Oxford University remembers Marechera

The symposium, titled Dambudzo Marechera: a Celebration, starts tomorrow and ends on Sunday, May 17. It was in Oxford that Marechera’s writing first materialised, after his expulsion from the University in 1976.
The list of guest speakers at the conference reads like the who’s-who of Zimbabwean literature, theatre and art: Raisedon Baya, Nhamo Mhiripiri, Flora Veit-Wild, Memory Chirere and Samm Farai Monro, better known as Comrade Fatso will all take to the stage to celebrate Marechera.
Other big names expected at the symposium include James Curry, who was editor of the Heinemann’s African Writers Series from 1967 to 1984.
“He got the rapid support of Henry Chakava in Heinemann to accept the manuscript of (Marechera’s) House of Hunger. He gave a copy to Doris Lessing, which resulted in the book becoming a joint winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize,” say the organisers of the Celebration on their website, marecheracelebration.org.
The symposium will also showcase paintings by Fisani Nkomo and Victor Mavedzenge; photography by Ernst Schade and music by Pascal Makonese among other media and art forms.
“There can be no more suitable time than now to celebrate the work of Marechera, whose scathing views of the moral corruption of the African post-colony have been grimly borne out in Zimbabwe,” say the organisers.
Marechera was a poet and author whose enduring works include The House of Hunger, Scrapiron Blues and Cemetery of Mind.

To survive, Zimbabwean literature will have to . . . “…compete with anything published in New York, in London, in Paris, in Tokyo, and so on. This means bringing up what has already been achieved to the stage where there will no longer be any need to talk about ‘Zimbabwean literature’ or even about ‘African writing’, where literature will simply be international. – Marechera, in May 1986, three months before his death (as quoted on
marecheracelebration.org)