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Born Tambudzai Charles William Marechera on June 4, 1952, in Rusape in the then Southern Rhodesia to Isaac Marechera a mortuary attendant and Masvotwa Venenzia Marechera a maid, Dambudzo Marechera remains Zimbabwe’s most important cultural product on the creative writing front.

The third of nine children, his original birth name, “Tambudzai,” meant “the ones who is to be troubled”. Trouble, however, came to the family in other forms. When Dambudzo was 13, his father was struck by a car and killed, plunging the entire household into poverty.

The first book Marechera ever owned was a children’s encyclopaedia from the Victorian era that he had discovered on the township garbage dump. The family was evicted and lived in a squatter settlements for a time. Such traumas caused Marechera to develop a stutter, which made him the target of schoolyard taunts. Marechera grew up amid racial discrimination, poverty, and violence. He attended St. Augustine’s Mission, Penhalonga, where he clashed with his teachers over the colonial teaching syllabus.

From 1965 on, Rhodesia was under an official state of emergency, and violence was common as indigenous Zimbabweans battled the racist white government to gain some measure of political representation. The troubled atmosphere brought further unease to Marechera’s life.

Though he was a solid student, Dambudzo began to suffer from hallucinations and a marked paranoia. He wrote about this time in “The House of Hunger”, particularly about the two worlds that his two languages, Shona and English, represented. “I was being severed from my own voice. English is my second language, Shona my first.

When I talked it was in the form of an interminable argument, one side of which was always expressed in English and the other side always in Shona. At the same time I would be aware of myself as something indistinct but separate from both cultures.”

In 1972 Marechera won a scholarship to the University of Rhodesia, but he was expelled the following year for taking part in campus protests against the Rhodesian government. His professors then recommended him for a scholarship at Oxford University in England, and Marechera began at New College in 1974. His time in England was troubled, for he drank heavily and was often disruptive on campus.

An American summer school at New College even threatened to pull out of Oxford because of his behaviour, and a scholarship program for African students was cancelled altogether because of him. He was finally ejected in March of 1976, after he set a fire on college property; there was no real damage, but he was given the choice of voluntary psychiatric treatment or expulsion, and chose the latter.

He later wrote about being an African in Britain in a work published posthumously, “The Black Insider”, recalling a visit to the Africa Centre in London: “I looked around, at the bar where a few blacks in national costume were standing, at the dining tables where the smart black faces were eating impeccably African food recommended by the Guardian, and at the side seats where little groups of black and white faces sat talking and drinking in an unmistakably non-racial way.

‘’Here then was the womb into which one could retreat to nibble at the warm fluids of an Africa that would never be anything other than artificial. A test-tube Africa in a brave new world of Bob Marley anguish, Motown soul, reggae disco cool, and the added incentive of reconceiving oneself in a friendly womb.” After his expulsion from Oxford, Marechera hitchhiked to London, and claimed to have lived in a riverside tent there while he wrote “The House of Hunger”, a novella and some short stories.

With a theme that questioned what had happened to his generation (that of the first politically conscious, educated Africans) the book caused a literary stir and won several impressive reviews when it was published by the esteemed Heinemann publishing house in 1978.

Some of Marechera’s works appeared in the years following his death are “Cemetery of Mind” (1992) a collection of 140 poems and an interview with him conducted by Veit-Wild and “Scrapiron Blues” a collection of drama, short stories, children’s stories, novella, novel fragment, and poem edited by Veit-Wild, Baobab Books (Harare, Zimbabwe), 1994. — Agencies.