Novel
A Son of the Soil
Wilson Katiyo · 1976
Synopsis
Alexio Shonga is born in Makosa, his ancestors' village, the grandson of a healer who communicated with the spirits. His father dies shortly after his birth; ordered to marry the dead man's elder brother, his mother hesitates, is beaten and driven out, and the child grows up far from her. He leaves for Salisbury to stay with a cousin, a servant in a white family, works in the fields, then, a good pupil, enters the high school at Goromonzi. His teachers, two white volunteers, and his ties with an African party draw the political police to him, who want to make him an informer.
Context
The novel appeared in London in 1976 from Rex Collings, a hundred and forty-seven pages, written in exile by a man who had left Rhodesia eleven years earlier. Partly autobiographical, it lends its hero the author's troubles with the political police, and belongs to the genre of the novel of apprenticeship. A sequel appeared in 1979, which takes the same character to England; a third book, left unfinished at the author's death, tells of the disillusion of independence.
Who it is for
In English, about one hundred and fifty pages. The narrative follows a childhood and adolescence and assumes familiarity with segregation-era Rhodesia.
Prizes and reception
Reviewed in 1980 by Govind Narain Sharma, who saw in it the work of a born storyteller; Albert Gérard, on the contrary, denied it any imagination.
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