Zimbabwean literature in English has a short history, only having started in the 70's with the writings of Charles Mungoshi and a few other writers. The literature started in war time, when the country was still under white minority rule, which meant that the writers had to exercise a degree of self-censorship in order not to get in trouble. So this early literature was mainly rooted in moralism and the troubles of domesticity. Some, especially that written in Shona and Ndebele, the dominant indegenous languages of the country, was state-controlled, since it was channeled through what was then the Rhodesia Literature Bureau. So the overal effect of the literature was that it was not a threat to the government.

Then came Dambudzo Marechera, a Zimbabwean writer who was based in England, who published his ground-breaking novella House of Hunger, which was a sting on the government of the day, as well as an advance indictment of the upcoming Zimbabwean majority government. It was his writing, in its avant-gardist nature, which introduced defiance and non-conformity to Zimbabwean literature, but for much of the early eighties, immediately after Zimbabwe got its independence, Marechera did not have many followers; in fact, many African readers dismissed him as irrelevant to issues African. To them ,he was not African enough in his writing, so he was not frequently mentioned in matters of African literature on the continent.

Then came the late eighties and all of the nineties, when Marechera had died, and Zimbabwe was...