Early Influences: How I Started Writing
I knew I wanted to be a writer after I read Aaron Chiundura Moyo. I was in Grade 6 at Mototi Primary School, in Mazvihwa. That's also the time I visited Harare for the first time. In Harare I had seen one of Chiundura Moyo's plays being acted on TV (the first time I was seeing that magic box)and when I returned to Mazvihwa after the school holidays, I had so much to tell my classmates. I had learned a bit of Zezuru, a version of Shona kids in Mazvihwa reverred, so I began to volunteer to read in class all the time, at first to show that I could read in Zezuru, but also to be in touch with stories since I always remembered them best after reading them to the class. Then government introduced intershool drama and traditional dance competitions for all rural schools. I was in the drama club, and the stories we acted were by A C Moyo. By the time I started Grade 7, I had written my own novel, Sara Nepurezha.
It all began this way.
"I want to challenge you," I said to Motion, my friend.
"In what? Karate?" (Our Grade 6 teacher, an ex-combatant, had taught us karate, so during break times all you saw were kids going "Hu-ha! Hu-ha!" and nearly hurting each other).
"Let's write novels."
"English or Karanga?"
"Shona."
He was hesitant at first, but then he figured if he could beat me in karate, he would also beat me in novel writing.
Mine was entitled Sara Nepurezha, a story of a young man who, against the advice of his aging parents, goes to Harare to look for work. The parents could not afford to send him to Form 3, so he had stayed at home, wasting his youth, and then he rebelled, refusing to heed their suggestions about how he could acquire a small field to farm, get married and become a fisherman like most Mazvihwa young men. But no, he wanted to go to Harare ,where Enock, someone from the same village, worked.
In Harare he got a job at Willowvale Motor Industries, where he started off serving tea, then his boss trained him to drive the folklift. In a year he had been promoted to folklift driver, and was making what he considered to be a lot of money. Then came the women, one after another.Any woman, mostly from the bars. He would befriend one for a week, then ask her to marry him, and they would be married for a month or two, and he would move on to the next one. He did not return home, ignored letters from his parents, did not go back to bury his father, ignored his mother's calls for him to come and participate in the kurova guva (commemoration of his father's burial), and so on. In his head he has become a rich man, and rich men did what they wanted, didn't have to follow the ways of the village.
Nine years into his stay in Harare he met the woman he really wanted to marry. She wanted to meet his mother, otherwise there would be no marriage to talk about.
"Alright then, I will travel first to go prepare my mother for the big day. I might even bring her back with me to meet you."
"Alright!"
She helped him shop for the mother (shoes, dresses, make-up, you name it). He geot on the bus to Mazvihwa. arrived after a whole day of travelling. He did not recognize the home at first because it was all ruins, except one small hut, with a damaged roof. How could anyone live in this place? But his mother was inside the hut, dying. He arrived just on time to hear her say, "Sara nepurezha". The novel ended there, with the last sentence" "Akasara akaigukuchira", which says something to the effect of "Indeed, he remained to live his life of extravagance". I remember I was avoiding a predictable ending, wanted to show that it was possible to not follow the ways of your parents, to rebel and even succeed in doing so.
I showed the novel to my Grade 7 teacher, the store-owner VaNduna, whose son, my friend Enock, had been featured as one the characters. He read it in an hour, brought it to class and read it to the whole class. From that point on, I was unstoppable. I shelved Sara Nepurezha ( I didn't know about publishing then, but some one should have told me something). The most important thing for me then was to write, worry about printing (which is what I thought publishing was) later.
The next novel was entitled Dikondo Yauya, which was about this post-war dances that spread in Mazvihwa after Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980. There was just a great sense of euphoria, with youths re-enacting scenes of the war (I had my own wooden gun), organizing all night liberation war dances. But more things than dance happened at those night-long gatherings. Girls began to get pregnant, real fights ensued, etc.
