the trip to full-blown AIDS.
Blood needed to be monitored every three months and so we continued to send samples of serum to Germany; if we were visiting, we had the tests done there in person. The period of waiting for the results was the most harrowing time. Would the number of helper cells have dropped again?
You felt on a downward slope, hoping only that the slide would not be too fast, or that a miracle would happen before you reached the bottom. You would also continuously be checking your body for possible symptoms, feeling for swollen glands, being alarmed by minor changes on your tongue, on your skin, or by night sweats. While there was no cure in sight, doctors advised us on prophylactic methods which might prevent certain forms of the illness, first of all the most dreaded one, Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), a typical AIDS-related killer disease.
It was what Dambudzo would die from, in August that year.
Once a month we had to inhale a certain substance using an electrical inhalator. There was the hassle of making sure we always had a sufficient supply of the substance and of the tubes needed for the inhalations. The procedure took one hour. The children kept asking why we were doing this. I hated it.
Our children. They were nine and six years old when we had received our diagnosis.
My brother, in his pessimistic outlook, urged us to tell them and also to have them tested. In the time before we knew, they might have had blood contact with one of us, he said.
I could not.
Projects and Rejects
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 169-171
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WHEN DAMBUDZO AND I AT LAST had become close again, and the other woman had disappeared into the countryside, I made attempts to consolidate our relationship.
We jostled with the idea of writing letters to each other, exchanging views on literature, sharing experiences, talking about his life and mine; and then publish the correspondence in book form. He seemed enthusiastic. But when I mentioned it again and wanted to make it work, he did not respond.
In fact, Dambudzo never ever wrote a single letter to me. What he felt about us, it was all in his poems, in his writing.
Another project I suggested we tackle together was an anthology of poetry.
I had discussed the idea with Peter Ripken, the representative of the German booksellers at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. We considered a collection of poetry to introduce Zimbabwean writing, which had started to flourish since the country's independence, to a German readership. Ripken had close ties to Zimbabwean writers and publishers. He knew Dambudzo – they had met some years before at the African Literature Festival in West Berlin in 1979.
‘We could select the poems together and write an introduction,’ I said to Dambudzo. ‘Wouldn't it be good to have something to work on? Otherwise we will continue with these useless discussions …’
‘No. Not with me. You do it, if you like. Why should I work for others if nobody is interested in supporting me?’
‘You would not be working for others,’ I pointed out. ‘You could write about the poets and their poems. You do this so well. And I would just do the correspondence and organise it all.’
‘No, you do your work. Don't try to exploit me. I do my writing, and if nobody wants to publish it, they should all go to hell.’
That was the crux of it. His frustration, his anger about being ignored, about local writers, readers, publishers being too illiterate to appreciate his work.
After he’d moved into his flat, Dambudzo wrote ‘The Depth of Diamonds’, a fairly short novel. He gave it to College Press, to his old friend Stanley Nyamfukudza, together with a bunch of his recent poetry. Nyamfukudza did not know what to do with the poems, whether they were meant as a part of the manuscript or not, and returned the material – all of it – without a comment.
Max and Dambudzo
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 108-110
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WHEN DAMBUDZO GAVE THESE and a few more children's stories to publishers, he was told that they were not suitable for children.
Could the six-year-old illustrator relate to them? Did he understand the stories which ‘contain themes that deal with adult cynicism but in a playful child's narrative voice’, the adult Max Wild was asked years later. He was a well-known jazz musician by then and performing on his saxophone with Zimbabwean musicians.
If I remember, ‘The Magic Cat’ was less cynical, and I definitely related to it in a very childlike way. ‘Baboons of the Rainbow’ got a lot darker, especially as the story went on. I didn't think twice about the violence, and thought it was very entertaining, as you can see from my drawings. I remember not understanding some of the adult stuff towards the end, like the drinking, cigar smoking, and listening/playing music. For me it didn't really make sense or go with the story at the time and seemed a little irrelevant. In fact, Dambudzo and I stayed up pretty late that night, finishing the illustrations, and I remember getting tired and him helping me with the drawings. The last couple of drawings he did himself, when I had gone to bed. You should be able to notice the subtle differences.
