ABSTRACT
Dambudzo Marechera, one of the most controversial and irreverent writers that Zimbabwe has ever had, was born in 1952 in Vengere township, near Rusape, into a troubled family. When he was eleven, his father was killed in a car accident, leaving the family without sufficient means of support. Soon evicted, along with his mother and his eight siblings, he struggled to survive in the harsh world of the ghetto. He ran in gangs, got his meals out of garbage cans, and suffered the abuse of white schoolboys. These early experiences in the ghetto established the ground for his subsequent fiction.