By the time I wrote Dhikondo, I had gained the reputation of "writer" at school, so as I worked on a chapter, I knew a group of school mates was waiting for it. We sat under a huge Muunga tree on the school grounds and I read the chapters to them. This satisfied me and ecnouraged me to keep on writing. The next book was Nzara MaMazvihwa, which was about the drought of 1982. This was the first time we had had such a drought, which killed our livestock and dried Runde and Gwen'ombe rivers. Even donkeys died that year (usually donkeys would survive in droughts since they ate tree bark and roots). In the novel I detail the ways the village used to survive, like switching to a fruit and root-based diets, eating some wild plant that grew on the bed of Runde river for vegetables (I would eat it with sadza if I were to find it!), but the most interesting survival activity we engaged was kungunjira , which features prominently in the novel because it brought a lot of fun. Kungunjira was a process of catching fish with bare hands. Since the water flow in the river had stopped, fish hid in the small, muddy pools that still existed in rocky parts of the river where there were caves. Even the usually-invincible Chimhiti dam almost dried up, and its fish bore into its muddy floor. The crocodiles disappeared altogether. Don't even think we saw a single hippo in Runde that year.
Groups of children went to the muddy pools and water caves and searched for fish in the mud. The helpless, but electrifying wriggles of a fish when you caught it in the mud was always a sign of success. We caught a lot of fish that way, and those who were very good at kungunjira started making money selling the fish to the teachers.
My novel detailed these struggles, including the other subplots of boys who got girls because of their special fish catching skills, for example, Mako, who always caught the biggest catfish and brims. Andrew, who caught frogs, got a girl too, for some weird reason, but that's what made my listeners laugh to tears when I read the chapters to them. The novel ends with the arrival of food aid, the first time Mazvihwa ever ate yellow corn sadza. That year, the Runde river authorities in Gweru (and Zvishavane) opened the reservoirs (dams up there) and let much of the water escape down the river. The novel ends with the whole village of Mototi going to the river to swim.
My friend Motion never really took up the challenge of the novel-writing, and the challenge was soon forgotten about as the spotlight was on me. But I am always thankful that we even had that challenge because that's when my writing truly began. Believing that I was a writer would determine how well I would do in secondary school, the type of subjects I would study at A-Level (In fact the belief that I was a writer would enable me to even discover that there was A-Level since most kids in Mototi school, if you they were good and had the money, ended with Form 4 at the Uppertop). No, I had to go to A-Level at Dadaya, where through the very good recommendation of a teacher who had once taught there, I got the promise of admission even before the O-Level results were out. There was something about a boy from Mototi wanting to study A-Level that impressed the Principal. But by the time the results came out, I had already settled in Harare with my big brother, already having approached schools like Lord Malvern, Mabvuku, and Highfield.
I was admitted to High Field High, where for two years a friend of mine would tolerate me reading Sara Nepurezha, Dhikondo, and Nzara kwaMazvihwa during break times. When he finally said, "I think you should focus on just sending these to the Literature Bureau", I knew reading time was over....
It all began this way.
"I want to challenge you," I said to Motion, my friend.
"In what? Karate?" (Our Grade 6 teacher, an ex-combatant, had taught us karate, so during break times all you saw were kids going "Hu-ha! Hu-ha!" and nearly hurting each other).
"Let's write novels."
"English or Karanga?"
"Shona."
He was hesitant at first, but then he figured if he could beat me in karate, he would also beat me in novel writing.
Mine was entitled Sara Nepurezha, a story of a young man who, against the advice of his aging parents, goes to Harare to look for work. The parents could not afford to send him to Form 3, so he had stayed at home, wasting his youth, and then he rebelled, refusing to heed their suggestions about how he could acquire a small field to farm, get married and become a fisherman like most Mazvihwa young men. But no, he wanted to go to Harare ,where Enock, someone from the same village, worked.
In Harare he got a job at Willowvale Motor Industries, where he started off serving tea, then his boss trained him to drive the folklift. In a year he had been promoted to folklift driver, and was making what he considered to be a lot of money. Then came the women, one after another.Any woman, mostly from the bars. He would befriend one for a week, then ask her to marry him, and they would be married for a month or two, and he would move on to the next one. He did not return home, ignored letters from his parents, did not go back to bury his father, ignored his mother's calls for him to come and participate in the kurova guva (commemoration of his father's burial), and so on. In his head he has become a rich man, and rich men did what they wanted, didn't have to follow the ways of the village.
Nine years into his stay in Harare he met the woman he really wanted to marry. She wanted to meet his mother, otherwise there would be no marriage to talk about.
"Alright then, I will travel first to go prepare my mother for the big day. I might even bring her back with me to meet you."
"Alright!"