Well, naturally, I now understand them better, and see the different layers. Although they went over my head at the time, I suspected that Dambudzo was up to something, hinting at something beyond the actual script. Reading them now, I recognise the pain and violence in them, but I remember that this was never an issue for me back then as a child, because Dambudzo made it sound so natural and almost comical. It seems to me that's how he might have viewed his own life.
He was very intense and, at the time, I thought he could act a bit crazy.
I think the key is that his mood could change very quickly. But when he was in form and focusing, he was very much in the moment, very funny, and definitely very nice to us kids. I think he liked me, and children in general. He could relate to our lack of inhibitions and the way life was so uncomplicated and easy to us. He was always very kind and caring towards me.
The Other Woman
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 164-168
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DURING OUR HOLIDAY IN GERMANY, travelling here and there, seeing many different friends and family in various places, Dambudzo moved into the back of my mind. I was not worried about him, I was not yearning for him, I did not think much about him. Even when I heard from someone that a writer had been detained during Zimbabwe Book Fair and that apparently it had been him, I remained largely unaffected. I probably just shrugged my shoulders and made a comment like ‘Oh, what kind of scene did he stage this time?’
However, already on our flight back from Frankfurt to Harare, the butterflies were starting to dance in my belly. I had told myself to wait for a while before going to see him. I wanted to keep the distance. I was afraid I would get sucked in again into the whirlpool of unresolved emotions, of a love that remained an illusion – that even, perhaps, was insincere?
My intent was useless. It did not take more than a day or two – in fact on my first drive to the shops to stock up our supplies – before I found myself making a detour to Dambudzo's flat.
‘How are you?’ I said, embracing him. ‘We only got back yesterday.
I cannot stay. But I am glad you are in. I just needed to see you. I have missed you so much.’
Dambudzo was strangely distant. My emotions flying out towards him, my desire that had flared up again, seemed to drop down to the floor where he was standing.
‘So, you are back,’ he said. ‘I did not expect you.’
I asked what had happened at the book fair.
‘Yes,’ he confirmed, ‘they detained me. I spent six days behind bars.’
A day before the fair had started, he said, he had been sitting in the lounge of the Meikles Hotel giving an interview to two Swedish women journalists. All of a sudden, two undercover policemen, CIO, walked up and arrested him. They confiscated the journalists’ tape and camera.
There was less of the usual rage in Dambudzo's voice as he told me what had happened. What had hurt him most, it seemed, was that his fellow writers had not done anything to come to his rescue.
Guest of Honour
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 69-72
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MY CURRENT ASSIGNMENT, TO conduct an interview, had taken me to the Literature Bureau, an agency for writers writing in Shona and Ndebele. I had almost walked past their office on Samora Machel Avenue, the northern artery of the city centre, so inconspicuous was it opposite the Monomotapa Hotel which, with its 20 storeys and modern architecture, towered over and completely outshone the low buildings in the area.
Through the bleary shop window I could make out some faded posters on the walls – announcing writing workshops and competitions – and equally sun-bleached catalogues on a table which, on closer inspection, had information about novels and children's books in the local languages. Their covers showed images of women with babies on their backs, a village scene, or a warrior with a spear.
‘The Bureau is of a colonial legacy,’ my interviewee explained when he saw me looking at them.
David Hlazo, the current director of the Literature Bureau, who spoke seven languages, was originally from South Africa. He was around sixty years of age and had a very dark complexion. The fine lines around his smiling eyes and criss-crossing the skin of his face reminded me of a map stitched into parchment paper.
He soon brought me back to the present. ‘
‘The colonial government saw in the black men only idiots,’ he said.
