British colony and first writings
One suspects that a country with sixteen national languages (recognized by the 2013 Constitution) has not remained silent, and one also knows the importance of oral tradition on the African continent. However, Zimbabwe seems to have generated fewer collections of stories, travelogues or testimonies than some other African countries, with the notable exception of the writings of the Anglican missionary Arthur Shearly Cripps (1869-1952), who came into conflict with the British South Africa Company, siding with the natives who adopted him by giving him a Shona name, "Mpandi", meaning "he who walks like thunder". In addition to his poetry(Titaia and Other Poems in 1900, The Black Christ in 1902, Lyra evangelistica in 1909) and his novels(The Brooding Earth in 1911, Bay-Tree Country in 1913, A Martyr's Heir in 1915), he published in 1927 the essay An Africa for Africans: A Plea on Behalf of Territorial Segregation Areas and Their Freedom in a Southern African Colony, which left no doubt as to his deepest convictions. However, these precursory texts confirm that the emergence of Zimbabwean literature must be seen as coinciding with the twentieth century, and that one of the pioneers was of English origin, although this does not detract from her commitment to anti-apartheid politics, nor from her great talent, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. In fact, Doris Lessing was born in Iran in 1919, but when she was only six years old, her parents moved to Southern Rhodesia to live on a farm, much to the displeasure of her mother, who no doubt dreamed of a more luxurious lifestyle. Their daughter attended Catholic school until she was 13, left the family home two years later to become a nanny, and continued her education through her employer who introduced her to politics and sociology. At the age of 18 she married, at 24 she divorced, leaving the custody of her two children to their father. After a second marriage, equally fleeting, and a new pregnancy, Doris Lessing left Southern Rhodesia for London in 1949, taking her youngest son with her. This freedom - rare for the time - will be endorsed by her freedom of thought: alternately communist and feminist, she will also become an activist, both against nuclear weapons and racism, which will earn her - the information will be made public in 2015 - no less than twenty years of constant surveillance by the British intelligence services. Her literary career is like her: precocious, abundant (more than fifty novels!), committed. As a teenager, she sold short stories to magazines, then branched out into the long form and published her first novel in 1950: The Grass Is Singing, available from J'ai lu under the title Vaincue par la brousse. In it, she paints an uncompromising portrait of colonial Rhodesia in the 1940s: a white woman is killed by her black servant, whom she continually harassed. After this first part of her career, which was primarily political, Doris Lessing turned to psychological novels, the jewel in the crown of which was The Golden Notebook, which portrayed a young novelist suffering from writer's block. Finally, from the 1970s onwards, influenced by Sufism, which now inspires her, she turns to science fiction, more precisely to dystopia, with the Canopus cycle in Argo, published in French by the beautiful publisher La Volte. She died at the honorable age of 94 in London.
Early Zimbabwean Writers
While Doris Lessing built her work on the European continent, her African counterparts and contemporaries also began to publish during the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. Among them was Lawrence Vambe (1917-2017), a journalist and anti-colonial activist, who wrote two essays: A Sick People: Zimbabwe Before and After Rhodes (1972) and From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe (1976). Alongside him, the prolix Ndabaningi Sithole was one of the founding members of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), for which he was imprisoned from 1964 to 1974, a decade during which his writings were smuggled out of the jail where he was locked up. As an archivist of independence, history - present and past - was his main source of inspiration, both in his essays(African Nationalism) and in his novels, such as The Polygamist, Obed Mutezo, and above all Ama Ndebele ka Mzilikaki, published in the Ndebele language in the United States (Longmans, Green & Co.) in 1956, and reprinted by the Rhodesian Literature Office the following year under the title Umvukela wama Ndebele. In it, he evoked the 1896 revolt of the Ndebele ethnic group, to which he was related by his mother.
Stanlake JWT Samkange (1922-1988) was just as prolific and committed. He was initially involved in the creation of Nyatsime College, the first school providing education for blacks, which opened in 1962. However, his disillusionment with the possibility of equality between peoples made him change direction and he turned to journalism, moved to Indiana, and began to write historical novels there as well, such as On Trial for My Country (1966), which describes the conquest of Rhodesia by Europeans. In this text - which was censored - he imagined that Cecil Rhodes (the British governor to whom the colony owed its name) and Lobengula (king of the Ndebele) had to account to their ancestors, the former having to show that he had been fair and honest, the latter having to explain why he had lost his land. Finally, literature in Shona took off thanks to Salomon Mutswairo who, in 1957, wrote Feso, the first novel in this language in which he used the codes of the oral tradition, song and narration. This work, which was political although it took place before colonization, was banned three years after its publication. Also in 1957, Bernard Chidzero gave a reading of Nzvengamutsvairo, also in Shona, a novel about the condition of workers in the Rhodesian farms.
