Novel
Crossroads
Spencer Tizora · 1985
Synopsis
In the late seventies, as guerrilla pressure on white Rhodesia grows, several lives that had been built without the war are caught up in it. Priscilla, wife of David Moyo, an agnostic swept along by events, has to smuggle medicines to the fighters; David, a teacher, gives up his profession and his marriage to join the struggle; Nwabu Zhou, a trainee teacher, lover, fighter, writer and visionary, crosses their path; Betty, a white woman, tries to understand the other side.
Context
The novel appeared in 1985 in Gweru from Mambo Press, two hundred pages, in the same year as another war novel from the same house, with which academic critics immediately compared it: this one hardly shows the fighting, it follows what the war does to ordinary lives. The narrative continues after 1980, when international aid money pours in and one of the characters, who has entered the state security apparatus, wonders what becomes of the aspirations of the black majority.
Who it is for
In English, two hundred pages. The narrative holds several threads at once, love, madness, prison, commitment, and gives no answer to any of the questions it raises.
Prizes and reception
The university journal Zambezia praised in 1987 a sensitive novel that raises real questions but tries to embrace too much.
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