The Literature Bureau was founded in the early 1950s, as the government wanted to develop a local reading market. The Bureau was to stimulate writing in Shona and Ndebele but at the same time it was supposed to make sure that writers abstained from touching on political matters. Every manuscript was screened by the Bureau and then put into print by local publishing houses.
‘Anybody who mentioned Mugabe's name in writing would be committing an offence, punishable by imprisonment,’ Mr Hlazo told me.
So there was strict censorship?’ I asked, my pen poised above my notebook.
‘No, there was no censorship,’ he corrected me. ‘The authors just had their taboos – not to publish anything on political or religious issues, or anything defamatory about anybody.’
‘So a sort of indirect censorship?’
‘Yes, that's right. And even today, I can't visualise anyone writing in the vernacular producing a political manuscript.’
December 1982
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- Book:
- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 45-46
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Harare in heat. Whores in plenty. Sunlight harsh, stridently bright. … The only sound of water in the City was the plungent Cecil Square fountains, the flush of toilets, the horrible oogle of the sink …
Dambudzo Marechera (‘Park Bench Diary’ in Mindblast)WE ARRIVED IN HARARE IN December 1982, a week before Christmas. It was terribly hot. After two seasons with abundant rains and bumper harvests, the summer months had been extremely dry and the country was facing its second year of drought. Every day clouds gathered, temperatures rose above 30 degrees, the air became oppressive – but then the clouds dissolved and not a drop of rain fell. On the farms the maize plants withered. In the villages rain-making ceremonies were held.
In my mind I see Dambudzo, sitting in Cecil Square, hammering away on his portable typewriter. At the time still bearing the name of the colonial conqueror, the square was a small quadrangle of a park in the centre of Harare, with low hedges laid out in a geometrical pattern, a fountain pouring water high into the air in its centre. Yet for Dambudzo the air is polluted by the stink of the public toilet hidden in one corner of the square, as the heat mingles with his pain and the hunger in his belly.
Of rain, not a smell, not a taste, not a touch. And the heat in my mind raged; a raw seething wound.
On one side of the square stood the old Meikles Hotel, whose woodpanelled interior exhumed the scent of the earliest days of colonial settlement; the other side was flanked by the modern commercial centre with a skyline of office towers, square façades of glass and stone, up to twenty floors. The centre of Harare was not at all as one might have imagined an African city. To the dismay of travellers looking for the exotic, it felt very European. There was no flurry and pell-mell of people, no carts or markets, no hubbub of voices, noises and smells. Everything was clean and orderly.
Yet it was Dambudzo's habitat. His typewriter and a plastic bag containing books and clothes – all the belongings he possessed – accompanied him. For lunch he would get a mug of sour milk from the Indian grocery.
A Reading and a Murder Charge
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 143-148
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AS MANY CRITICS LATER POINTED out, Marechera's life and writing intermingled constantly. It was as if in his life he was staging the scripts for his stories or, vice versa, he was acting out what he had written. Much of it was absurdist comedy or, as he would say in the splendid lecture he gave in 1986, it came close to ‘Menippean Satire’.
Heaven and hell are close and may be visited. Madness, dreams and daydreams, abnormal states of mind and all kinds of erratic inclinations are explored. The world of such novels is complex, unstable, comic, satirical, fantastic, poetical and committed to the pursuit of truth. The hero can travel anywhere in this world and beyond. Fantasy and symbolism are combined with low-life naturalism.
As I had the ‘privilege’ of travelling with the hero to some of such vantage points, looking back to them now they do indeed read ‘complex, unstable, comic and satirical’. Even those of us who were made part of these stories acted strangely at times.
In hindsight the preparations for Dambudzo's public reading in February 1984 read like a caricature of the interaction that was taking
place between the threesome that we were: Dambudzo, the ingenious writer and spoilt brat, Victor, his magnanimous sponsor and rival, and me, his lover and sponsor in one.
