House of Hunger

"Yes. He died homeless on a park bench in 1987. He’d been kicked out of Oxford for ‘unsociable behaviour and academic dereliction’ … We are. But I think he was in a very dark place and the short stories reflect that. He’s talked about as the African Joyce and the stories are difficult to read. There are lots of shifts in time and place and you’re never quite sure what is real and what isn’t. He came from a township where his mother was a maid and his father worked in a mortuary and he had a brutal childhood, which he writes about here. He writes about race discrimination, poverty, violence. He was a vocal critic of the colonial teaching syllabus. I’m not sure if I exactly like his work but he’s definitely part of the post-colonial canon and he was, I think, the first black Zimbabwean writer writing in English, but his books weren’t recognised in his lifetime. Well, he was HIV positive. There was such huge denial of HIV at first and Zimbabwe was like South Africa and so many people died because the government wouldn’t accept the antiretroviral drugs from the West because they said there wasn’t a problem. I mean, this is one of the reasons that people in power want to stay in power in Zim – because they have access to the antiretrovirals. There are lots of reasons. One is the African tradition, it is almost a tradition, of dry sex. Women put herbs and all sorts of things in their vaginas to create friction and this, of course, causes lesions that make the spread of HIV more likely. Also, monogamy is not particularly prized, or, at least, it wasn’t. And then the army was sent to Congo where HIV is really bad. The Zimbabwean army is now 70% HIV positive. There is a lot of migration too. Men work away from their families. If you work in the mines you’re in single sex quarters, if you work as a domestic you live alone. Families are completely broken up. It is. What can I say? I mean, when you’re there, if you have enough money, you can live a fantastic life behind big walls, but it’s impossible to do that if you have the slightest social conscience because things are so bad for most people. People do say it. And it isn’t acceptable. I was 13 at independence so I wasn’t at all politically aware. The UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) just meant sanctions to me – no chocolate. And now there is huge economic colonisation happening. The Chinese are coming for the minerals and the whites are still being brutalised. One farmer was decapitated last week. It’s still happening and the whites really have nowhere to go. Some go to South Africa or Australia but the older people, like my parents, who set everything up so that we would be fine, lost everything. I’m talking about a doctor and an engineer here. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter No, they didn’t. Everyone thought it would be okay. Basically there is a feeling amongst the older generation that Rhodesia was sold down the river by Britain. We were a British colony and when Ian Smith made the declaration of independence from Britain they could have stepped in and it might all have been okay. Smith goes into it in his book, The Great Betrayal . Rhodesia was very advanced in terms of farming and crops. There is another book by C.G.Tracy called All For Nothing , though I think it should be subtitled ‘Pig Farming in Southern Rhodesia’ as it’s quite technical about all the country’s farming prowess and he quotes Kipling on Ulster 1912, though it applies equally to Zimbabwe: The dark eleventh hour draws on and sees us sold to every evil power we fought against of old – rebellion, rapine, hate, oppression, wrong and greed are loosed to rule our fate by England’s art and deed."