I think being absolutely honest about Zimbabwe’s actual history is what makes it possible to show the complexities of Zimbabwean identity. If anything, I am writing against the nationalists’ myth of an uncomplicated nation—a nation whose people are encouraged to think about and discuss difference in the simplest of terms (black versus white, ethnic group A versus ethnic group B, etc.). But in order for this [mythological thinking] to happen, history—actual history—has to be misrepresented, mistaught, or simplified. Because history—actual history—never results in anything that simple. History—actual history—is extremely messy and complicated and often brutal, violent, and ugly. History—actual history—is about change, change that is the result of contact and encounter … and there is power at play in every contact, … in every encounter. But that is exactly what we inherit: this messy, messy, knotty thing. So our desire to simplify it makes sense but does not lead to honesty. I do not particularly relish having to agree with Hegel on anything, but I do agree with his dialectic; once A encounters B the result is something new and different—it is change. In my work, I am trying to be honest about the changes that have happened throughout the country’s history and how these changes have impacted, and in some cases even created, particular “Zimbabwean” identities.

I was not surprised, no. At the time I published The Theory of Flight, I had only read one novel that focused on the experiences of coloured Zimbabweans: Paul Hotz’s Muzukuru. That novel really helped illuminate for me some of the experiences that coloureds in then-Rhodesia had during the war.

I have recently read Violette Kee-Tui’s wonderful Mulberry Dreams, which presents us with the social lives of coloured Zimbabweans. I am sure there are other books—or, rather, I hope that there are—which highlight different aspects of the coloured experience in the country. Zimbabwe sorely and desperately needs a diversity of voices and representation in its literature.

I think there is so much silence about mixed-race or coloured people because to talk about mixed-race or coloured people would be to talk about the many messy things in our actual history. We would have to talk not only about the colonial encounter and the violence it visited upon the black body—though actually, this is something that we have been taught not to have a problem discussing because it falls neatly into the oppressor versus oppressed category—but also talk specifically about the violence visited upon the black female body.

The difficult thing here is that we also have to make room for love. Not all encounters were violent—there are love letters in the archives that tell this story, letters confiscated by a colonial system afraid of losing face and eager to hide certain truths. But the idea of love is complicated here as well. If the white man exists in a system in which he has all the power, is it love or coercion? How much choice and agency can a black woman be seen to have under the circumstances?

All these complexities tend to silence the tongue, but I think what silences it even more is the treatment that mixed-race or coloured people had to face. In the early days of the [colonial] encounter, you could actually have racially mixed families, but that did not last long—settler colonialism and its very binary understanding of the world and its peoples could not let it. Families were torn apart. White fathers [were] made to not be directly responsible for their offspring by anti-miscegenation and racist laws; black mothers were made to bear the brunt of both colonial and traditional patriarchies’ very narrow and myopic sexist ideas about unwed mothers; and mixed-race children were forced to exist in a liminal space, never quite being either or.

All this led to a deep sense of shame—and shame often leads to silence and silencing. For a while there, Southern Rhodesian coloureds preferred to have Cape Coloured roots (whether real, imagined or manufactured). But while Cape Coloureds had definitely come with the settlers (working as drivers, porters, etc.), they were not the sole root of Southern Rhodesia’s coloured population.

And because nothing stays the same, there was a time when settler colonialism realized it could use the coloured community to create something of a middleman, and to this end focused on educating coloured children to act as such—even if educating them meant forcibly removing them from the only homes and families they had ever known. Again, families were torn apart. As a result, in segregationist Southern Rhodesia, four races were created—white, coloured, Asian, and black—and a racial hierarchy was established. Within this hierarchy, relations between the “races” were erased, so when independence was attained in 1980, it became easier and more expedient for those who now had power—the blacks—to be silent about that relationship as well. Silence is evidently preferable to acknowledging the messy, messy, knotty history we have inherited.

As the above shows, whites, blacks, and coloureds themselves have played a part in creating the different silences about the coloured and mixed-race experience in the country.

After the war, when my family returned to the newly independent Zimbabwe, we settled on a beautiful smallholding on the outskirts of the city of Bulawayo, called Rangemore. It had been, under Rhodesia’s segregationist laws, a coloured zone. We were one of the first black families to move in and it was in this community that I spent my formative years.

I lived in Rangemore but attended a school in the city: Coghlan Primary School. I would board the bus from the city to Rangemore at City Hall. And at the bus terminus at City Hall, there was a former Rhodesian Forces soldier who wore his military fatigues and was christened Jesus by the denizens of the city.

All of this is to say: I did not rely on research to construct Vida/Jesus; I relied heavily on memory.

Yes, you are right; scholarship on coloured Zimbabweans is scanty at best, and while the works of Mandaza and Muzondidya are seminal, there definitely needs to be new scholarship.

I have appreciated coming across personal and social histories—a particular favorite autobiography is The Other: Without Fear, Favour or Prejudice by Judge Chris N. Greenland and Palmira R. Greenland, but that too is now more than ten years old.

I think it is the fate of most ethnic minorities to be used as pawns in the game of politics. I think when it is convenient, as it was at a certain point during the colonial era, then coloured people are seen and counted, and when it is not convenient, as it has been for most of the postcolonial moment, then coloured people are not seen or counted—that is, made to matter politically. They are treated as expendable entities, which makes their position in society extremely precarious.

In the novel, Vida enjoys his moment of fame and is politically recognized, because The Man Himself [the president of the unnamed country] wants to be seen as cosmopolitan, open-minded, anti-racial, etc. But when that image is no longer the one that will give him the most political capital, he eschews it and Vida along with it.

You cannot establish a narrative in which one race is inherently superior to another and then allow the races to mix—that would be antithetical and reveal the very lie at the heart of the narrative you have created. Now, of course, as I have already mentioned in an earlier answer, the races mixed. But all things are never equal, and the “acceptable” mix was the one between a white man and a black woman. So while there were anti-miscegenation laws, the black female body was rendered oversexed and, therefore, unrapeable and always already dangerous. This meant that whatever white men did to black female bodies, they were never held accountable.

The same could not be said of black men where the white female body was concerned. The white female body, especially in the colonies, was written or seen as pure and virtuous—the complete opposite of the colonized female body. To keep that virtue intact, there were fears of Black Peril and Yellow Peril. And whereas the white man could get away scot-free for violating a black female body, the same could most certainly not be said about the black man violating the white female body.

So in the novel, when Beatrice Beit-Beauford, a white female, decides to have a relationship with a black man, she is doing so much more than sleeping with the enemy. She is attacking the very foundation that upholds the narrative of settler colonialism—and therein lies her real danger.

You’ve got to love Marechera! I absolutely agree with him, although I am sure that my Lutheran upbringing would make me express myself very differently. Yes, it was definitely my intention to portray my characters as complex human beings. My experience of human beings is that they are incredibly self-contradictory, complicated, complex, and prone to conflict; my experience of fictional characters is that they are incredibly self-contradictory, complicated, complex, and prone to conflict. There are so many different things that make up who we are—some of them are good and some of them are bad. As a writer, I think it is always important to remember, as Dave Mason once sang, “There ain’t no good guys, there ain’t no bad guys. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.”

I am not sure. I guess the irony is that I wrote 90 percent of the novel while I was living in the diaspora. Perhaps nostalgia and distance gave me 20/20 vision.