Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira-At the Bookstore
Chinua Achebe once made a declaration that has become almost proverbial among African writers when he said, “We in Africa did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans.”
The statement is both an indictment of colonial arrogance and a reminder of the depth of African cultural consciousness.
Achebe’s reasoning is that the African imagination has always been alive, its rituals intact, its moral codes functional, and its stories resonant long before Europe entered the frame.
For as long as humanity has sat around fires, under trees, and in communal gatherings, the artist in Africa; whether in the form of the griot, the sculptor, the poet, or the praise singer, has carried the weight of memory.
In the words of Chinweizu and his fellow critics in “Toward the Decolonisation of African Literature” (1985), the African artist is “the custodian of the mores and values of his people.” He is not an ornament, nor an entertainer detached from life, but a cultural sentinel who teaches, corrects, and reminds.
And yet, somewhere along the historical passage, a rift was introduced: a monstrous barricade that sought to separate the African from his roots. The colonial encounter staged a battle of gods, the European Christian God against the African ancestral spirits.
Alongside conquest came language loss, cultural dilution, and the denigration of indigenous epistemologies. For, when language, the vessel of a people’s soul, is disrupted, then the archive of collective memory collapses.
It is this backdrop that gives urgency to the works of writers like Crymio Kutyauripo, Obvious Dziwanyika and Oscar Gwiriri.
To read Kutyauripo’s novels is to encounter not only narrative skill but also an act of reclamation, a refusal to allow language and memory to perish. His writing is, in every sense, a reaffirmation that African stories must be told in African tongues.
In his insistence on writing in Gikuyu, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o has argued that language is not a mere tool of communication but a carrier of culture, history, and identity. To write in one’s language is to preserve a people’s worldview, and let them speak to themselves without translation.
Conversely, to lose language is to lose sight of the metaphors, idioms, and worldviews that give life meaning.
Kutyauripo’s contribution is firmly rooted in this recognition. His debut, “Museve Usingapotse” (2014), already signalled his commitment to Shona as a literary language. It was prescribed an Ordinary Level set text, ensuring that young readers engage with their history and culture in the language that birthed them.
His follow-up, “Nhaka Yeropa” (2016), not only consolidates that commitment but also expands the scope of the Shona historical novel.
Notably, Zimbabwe has a proud tradition of the historical novel. From Solomon Mutsvairo’s “Feso” (1956), which inaugurated Shona literature in print, through Stanlake Samkange’s “On Trial for My Country” (1966) and Bernard Chidzero’s “Nzvengamutsvairo” (1957), to Patrick Chakaipa and Giles Kuimba, the genre has always been a site of cultural and political interrogation.
Kutyauripo takes up this mantle, but he does so with fresh urgency. His novel does not merely reconstruct a past for its own sake. Instead, it stages the past as a mirror of contemporary anxieties.
The succession disputes in “Nhaka Yeropa”, the brutality of political machinations, the frailty of love under patriarchal constraint — all speak directly to the struggles of modern Africa.
In this sense, Kutyauripo is not simply a novelist but an inheritor of a role ascribed to the African artist: to be society’s conscience and its archivist.
The novel is set in ancient Dande, where King Nyatsimba must anoint a successor among his six sons. Tradition dictates that the ancestors, through the oracle Old Munhengawezizi, have the final say. But the King’s own preferences, fuelled by love for his second wife Togarasei’s sons, lead him to subvert protocol.
What follows is a spiral of deceit, manipulation, witchcraft, and bloodshed.
The favoured son, Tadzeushe, is falsely anointed by a compromised oracle, but the ancestors intervene with terrifying force. Death stalks the royal household, and power politics unleashes animosity, betrayal, and carnage.
The brilliance of Kutyauripo’s narrative is not in its events alone but in its layering. Through deft use of plot fracturing, satire, suspense, and symbolism, he shows how the lust for power erodes kinship, corrodes morality, and unleashes violence.
The title itself, “Nhaka Yeropa” (A Bloody Inheritance), is both literal and metaphorical, capturing the tragic costs of power built on deceit.
Yet, amid the brutality, Kutyauripo carves out spaces for tenderness. Mwoyoweshumba, the King’s first-born son, is in love with Wadzanai, a commoner’s daughter. Against royal tradition, he refuses to let status dictate his heart. Similarly, Matinyanya, daughter of Chief Chikonamombe, publicly rejects a forced marriage to Mwoyoweshumba, declaring her love for a servant’s son instead.
These subplots are more than romantic diversions as they are acts of resistance. They remind us that love, in its raw honesty, can destabilise the rigidities of power and tradition.
In a society torn apart by blood and ambition, love emerges as the one unconquerable force, echoing Shakespeare’s timeless assertion: “Love is blind.”
Through these love stories, Kutyauripo injects humour, surprise, and humanity into a narrative otherwise steeped in darkness. He affirms that even in the harshest climates of power politics, human beings yearn for connection, tenderness, and joy.
No reading of “Nhaka Yeropa” is complete without attention to its spiritual dimensions. The ancestors are not abstract forces here. They are active agents who refuse to be sidelined. When the oracle is corrupted, the spirits intervene, exposing deceit and restoring order, even at the cost of human lives.
Kutyauripo depicts the supernatural not as superstition but as integral to the African worldview. In his narrative, the ancestors embody justice, truth, and continuity. Their presence asserts the African conviction that the living, the unborn, and the dead are bound together in a continuum of being. To ignore them is to court disaster.
This dramatisation of ancestral authority is itself a cultural statement. At a time when colonial legacies and modernity often deride indigenous spirituality, Kutyauripo re-centres it as a legitimate force in African life.
Kutyauripo’s achievement is not only thematic. It is linguistic as well. His Shona prose is rich with idiomatic turns, proverbial wisdom, and a rhythm that cannot be replicated in translation. The cadences of ritual, the humour of satire, the gravitas of ancestral pronouncements, all gain force because they are articulated in Shona.
This is precisely why indigenous-language literature matters. A proverb that pierces the heart in Shona may appear flat in English. A humorous exchange, loaded with cultural tones, may wither when transplanted. Writing in Shona, Kutyauripo ensures that his readers encounter the story in its full cultural and aesthetic resonance.
What does all this mean for the role of the writer in society?
Kutyauripo, like Achebe and Ngugi before him, insists that literature is not escapism. It is society talking to itself. Through allegory, metaphor, and storytelling, it interrogates the choices of leaders, the follies of ambition, and the resilience of ordinary people.
Hence, “Nhaka Yeropa” becomes a mirror through which bloody succession disputes of Dande reflect contemporary contests for power across Africa. The manipulation of tradition resonates with known political realities. Yet, the possibility of love, truth, and ancestral justice offers hope.
The novel, thus, fulfils the ancient function of storytelling: to entertain, to teach, and to heal.
Kutyauripo’s “Nhaka Yeropa” is an intervention, calling on us to remember that history lives in language; that memory is carried in stories; and that the artist’s role is to keep society tethered to its essence.
In reanimating the historical novel, Kutyauripo contributes immensely to Zimbabwean literature. He bridges the fireside storytelling of our ancestors with the printed page of the modern novel. He asserts that Shona is not a parochial medium but a global one, capable of carrying the weight of philosophy, politics, romance, and tragedy.
For readers who take literature seriously, “Nhaka Yeropa” is not optional. It is essential. It is a thrilling, evocative, and culturally resonant narrative that enriches the archive of Zimbabwean letters while reaffirming the artist’s vocation as custodian of language, memory, and truth.
In Kutyauripo’s hands, the historical novel is reborn — urgent, relevant, and deeply African.
