Quote by Dambudzo Marechera: “I am the doppelganger whom, if you meet, you must either kill or be killed.”

Marechera saw himself as an uncomfortable double — a person who reflected back to colonial and postcolonial society the violence and contradictions it preferred not to see. There is no safe, neutral encounter with the truth; it either forces change in you or destroys the person brave enough to speak it.

Marechera published The House of Hunger in 1978 as Zimbabwe — then Rhodesia — was in the final years of its liberation war against the white minority government of Ian Smith. His explosive, rebellious writing embodied the psychological rupture of a generation raised under racist colonial rule and reaching for freedom.

Zimbabwean writer whose debut short story collection The House of Hunger (1978) won the Guardian Fiction Prize and announced one of the most distinctive voices in African literature. He lived as a nomad in Oxford and London, sleeping rough and writing ferociously, and died in Harare at thirty-five. His work refuses all comfort and convention.