Irene Staunton gives her working life as her response. �For me, fiction is more important than history. Some truths can only be told through fiction. We can never understand wars, conflicts, love, and how things go wrong without fiction. We can never get inside the complexities and understand how small mistakes can turn into terrible issues. The best history of Zimbabwe�s liberation war has been told through fiction, told as complex and compelling story, as seen from all sides with no one perspective.�

A buzz was going around Harare in January. Tsitsi Dangarembga wrote one splendid debut novel, Nervous Conditions, then declared she was abandoning fiction for film. Now the rumours said she was writing again. Nervous Conditions led the girl Tamba from village life into a mission school education, a great fracturing of culture that had sadly damaged the lives of her cousins. Tamba�s duty was to use her education, her reading, to render that fracturing whole again within herself. The mending is both the mending of a writer, and the mending that can be affected by a writer. Final words of the book declare, �Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story.�

�Tsitsi Dangarembga has a very supportive husband,� the writer Virginia Phiri told me. It�s not necessarily the norm in Zimbabwe. �Men don�t want women to have more about them. One woman writer�s husband used her manuscript for his roll-ups and smoked it.�

Phiri has a supportive husband of her own. She paid for publication of her novel Desperate herself. The book was an act of homage to the sex workers who had sheltered her during her own fighting days in the liberation war. Without their protection and food she would have died. The book is filled with the fictionalised tales of these women. It shows the circumstances that led the women to prostitution, the sad run of disaster, abandonment and oppression that led them to make �desperate� choices, while it also has the strength to go off-message and explore the women�s sexuality. Writers teaching in Bulawayo have installed the book on the curriculum for trainee teachers, inspired by its daring and the power of its telling. �Are you still African?� people have asked of Phiri, as though crossing social boundaries meant leaving your nationhood behind. �Africa is an oral culture,� she explains in response. �The orality of things is selective�we choose what we talk about. Self-censorship in an author is very serious. I don�t intend to annoy anyone. When most writers stop self-censoring we will bring out what we want to say.�

Fountain pen in hand, the writer Charles Mungoshi recently spent a month as �writer in residence� at Irene Staunton�s Weaver Press. Painstakingly the words and the sentences built up into an exquisite story of five pages, �Chizuva�, in the collection of stories by new and established writers, Writing Now. Mungoshi�s novel Waiting for the Rain should have had the Nobel prize Committee sitting to attention when it came out in 1975, when Mungoshi was just 27. In that novel the boy Lucifer has won an art scholarship which will take him from his Zimbabwean village to city life in England. The novel is the tale of Lucifer�s departure.

Lucifer has an older brother, the itinerant musician and drummer Garabha. Garabha holds dear what Lucifer despises, cares for his family and honours his traditions, yet his father disowns him in favour of the younger, departing Lucifer. The book does speak of a new world order coming to destroy and devalue the old, yet beyond that it tells the value of art.

While Lucifer�s departure is trumpeted, Garabha leaves the village in secret, because he knows he will cry, unable �to stop the foreboding feeling that his brother is chasing the wind�. As he walks away, his grandfather hears a song leave with him, fading into the bush. �It is only later that he realizes that the song and the tune are not any of the old war chants. It must be something that the boy has made up himself, he concludes. Made up with the unerring ear of the old musicians. With a heart that can make such poetry, the Old Man feels, the boy is Home, the house is in order. But the boy doesn�t know it yet. He is still searching. Good for him. It means he will find what he is looking for � he isn�t far away now.�

The book is taut with family conflict, with character, with tenderness and longing, with issues drawn from primal social conflict and change. Yet quietly, it is a work of art in praise of the artist. Not the artist Lucifer who manufactured a style to appeal to others, but the truth of Garabha who tells essential tales with his drum. ��And he says he hasn�t got a thing to give anybody�the foolishness of youth.� The Old Man chuckles to himself and attacks his work with renewed zest.�

�A young writer came up to me and said �I loved your Waiting for the Rain��, the novelist Shimmer Chinodya told me. �I say go away and don�t come back till you know what books I�ve written.�

His first novel, Dew in the Morning, was written when he was eighteen. �I grew up in the countryside in the 60s and 70s. That first book is about the land question, Smith shunting blacks into bad areas. The land question was before Zanu PF � this country�s steeped in land issues. Do you wait 50 years to start on the land situation, or do you just start and then fix the problems as you go? Why was the war fought? What does the average Zimbabwean have? Go into the rural areas and you meet real poverty�no trees or schools or clinics and the rivers are silted. It is the writer�s obligation to write about what is happening. How do you say it intelligently, convincingly and creatively? We need intelligence. Do that extra something to rise above the common voice.�

Shimmer Chinodya and I were meeting over beers in a Harare caf�. His new novel Chairman of Fools was the city�s must-read book. An earlier novel, Farai�s Girls, was frankly autobiographical. Farai reappears in this book, a writer in Harare seeking to repair his fractured life. Bipolar disorder results in a breakdown, seeing Farai elected �Chairman of Fools� among the inmates of an asylum. Both in the breakdown of a writer�s life, and its painful and gradual reassembly, the book is a powerful primer for anyone seeking insights into Zimbabwe�s writing life in.