Much promotion had gone into this first public appearance by Dambudzo Marechera. It had been a long time since the heady days after his return from exile in 1982. We could not risk a fiasco. Eminent dignitaries had accepted our invitation: the German ambassador, representatives of the British Council and the Alliance Française, as well as the patron of the Zimbabwe German Society (ZGS), who was a well-known Zimbabwean businessman and who agreed to speak words of welcome. We were especially proud to have secured the Minister of Education and Culture, Dzingai Mutumbuka, to introduce the writer. He and Dambudzo had been contemporaries at the University of Rhodesia and were expelled together in the 1973 student unrest around the famous ‘pots-and-pans demonstration’. While Marechera went on to Oxford, Mutumbuka had joined the armed struggle. After independence he became a minister in the first Mugabe cabinet.
With about two weeks to go before the reading, Victor and I deliberated what the best strategy might be to ensure that everything proceeded smoothly.
Boscobel Drive
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 65-68
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THE PROPERTY WE EVENTUALLY found and which became our home reached far beyond what we had expected or aimed for. Back home in Germany, it definitely nurtured the reputation we were acquiring among some of our friends that we were stepping right into the shoes of those we had formerly regarded as colonial exploiters and oppressors. But for me, finding this dream-like house became another of the junctions in my life that would transform it as if with a magic wand.
One morning, when Victor was at work and Max at school, I put Franz into his buggy and set off on foot to view a house that wasn't too far from the one we were renting. I remember the day so clearly. Sunlight filtered through the feathery branches arching over Boscobel Drive, my destination.
Houses in Highlands, as the suburb was called, were built in the colonial style of the 1930s and 1940s. Mostly the houses were rather small but set on a large plot of land surrounded by tall old trees and hedges, shielding them from the streets.
I walked along the pavement, pushing Franz carefully over the uneven parts. Streets in these residential areas did not generally have sidewalks and residents seldom walked – they drove everywhere. It was only their nannies, cooks and gardeners in overalls or maids’ uniforms you would see walking anywhere, ambling along, chatting to each other, or gathering at street corners on their lunch breaks. If they saw a white woman walking past, they would turn their heads and stare. Who was she? Why was she not driving a car? And in my case this bright morning – where was she headed with the little blond boy in the pushchair?
Looking out for house No 8, I found myself walking along a hedge, which was very high and seemed to have no end. Where it was a little patchy, I could get a glimpse of the property behind it.
‘Hey, Franziboy, this can't be it,’ I muttered, more to myself than to my son who, dummy in mouth and cuddly cloth in hand, seemed dazed by the warmth and the freckly light.
In the glimpses I got I could make out a wide stretch of lawn, large trees and something sparkling blue.
Escape from the House of Hunger
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 9-17
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DAMBUDZO, CHILD OF SORROW, your mother was so proud of you.
At five and a half you were chased away from school because you were too little. But you went back. You always wanted books, she said. You always wanted to write. Panguva yega yega ainge achingonyora.
Your family lived in a two-roomed shack in Vengere near the town of Rusape, in what was still the colony of Southern Rhodesia. You had two elder brothers, and six more siblings were to follow.
You were baptised Charles William in an Anglican church. It was only when you became a published writer that you reclaimed your Shona name.
Your father was first a lorry driver, then a mortuary attendant. A violent man. He spent most of his meagre salary in the beer hall and often came home drunk, beating up anyone who got in his way.
Your mother crossed the railway line to the suburbs where the white people lived. She washed their dirty clothes and cared for their children. She did whatever she could so that you and your siblings could go to school, so that you had food to eat.
No wonder, many years later, you called your first book The House of Hunger .
‘I got my things and left,’ it famously begins. ‘I couldn't have stayed on in that House of Hunger where every morsel of sanity was snatched from you the way some kinds of bird snatch food from the very mouths of babes.’
But even as a child you found a way to escape. ‘I was mesmerised by books at a very early age,’ you wrote in Mindblast.
