Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987). Zimbabwe.

Marechera was born in 1952 in Vengere Township, Southern Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe). The family called him "Tambudzai," meaning "the one who brings trouble" (Veit-Wild, 1996:181).* His father died when he was thirteen years old, leaving the family destitute. Because of his intelligence and academic talent, he received scholarships to continue his education. Fiercely independent and brilliant, he had difficulties with the educational system throughout his academic career. He enrolled at the University of Rhodesia in 1972, but was expelled in 1973 as a result of his involvement with a student protest movement. Unlike many other suspended participants, Marechera was unrepentant about his role in the demonstrations. Despite his rather poor grades and iconoclastic behavior, his professors at the university admired his brilliance, and recommended him highly for a scholarship to Oxford. He enrolled in the New College in 1974, but was forced to withdraw because of his anti-social behavior.

While at Oxford, he wrote his first book of short stories, The House of Hunger. Somewhat reminiscent of Joyce's Dubliners, the stories deal with psychological and social alienation. Marechera's work is not material typically associated with "African" literature. His stories are psychologically, rather than politically, motivated as his depictions of living in exile and outsiderhood show. The House of Hunger received the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. While giving his acceptance speech, Marechera expressed his dislike of attaching prefixes such as "Irish" and "African" to the term "author".

His second book, Black Sunlight, is more typically "Joycean." It is unstructured, with characters who do not function in the standard plot-driven way, and surrealist, even less "African" than its predecessor. The publisher feared that it would not sell because it was not identifiably written by an African author. It probably would not have been published were it not for the critical success of his first book.

In 1982, Marechera returned to Zimbabwe after eight years in exile. His stay in Britain had been filled with poverty and several charges for petty crimes. In Zimbabwe, he continued his chaotic and self-destructive lifestyle, publishing only one more book, Mindblast, in 1984. He died in 1987. (KJ)

Selected references

N.B. Veit-Wild's 1996 "Dambudzo Marechera" entry in DLB (below) contains a good critical bibliography, and notes that the National Archives of Zimbabwe has a comprehensive set of Marechera papers and manuscripts.

An articulate anger : Dambudzo Marechera: 1952-87. Marechera, Dambudzo, et al. Sydney, Australia: Dangaroo Press, 1988.

The black insider. Veit-Wild, Flora (ed.). Harare: Baobab Books, 1990; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992; Trenton, NJ; London: Africa World; Turnaround, 1999.

Black sunlight. Marechera, Dambudzo. London: Heinemann, 1980.

Cemetery of mind: collected poems of Dambudzo Marechera. Veit-Wild, Flora (ed.).  Harare, Zimbabwe: Baobab Books, 1992; Trenton, NJ; London: Africa World; Turnaround, 1999.

Dambudzo Marechera, 4 June 1952-18 August 1987: Pictures, poems, prose, tributes. Veit-Wild, Flora and Ernst Schade (eds.). Harare: Baobab Books, 1988.

Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work. Veit-Wild, Flora. New York: Hans Zell, 1992.

"Dambudzo Marechera" Veit-Wild, Flora. pp. 181-191 In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 157: Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers. Lindfors, Bernth and Reinhard Sander (eds.). Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1996.

Emerging Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera. Chennels, A. J. and F. Veit-Wild (eds.). Africa World Press 1998, ISBN 086543644.

House of hunger: a novella & short stories. Marechera, Dambudzo. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

House of hunger: short stories. Marechera, Dambudzo. Harare, Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe Pub. House, 1982, 1978; London: Heinemann Educational, 1993.

Mindblast, or, The definitive buddy. Marechera, Dambudzo. Harare: College Press, 1984.

Scrapiron blues. Veit-Wild, Flora (ed.). Harare: Baobab, 1994; Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999.

*Note from a reader on the name Tambudzai:
"I had a chance to read the overview about Marechera and felt that there was one thing that need to be corrected. The name Tambudzayi does not mean one who brings trouble but one who is dogged by them or who is always at the receiving end. To suggest that it means one who brings trouble is only to take the name in retrospect after his character. It is a Manyika name, one of the Shona dialects, and it is derived from the verb root -tambudz- from where we have nouns like dambudzo meaning problems and not trouble."

--Leonard Makombe