ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 discusses two texts portraying migration from Zimbabwe to the United Kingdom. The protagonist of Brian Chikwava’s highly successful Harare North (2009) seeks asylumn in London, Tendai Huchu’s second novel The Maestro, the Magistrate, and the Mathematician (2014) follows three Zimbabwean men into exile in Edinburgh. This chapter argues that these texts investigate Zimbabwe and its ideological topographies through Britain. Both texts show that the fiction of the Third Chimurenga itself is mobile: it can travel with the characters into exile to colonise the topographies of Northern cities such as Edinburgh and London. In this peculiar take on transnational movement and global modernity, the ‘frantic stasis’ motif and its related idea of being stuck in movement reveals itself: In each novel, the protagonists travel far, but find themselves wandering through the political and ideological landscapes of home. This chapter also shows that these texts cannot be read in a nationally circumscribed manner. They do not only respond to Zimbabwean realities and literary traditions but also speak to a longer tradition of Black British migrant writing and enter a complex intertextual dialogue with precursors of this tradition, including Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
