In Zimbabwe, Literature Is Protest

A New Generation of Authors Are Giving Voice to the Post-Mugabe Reality

In November 2017, when a military coup removed Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s head of state after 37 years of rule, euphoria gripped the whole country. Many saw it as an end to “the house of hunger”—the title of a widely read 1978 novel by Dambudzo Marechera that described the people’s suffering under tyranny.

Poet Philani A. Nyoni captured the excitement vividly in a stanza of a poem he composed on the day Mugabe stepped down:

The poem appears in his book Philtrum, which candidly expresses the bitterness that gripped the country during …