(In his own words)

I was born in a small village outside an asbestos mining town in southern Zimbabwe. Our local mountain was discovered to be on a pile of iron ore and when I saw it being shred to small bits, I wrote a poetry anthology entitled ‘Red Hills of Home’ in its memory.

I came from a family of story-tellers and artists (sculptors of wood and ivory). After qualifying as a High School teacher, I taught at a country high school. When the war of liberation arrived, I saw much suffering (particularly those who did not have guns). Through the bloodshed, I began to record my experiences in poetry. The poems were my way of recording the experiences of war and the vulnerability of the villagers who sacrificed all they had to feed the fighters for Zimbabwe’s liberation. At that early stage in my teaching career, I wrote and published several poems in anthologies. The biggest of these was the publication of my own anthology entitled, ‘Up in Arms’ in 1982.

I left teaching to become a literary and magazine editor of a Catholic publishing house. A few years later, I was elected Chairperson of the Zimbabwe Writers Union and was involved in establishing the famous Zimbabwe International Book Fair-serving as one of its board members. When political interference came, I resigned. Books should not be managed by governments.

In 1988, I won the Zimbabwe Literary Award for my novel, BONES, a novel about the missing people during the war of liberation as seen through the eyes of a simple village woman whose son does not return after the war. The following year I won the Noma Award for BONES. The Noma prize is sponsored by the Japanese publisher, Shoichi Noma (Kodansha Publishers) which awards the best book of the year published in the African continent. As a newly established prize-winning author and educator, I used the national and public platform to champion the cause of education for all the children of my country.

I organized writers to campaign for the rights of children to have decent educations and health services. In 1990, I, along with other colleagues, founded the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (Zimrights). Our purpose was to ensure that the citizens of Zimbabwe knew their rights as stated in the national constitution. We organized many workshops in the whole country to make politicians accountable to the citizens of their country. My main thrust was to have Human Rights as a subject in the education system from primary school to university. That did not go down very well with politicians, and my conflict with them continues even now.

While my writing has been censored in my native land, international newspapers have given me open columns to write on topics pertaining to subjects of my choosing. These popular columns led to the publication of two books of my journalism and cultural essays: SHEEBEN TALES, 1989 and PALAVER FINISH, 2002.

In my novels and poetry, I have tried to be a voice that names the issues which I think are at the heart of human dignity.

Creative Writing and Teaching

In all my work I view society as the place, the water well from which the writer drinks the juices of inspiration, asking questions, naming things in a different way, but at the same time telling stories of the beauty and ugliness of human beings.

I am a writer who believes that creativity is in everyone, only that it is suppressed as we grow up to be ‘forced’ into non-creative lives. This is the basic principle when I work with young writers. I believe it gives them the confidence in themselves to write, even if it means writing badly.

I am a strong believer in writing as communication: with oneself, and in the process of discovering the self, one discovers the ‘other’. A person who has not discovered him\herself cannot try to discover ‘others’ around them. Of the 20 students of my creative writing class at the University of Zimbabwe (1991 -1994), five of them have become prominent writers of national reputation in Zimbabwe.

Over the years, I have also written for radio, television, the stage and culture in order to interrogate the usual questions: what is culture? What is identity? What is individuality? What is society? What is hope? What is human despair? What is suffering and how do different individuals cope with it and survive to dream again for the future?

For me, literature has always been the search for the meaning of things, the capacity to doubt everything, even the structure of art and the novel itself.

When I teach literature, I always try to ensure the students understand that literature, every novel, every poem, a piece of theatre, is a search for the core of meaning of human life. I persuade students to relate to the work in their own way as individuals who are also members of society in its many shapes.

I have travelled my whole country and the world, participating in national and international literary events, winning prizes in the process but at the same time continuing to hold on to my beliefs in the power of literature to change human perspectives. At times the writer has also to contend with the fragility of the written word, literature, the human voice submerged by other forces.

The Writer, Politics and Social Justice

With the public space I’ve received from a national and world-wide audience (my books are translated into most European languages), I have involved myself in matters of social justice. In my country, I helped with the establishment of the Zimbabwe Book Development Council. Our policy was ‘a book per citizen a year.’ I believe by giving people the access to a minimum of a book a year that those readers can begin the search for social justice, human dignity and the interconnectedness of life. That kind of development has to do mainly with developing the mind, the heart and the human spirit.

In my quest for those objectives, I went into fights with politicians, business people and others who seem to tell the citizens they have found all answers to life’s problems. I have always fought for the rights of people to find ‘truths’, not ‘the truth’ since I believe life has a diversity of truths which only help to enrich the human being if explored genuinely. Politics determines our lives to a large extent but it is one among many of life’s conversations, a multi-facetted dialogue which cannot yield a single answer. I have always tried to put these issues on our national agenda, sometimes with dire consequences.

I left my country at the end of 2001 after the Head of State introduced violence as a political tool into our politics. For three years I was in France but when the French government was trying to befriend the Zimbabwean president, they asked me to find another country. The Norwegians accepted me to come and continue my work from there.

As a writer for over 30 years, I have come to accept that the life of a writer has its own risks, especially if that writer insists on some inherent truths about social justice and freedom. I left my country after many attempts on my life: death threats, fabricated car accidents and slander by the government newspapers. I do not regret it at all.

With my broad experience as a teacher, editor\publisher, human rights activist, writer, playwright and columnist, I believe I can share my insights with others around the world, especially young people. To be able to share my hope and vision for a better world is a journey I am constantly on.

My quest for social justice will always be the guiding light of my literary work-both as an artist and a citizen of my country and the world. Write beautifully, I always say to myself, about the ugliness and beauty of your lands.

Download Chenjerai Hove's Curriculum Vitae (PDF 132kb)