She helped him shop for the mother (shoes, dresses, make-up, you name it). He geot on the bus to Mazvihwa. arrived after a whole day of travelling. He did not recognize the home at first because it was all ruins, except one small hut, with a damaged roof. How could anyone live in this place? But his mother was inside the hut, dying. He arrived just on time to hear her say, "Sara nepurezha". The novel ended there, with the last sentence" "Akasara akaigukuchira", which says something to the effect of "Indeed, he remained to live his life of extravagance". I remember I was avoiding a predictable ending, wanted to show that it was possible to not follow the ways of your parents, to rebel and even succeed in doing so.
I showed the novel to my Grade 7 teacher, the store-owner VaNduna, whose son, my friend Enock, had been featured as one the characters. He read it in an hour, brought it to class and read it to the whole class. From that point on, I was unstoppable. I shelved Sara Nepurezha ( I didn't know about publishing then, but some one should have told me something). The most important thing for me then was to write, worry about printing (which is what I thought publishing was) later.
The next novel was entitled Dikondo Yauya, which was about this post-war dances that spread in Mazvihwa after Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980. There was just a great sense of euphoria, with youths re-enacting scenes of the war (I had my own wooden gun), organizing all night liberation war dances. But more things than dance happened at those night-long gatherings. Girls began to get pregnant, real fights ensued, etc.
By the time I wrote Dhikondo, I had gained the reputation of "writer" at school, so as I worked on a chapter, I knew a group of school mates was waiting for it. We sat under a huge Muunga tree on the school grounds and I read the chapters to them. This satisfied me and ecnouraged me to keep on writing. The next book was Nzara MaMazvihwa, which was about the drought of 1982. This was the first time we had had such a drought, which killed our livestock and dried Runde and Gwen'ombe rivers. Even donkeys died that year (usually donkeys would survive in droughts since they ate tree bark and roots). In the novel I detail the ways the village used to survive, like switching to a fruit and root-based diets, eating some wild plant that grew on the bed of Runde river for vegetables (I would eat it with sadza if I were to find it!), but the most interesting survival activity we engaged was kungunjira , which features prominently in the novel because it brought a lot of fun. Kungunjira was a process of catching fish with bare hands. Since the water flow in the river had stopped, fish hid in the small, muddy pools that still existed in rocky parts of the river where there were caves. Even the usually-invincible Chimhiti dam almost dried up, and its fish bore into its muddy floor. The crocodiles disappeared altogether. Don't even think we saw a single hippo in Runde that year.
Groups of children went to the muddy pools and water caves and searched for fish in the mud. The helpless, but electrifying wriggles of a fish when you caught it in the mud was always a sign of success. We caught a lot of fish that way, and those who were very good at kungunjira started making money selling the fish to the teachers.
My novel detailed these struggles, including the other subplots of boys who got girls because of their special fish catching skills, for example, Mako, who always caught the biggest catfish and brims. Andrew, who caught frogs, got a girl too, for some weird reason, but that's what made my listeners laugh to tears when I read the chapters to them. The novel ends with the arrival of food aid, the first time Mazvihwa ever ate yellow corn sadza. That year, the Runde river authorities in Gweru (and Zvishavane) opened the reservoirs (dams up there) and let much of the water escape down the river. The novel ends with the whole village of Mototi going to the river to swim.
My friend Motion never really took up the challenge of the novel-writing, and the challenge was soon forgotten about as the spotlight was on me. But I am always thankful that we even had that challenge because that's when my writing truly began. Believing that I was a writer would determine how well I would do in secondary school, the type of subjects I would study at A-Level (In fact the belief that I was a writer would enable me to even discover that there was A-Level since most kids in Mototi school, if you they were good and had the money, ended with Form 4 at the Uppertop). No, I had to go to A-Level at Dadaya, where through the very good recommendation of a teacher who had once taught there, I got the promise of admission even before the O-Level results were out. There was something about a boy from Mototi wanting to study A-Level that impressed the Principal. But by the time the results came out, I had already settled in Harare with my big brother, already having approached schools like Lord Malvern, Mabvuku, and Highfield.
I was admitted to High Field High, where for two years a friend of mine would tolerate me reading Sara Nepurezha, Dhikondo, and Nzara kwaMazvihwa during break times. When he finally said, "I think you should focus on just sending these to the Literature Bureau", I knew reading time was over....
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