I’m - a budding yet prolific poet among my peers - a novelist and journalist who is now best known for my vivid portrayal of the contemporary ‘third world’ Zimbabwe in my debut novel, Naked.
My passionate, imaginative, seemingly simple yet intellectually complex art is reminiscent of the unadulterated African lifestyle of the Shona people in Zimbabwe. I use coyness and mock modesty to address anomalies within the complexity of the race – my race – of which I’m so proud ‘and that which I love I chastise.’
Born in Mt Darwin on 16 November 1979, I began my primary education in 1986 at Dandamera Primary School in Concession. I attended four more primary schools, before reaching high school, during which time I experienced more than I comprehended.
I attended forms 1 to 6 at Oriel Boys’ High School where my mind and experiences fell prey to an indisputably well read English Literature teacher who had an unquenchable desire for intellectual supremacy. I Nigel, his ‘guinea pig’, innocently went through the process of intellectual revolution without conceiving any suspicion of its irreversibility.
My parents held my penmanship in sufficiently high esteem to send me to the Christian College of Southern Africa (CCOSA) from which I emerged, in 2001, with a diploma in communication and journalism. During the two years I spent in college I developed the hobby of writing and reading poems to my classmates.
I later decided to gather all the poems together - and came up with a manuscript that I entitled; ‘yet you love them’ and other poems.’ I lost this, my one and only manuscript, to a prominent writer whom I had asked to peruse the document pending its despatch to a publishing house.
In frustration I gave up poetry and seasoned my mind to concentrating on my journalism profession and, in January 2002, joined a Bulawayo based newspaper, The Chronicle, where I worked as a junior court reporter. In 2003 I joined the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, where I was employed as a scriptwriter and researcher.
While I was at ZBC I experienced deep pangs of poetic nostalgia but frustration would supersede the intransigent passion that had, some time ago, earned me nothing but repentance. However, art is not a job it is a calling - I eventually gave in to the passion but this time I would try prose.
Within a fortnight I completed a novel that I entitled ‘An apology for the life of Sean Quincy.’ I thought about my work and found it an incomplete history so I started writing another novel that I entitled ‘Trapped.’ Later I joined the two books and the work became ‘Naked.’
My first book, naked, was tailored for the reader to discover the common intent of meaning. This I deliberately fashioned without expressions of personal purpose and I’m at liberty with my conscience to dearly pardon oneself and apologize to others if such is therein occasioned. However a common secret I wish to divulge that one's life is bedrock upon which all expressions and impressions are derived. Single or several of them may be disapproved, disaccorded or even discarded by the reader but the fact remains that art is a journey in self discovery and discovery of the world. Today, the stories that I write are pieces of historical fiction that I suppose most part of people will delight to read rather for assortment of matter, and for profit of profile than precision of figures and meticulousness of dates and numbers. They are sincere compositions and substances of my responsibility to myself, and the reading society, above all they are mirror images of my unalloyed commitment to art.