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him a police informer, but Alexio refuses and is harassed constantly. His only way to continue his education is to travel to
England. This plan fails because once again, he is accused of being a communist while applying for a passport. Alexio is beat up and asked again if he wants to become a police informer. A black police officer grants Alexio some time to consider the offer, and it is here that Alexio escapes detention in order to become a guerrilla fighter.
129:, the country's capital) to live with his cousin who works as a servant for a white family. Alexio then becomes a farmer in Jena's village and is given the opportunity to be sent to school. Being successful in his studies, at age 12 he travels back to Salisbury to attend Goromonzi Secondary School, funded partially by an official of the African Party, which evidently is opposed to Rhodesia's minority rule.
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his father's death, Alexio's mother is obligated to marry her husband's eldest brother. She hesitates, and consequently is beaten and banished from her village, unable to see her son. Most of the novel focuses on Alexio's life journey and education. He experiences hardships not only from white people, but a large part due to his own family.
199:, in 1984, and performed at the University of Zimbabwe to celebrate the opening of the university's drama program. It was published by "University Playscripts", with a foreword by Stephen Chifunyise, a high-ranking civil servant at the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture, who praised the play for its "uniquely Zimbabwean dramatic idiom".
169:, as Katiyo's first published novel, could have done with better editing to avoid spelling and grammatical errors. But Katiyo, she said, is a "born storyteller" and the narrative is continuously interesting. Katiyo knows his materials well but still writes in a "detached and objective" way, and the novel (referred to as a
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In
Salisbury he has two white teachers, Paul and Sarah Davies, who came to Rhodesia as volunteers, and this, plus the association with the African Party, gets Alexio in trouble with the police. They attempt to charge him with being a political activist and a communist, but fail. They then try to make
182:
Scholar Robert
Muponde commented on the novel's male main character and his "son of the soil" ideology, which is grounded in resistance against the colonial oppressor: in this and other novels the "male raconteur" is a story-teller who relates stories related to colonial oppression to younger men.
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Alexio comes from a well respected family. His grandfather was known in society for being a "medicine man" as well as a medium who communicates with ancestral spirits. His grandfather had three wives and seventeen children, one being his father who died shortly after Alexio's birth. As a result of
97:, the "self-governing" minority-ruled state that preceded independent Zimbabwe. The novel is a close representation of real events Katiyo faced growing up as a black Rhodesian ruled by a white society.
109:, was run by a white-minority government that repressed its African majority. The main character, Alexio, resembles Katiyo, in that he also runs into trouble with the
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and their move toward independence, but simultaneously expresses the hope for a better future, as an independent country after being
113:, the security force of the white Rhodesian government; like Katityo, he escapes Zimbabwe and, by way of Zambia, ends up in England.
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When Katiyo wrote the novel, he was studying in
England, in exile as a political activist, while his country, then called
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This, according to
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586:"Mental Colonisation or Catharsis? Theatre, Democracy and Cultural Struggle from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe"
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Alexio spends his earliest years in Makosa, an ancestral village, but then moves to
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depicts the racism prevalent during the oppression of the people of
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Govind Narain Sharma, summarizing and critiquing the novel for
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The
Politics of Translating Sound Motifs in African Fiction
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Brigitte Angays-Katiyo translated the book into French, as
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545:"Theatre for Development in Zimbabwe: An Urban Project"
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499:McLaren, Robert Mshengu (1992).
454:Research in African Literatures
371:Culture and Customs of Zimbabwe
631:. John Benjamins. p. 73.
288:Sharma, Govind Narain (1980).
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543:Kavanagh, R. Mshengu (1990).
16:1976 novel by Wilson Katiyo
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584:Kaarsholm, Preben (1990).
368:Owomoyela, Oyekan (2002).
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