Musaemura Bonas Zimunya

Literary Arts

Zimunya was born on 14 November 1949 in Mutare. In 1973 he was expelled from the University of Rhodesia and went into exile in the United Kingdom where he studied at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Hand attained a Bachelor’s degree in 1978 and a Master’s degree in 1979. His Master’s dissertation was later published as Those Years of Drought and Hunger: The Birth of African Fiction in English in Zimbabwe.

In 1980, he returned to newly independent Zimbabwe were took a University of Zimbabwe position as a professor of English. In 1992 he received a Fulbright scholarship to the Pratt Institute in New York and in in 1999 he joined Virginia Tech in the USA as Director of Black Studies.

Zimunya began publishing poems when he was still at school. He broke into print gradually in the 1970s in periodicals like Two-Tone and Chirimo. Later, he appeared more emphatically in group anthologies like including Kizito Muchemwa’s Zimbabwean Poetry in English in 1978 and Gwenyambira in 1979.

In 1981 he co-edited with Mudereri Khadani, And Now the Poets Speak. His first collection Thought Tracks was published in 1982 the same year he produced Kingfisher, Jikinya, and other poems.

In 1985 he published Country Dawns and City Lights. Zimunya co-authored and edited Chakarira Chindunduma in 1985 while in 1987 he co-authored Samora! These were followed by Birthright (1989), The Fate of Vultures (1989), Perfect Poise (1994), Selected Poems of Zimunya which was published in the Serbian language, and English in 1995 as a collection that contained both the lyricism of his earlier work and the cynical perspective of the critic.

In 1993 Zimunya published his only collection of short stories, Nightshift. The prolific writer has been a subject of many academic articles including like Veit-Wild’s Patterns of Poetry (1988) and Teachers, Preachers and Non-Believers (1992), and many journal articles.

Musaemura Zimunya is undoubtedly one of Zimbabwe’s leading poets as he is the most anthologized of all poets. He writes poetry both in English and the Shona languages and is also a prominent scholar of Zimbabwean literature. His poems over the decades reflect on the physical beauty of his country, his people’s struggles against settler-occupation and racism, the meaning of African myths and traditions, and the meaning of freedom to the individual.

Zimunya is highly regarded as a pioneer in the development of modern African poetry with his work being read at universities across the globe. Zimunya has played an instrumental role, administratively with the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF), Zimbabwe Writers Union (ZIWU) and Zimbabwe Writers Association (ZIWA).— NACZ,