I found my first one – Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia – at the local rubbish dump where the garbage from the white side of town was dumped every day, except Sundays. You never knew what you’d find in that rubbish dump. Broken toys, half eaten sandwiches; comics, magazines, books. One brilliant morning I found what I thought was a rather large doll. But in touching it, I discovered it was a baby. Dead. Rotting. I fled as fast as I could to the safety and razor fights of the ghetto. I read that encyclopaedia from cover to cover.
PART FIVE - BASTARD DEATH
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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The Moment of Terror
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- They Called You Dambudzo
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- 26 May 2022
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- 17 June 2022, pp 256-257
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Summary
WHEN I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING, there is this moment of terror. That is what I call it. Terror of another day that has to be lived, to be lived up to.
It is like molten lead is sprawling through my veins. The crisis of the in-between. The anxiety, the angst of the living creature. I am alive, hence I must stand up for myself, must act, I must – There is no way back into the sheltering womb.
This is how I have felt many times.
The feeling has no name. But it has a colour and a texture.
It is a thick foil of fog clinging around me, tight, suffocating. Sticky foggy grey, black-spotted hyenas howling from afar. Opaque.
Sometimes it is a crow with large wings and a terrible croak circling above me, its shadow noiseless but haunting. At other times there is an iron ring around my heart. I am stuck. I can't move. The brain is cramped, the heart yells for help.
Or it is a Kraken, threatening to strangle me. Like the hovering crow. I try to duck away but its tentacles are too large, I can't escape. Trapped. Forever. No fire escape. The trauma of my youth, my childhood – the boa constrictor of my father around my neck: Don't talk if it is not meaningful. Children are not yet human beings. They have to listen and only speak when they are asked.
He is long dead. But the ugly Kraken remains, crawling out of his grave. Grabbing me, crawling over my body, my soul. Creepily. Kraken – crow – Krähe. The kr-sound – clenching your teeth to go on, no rest, to soldier on, no matter what, unseeing, not minding the cold, the heat.
The Hourglass
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- Book:
- They Called You Dambudzo
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2022, pp 198-207
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Summary
THE FIRST WEEKS AND MONTHS OF 1987 are sealed off in my memory like in a glass cabinet with little porcelain figurines that have been taken out by some invisible hand, moved about and put back inside – up to now they are stuck in that very moment.
Can I open it and go through the motions again?
I will try.
The doctor's phone call set us in a state of panic.
‘Could you and Victor come to see me? It is about Dambudzo.’
This was a couple of days after I had found Dambudzo in his flat in a frightful state. He was running a high temperature, coughing blood, emaciated. Open books between dirty sheets, a half-eaten pie on a table. I had dragged him into my car and driven him to the doctor's rooms around the corner in The Avenues.
‘You are not looking so good today, Dambudzo,’ Nick C., our family GP, said, and after a brief consultation, to me: ‘Here is a referral. Take him straight into Parirenyatwa Hospital.’
Visiting our GP was always an uplifting experience. He would usually see you off with the prescription: ‘All you need is TLC!’ On the phon he had seemed concerned, which got us worried. We wracked our minds. What was wrong with Dambudzo? Why had Nick not wanted to tell us over the phone? Was it cancer? Or – what if it was AIDS?
‘I have no contact details for any of Dambudzo's relatives,’ Nick said when we had settled in his office. ‘He was always very dismissive when I asked him to name someone –’
‘Yes,’ I confirmed, in order to calm my nerves ‘– he wouldn't want his family interfering with his life.’
Nick nodded. ‘So for me you are his closest kin,’ he said.
Victor and I waited.
‘The news is not good. I have been phoned by Parirenyatwa. Dambudzo has a far advanced pneumonia which is caused – as a test has proved – by AIDS.’
Nick must have seen our faces freeze, but he did not know our story yet. I only told him after we had received our own test results.
‘So … what does this mean?’ I stammered. ‘How are they treating him?’
‘With antibiotics, which will bring some ease to his lungs.
