Short stories
Aftermaths
Stanley Nyamfukudza · 1983
Synopsis
Short stories about the early years of independent Zimbabwe, attentive to what the war and its aftermath do to minds as well as bodies. One follows a man who returns to the country after years spent abroad; another, a man and a woman who, armed with a pickaxe, a shovel and an axe, clear a thick forest on their own in the hope of winning a little land, without knowing whether their stubbornness still makes sense.
Context
The collection appeared in 1983 in Harare from College Press, seventy-eight pages, in a series of modern Zimbabwean writers. It comes three years after its author's war book and follows on from it, on the side of what independence leaves to the characters once the celebration is over. The stories, very brief, are written in a language that is simple but painstaking in its descriptions, almost pictorial; a second collection followed in 1991.
Who it is for
In English, fewer than eighty pages. The stories are short and assume familiarity with the climate of the first years of independence.
Prizes and reception
Memory Chirere makes it the third founding moment of the English-language Zimbabwean short story, after Mungoshi in 1972 and Marechera in 1978.
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