Chinodya waves his hands in the air in mock confession to the autobiographical nature of this work. �Four or five other colleagues have gone through the same experience of bipolar disorder. In Zimbabwe there is the added pressure of fending for one�s family. In the eyes of the public writers are up against lawyers and accountants. That pressure can destroy us. Most people are young and go-getters � the question is, how do you paddle your own canoe?�

An award took him on a writer�s residency to Italy, another aspect of his life fictionalised as a feature of this new novel. �When I went to Italy I took my book in my head with me. I wrote Chairman of Fools there in five weeks. It was a convenience. But I must think my book out here and talk to people. Things change so quickly in Zimbabwe you can�t stay out too long. Four to six years is not right.

�Some people still ask, �When are you going to get a proper job?� I�ve written forty-nine books � [seven literary the other text books.] Language text books � I used to be ashamed of them but I�m not any more. I�m very, very proud of what I do in Zimbabwe. I write creative books that are exciting and interesting for children. Writing is a profession. We take ourselves damn seriously.�

Chinodya�s classic novel is Harvest of Thorns, written in self-imposed exile as an MA thesis at Iowa. �In the US all writers were minimalists. I learnt to clip my style, to be more precise and simple.� The novel �was about thirty to forty years of Zimbabwean life. One third of Benjamin in that book is me. His school and urban life is my life. What happens to a 13 or 14-year-old when he�s thrown into the thick of war while pubescing? What does it do to his relationships? It�s a psychological examination of war on young people. War is inevitable in most Zimbabwean writing. It�s so much a part of our psyche.

�African writing is good for the English language. It is totally African though Anglophone. Language is a way of life and expression and identity. At school we spelled very well, though we mispronounced the words. My writing is an act of revenge � all that grammar they shoved down my throat, I�m going to use it and create something totally hybrid. It is well written but the voice must shock you. My use of English must show the complexity of the African thought processes. Most books haven�t tackled the complexity of the African mind. Ultimately that�s why my books all sound so different. I�m searching for the complexity of options and choices and values. I�m trying to salvage the African mind from decades of abuse and misconception.

�I�m a funny mix. I look confident. All serious writers are not sure of themselves. Writing is a process of self discovery. You can�t sit down and write a book and know what you�re doing. Afterwards you can say �I didn�t know that much about myself�. Writing is modesty.

�There is so much resilience here. Perhaps that�s not been acknowledged. A West African country might have had ten coups by now. We are maybe too tolerant. The western press is deliberate in their viciousness. You need to live here to know what is happening. The foreign press exaggerates the situation in Zimbabwe. Read The Standard for an example of a free newspaper. They have wicked cartoons of Mugabe for example. Some papers have been shut down but nobody has been killed or locked up. Writers haven�t been subtle enough to challenge the government. We have to challenge the system in a very subtle way, not just offer the clich�s the west expects to hear.

�I write about the psychology of being a writer � being a writer in Zimbabwe. I�m a colonial victim. They forced me to speak in English. I talked, dreamt, laughed in English, went to the toilet in English. I�m not good enough in Shona. English is enriching. I draw from two cultures. I draw from my Shona experience and educated English.

�Family ritual is the other side of the African mind. Going to church on a Sunday morning and a jazz show in the afternoon. In the west it�s each man for himself. Africanness is not necessarily material. It�s a sense of family, of some values, of spiritualism. If I took you to an African wedding or a kitchen party you would know what I mean. It�s the paying of Lobola, the bride price. Some things have to be done properly. Maybe we are losing things with TV, video, DVDs etc. Things must change, but if we lose our Africanness we lose ourselves. We must be able to compromise.�

Ignatius Mabasa is at the forefront of writing in Shona, the majority language of Zimbabwe. His novel Mapenzi was voted one of the top seventy-five Zimbabwean books of the century. A current project is to translate Dangarembga�s Nervous Conditions into Shona. He sees three tiers of writers in the country. �The first generation of writers were products of colonial education. Mostly teachers or priests, their writing was didactic, delivering a moral message. The next generation started by glorifying the revolutionary war, and moved on to questioning it and their own identity. Zimbabwe has a new generation of writers, the �born frees�, who did not experience the war. Born in the city they do not have that transition from country to city to deal with. There is a hunger to hear them, but there is a drought in publishing. Publishers bring out either no books, or one or two novels a year. Manuscripts are returned unread. The born-frees are not being heard.�

But they are writing. Born-frees and their elders brought a fresh demand to my workshops in Harare and Bulawayo. They wanted to learn how to lead their own workshops, to carry the vigour and freedom of artistic expression into community groups and schools. What is writing? It�s something you can spin out of your private world then dare to share. It�s letting yourself be vulnerable when it makes much more practical sense to shield yourself. It�s daring to imagine your way into the whole spectrum of being human. A workshop exercise brought group poems out of Harare and Bulawayo, students writing individual lines then gathering to select, discard and arrange them till they had poems that spoke some sort of joint truth. Here are two of their poems.

What is writing in Harare?

It is the assurance

something is

going on in my head,

engrossing, captivating

- revisiting my mind

It takes me many places,

Makes me many people

- expressing thoughts, experiences.

It ties everything together,

like dreaming

And what does writing mean in Bulawayo?

It is an exploration of my nakedness

Livening and beautifying my being

Cleansing my emotions

A therapy that brings healing

It is a weapon, sharp and incisive

Challenging taboos and boundaries

A deep well of teachings, thoughts and activities

A fulfilling experience.