8 Sloane Court
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- Book:
- They Called You Dambudzo
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2022, pp 152-157
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Summary
AS OFTEN HAPPENED IN HIS LIFE, in his forays through the city bars, tired, starving, desolate, Dambudzo had bumped into a relative of a relative. ‘Mukoma, you don't have a place to stay? No problem, come along, uncle, get some sleep in my flat.’
As it turned out, the tenants of the flat were in arrears with their rent and rates and were about to be evicted, so Dambudzo told us. Thus, what had looked like a temporary arrangement was able to become, by chance and with our help, a permanent one. We negotiated with the management of the building and after we had paid the outstanding debts, Dambudzo obtained a lease agreement. Sharing the rent as well as water and electricity bills between Victor and I and Marilyn Poole, our protégé writer was able to live in 8 Sloane Court until the time of his death.
Before he moved in, we had the flat thoroughly cleaned, fumigated and whitewashed. We put up a bookshelf and gave Dambudzo some odd pieces of furniture, pots, pans and crockery. I sewed curtains from a fabric we had brought from Germany and put them up at his window. The fabric had a kind of Scandinavian pattern, I remember – slanting stripes in bold red and white – you can see the curtains in the background of the photos taken of him in the flat. Sewing, like knitting, has a warm, caring side. I sewed the curtains for Dambudzo, hoping he would be happier, feel sheltered in this place of his. I was hoping for us, too, for our love to have a space to steady itself and expand. But would it?
It was mostly in the early afternoon that I knocked at his window, a couple of hours before my German classes at the nearby Zimbabwe German Society.It was also the best time to be with him. He would have spent the morning writing or reading, maybe got some food from the nearby shopping centre, and he tended to be in a placid mood; much better than in the evening, when he became restless because he wanted to go out and drink; or was drunk already.
I would often have a hip flask of sherry in my bag, from which we would take sips in between, to flavour our mouths and enhance the sensuousness in our limbs.
Shadows of Death
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- Book:
- They Called You Dambudzo
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2022, pp 210-214
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Summary
Death wears, from within all faces,
a secretive smile;
from within all gesture
an incomprehensible movement;
From within all voices
a sound beyond all hearing.
DAMBUDZO KNEW THAT DEATH was coming. In 1986, the surgery and haemorrhaging. In 1987, pneumonia and a diagnosis. He was in constant conversation with ‘Bastard Death’, as he called him. But there seemed no reprieve. His strength to withstand was waning.
Darkness a Bird of Prey
What are the things, bright-winged
That within me no longer move
No longer ‘bruptly leap clear to soar
Towards the stars above this dead-weight night?
Where is that ecstatic turmoil
Which once fired my youth into desperate acts
Visions beyond any known to the hideous devil?
Where! that demented force that hurls Death
‘Get thee behind me’?
The hundred knocks on the door
To my thirties-old life
And th’impatient question ‘Is anyone in there?’ – I have
No strength to shudder, to utter, to
Scream YES or painfully mutter ‘Go away’.
We did not talk much after I knew his diagnosis, not about what was on his mind nor about what was on mine. I could not and would not believe that he was dying because would that not mean that I would follow, not now but maybe in a year, or two, or whenever? I was not able to tell him that the Bastard was hovering over my life too, and that of my husband. That my children might become orphans. The thought was too horrifying to be uttered.
He never asked the question: What about you? And Victor? The children? I never asked him if he knew that he had AIDS. He only mentioned that they had found ‘some kind of virus’.
Our conversations clung to daily necessities.
His knees ached, he told me; could I get him another prescription for the pills to relieve the pain?
After Dambudzo was discharged from hospital Victor and I gathered some friends inside and outside Zimbabwe to contribute to a fund from which he received monthly payments to buy food. Then, to make sure he would actually eat, we arranged for him to have lunch and dinner at a nearby restaurant. He did so for a while.
His last public appearance was in April that year at a literature colloquium at the University of Zimbabwe.
PART THREE - EAGLETS OF DESIRE
- Flora Veit-Wild
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- Book:
- They Called You Dambudzo
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2022, pp 85-86
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