Independence and post-colonization
From the independence of self-proclaimed Rhodesia in 1965 by Ian Smith's white government to the independent Zimbabwe of 1980, without underestimating the difficult years of post-decolonization, the second half of the twentieth century was a delicate one, but it produced new generations of writers who no longer hesitated to draw on different languages while continuing to be inspired by the fight for freedom, these include Edmund Zivanai Chipamaunga, Zimbabwe's first ambassador to the United States from 1982 to 1985, in A Fighter for Freedom (1983), Chains of Freedom (1998), Feeding Freedom (2000) and New Roots (2018), and Wilson Katiyo (1947-2003), who follows the fate of a boy who is a victim of segregation and is then exiled to England in A Son of the Soil (1976), followed by Going to Heaven in 1979.
If some authors are still of European origin - at least Alexander McCall Smith, born in Bulawayo in 1948 and living in Scotland since 1984, who has had incredible success with his detective series - the majority are of African origin and are now making their voices heard on a global scale. One of the first that we are lucky enough to discover in French is Charles Mungoshi (1947-2019) with Et ainsi passent les jours translated from Shona, published by L'Harmattan. This title is only a modest overview of his protean work, which he also wrote in English and for which he won the Noma Awards in 1992 as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize twice (1988 and 1998). The works of his contemporaries will remain more difficult to access, whether it be the poetry of Samuel Chimsoro(Smoke and Flames in 1978, Dama Rekutanga in 1990), the books, notably for children, of Barbara Makhalisa (from Qilindini in 1974 to Giya Giya in 1990), musaemura Bonas Zimunya's short stories(Nightshift in 1993) or those of Stanley Nyamfukudza (collections Aftermaths and If God Was a Woman), who nevertheless marked Zimbabwean intellectual life with The Non-Believer's Journey (1980), which again dealt with the struggle against colonialism. Finally, we should mention those who have used the stage to carry their poetry, such as Freedom Nyamubaya, who died in 2015, who toured several festivals in Africa and on other continents, where she performed in militant and feminist performances.
A new generation, very feminine
Nevertheless, things are changing, partly because the writers' style has become stronger, giving their stories a universal scope that is recognized by foreign publishers, and partly because the situation in Zimbabwe has evolved: some authors (not to say writers) were born after the Mugabe era and have a different view of the past than their elders. Taking the measure of the richness of Zimbabwean literature is thus facilitated by the number of translations in constant increase. It will thus be possible to relive the colonization and then the struggle for independence with Soleil noir (in digital version by Vents d'ailleurs) by Dambudzo Marechera, and especially with the very strong novels by Chenjerai Hove (1956-2015) published by Actes Sud: Ossuary, Shadows and Ancestors. The voice of women and women's issues are also heard, thanks to Tsitsi Dangarembga(À fleur de peau, École des Loisirs), Nozipo Maraire(Souviens-toi, Zenzele, published by Albin Michel) and especially Yvonne Vera (1964-2005), two of whose five novels are in the Fayard catalog: Papillon brûle and Les Vierges de pierre. They make no secret of the dramas that littered the road to freedom taken by her fellow citizens. Another important voice is that of Alexandra Fuller, born in 1969 in England but raised in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe: her autobiographical Larmes de pierre (Le Livre de Poche), in which she does not hide her mother's alcoholism or her father's racism, nor the violence of the wars that tore the African continent apart, received the Winifred Holtby Prize and was hailed by the New York Times. Finally, the next generation of writers is already assured by Petina Gappah(Le Livre de Memory, Livre de Poche, Hors des ténèbres, une lumière éclatante, Lattès), NoViolet Bulawayo, who evokes the diaspora in Il nous faut de nouveaux noms (Gallimard), and Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, born in 1988, who, in her first novel, La Maison en pierre (Actes Sud, 2022), examines recent history.
