Wilson Katiyo (1947-2003)

Wilson Katiyo’s life was marked by returns. The Zimbabwean writer died of cancer last year far from the troubled country of his birth – but not before visiting Zimbabwe one last time to say his farewell. Decades earlier, as a young man in colonial Rhodesia harassed by the police for his involvement in political activities, Katiyo had left the country with the help of expatriate friends. He returned after independence, only to leave again in the late 1980s. His fiction – the novels A Son of the Soil (1976) and its sequel Going to Heaven (1979) – also tells of an interrupted series of circlings. The novels’ hero Alexio journeys from country to city and back, and is finally forced to leave his homeland altogether. He dreams of a return but the narrative leaves him in England (the ‘‘heaven’’ of the second novel’s title), suspended between the inside and the outside, the present and the future, home and the west. Katiyo could hardly have anticipated the manifold resonance his story would have with many Zimbabwean lives today. Wilson Katiyo was born in Mutoko on 19 February 1947 and attended Fletcher High School in Gweru. In 1965 – the year Ian Smith’s government unilaterally declared Rhodesia’s independence from Britain – he left Rhodesia for Europe. He lived first in England (where he studied chemistry at London University’s Queen Mary College), and then in France and Switzerland. After independence, he returned to Zimbabwe and had a variety of temporary jobs, including working as an industrial chemist and as a producer in the Ministry of Information’s film unit. He became the first post-independence editor ofMoto magazine and worked as assistant director on Chris Austin’s 1983 film The House of Hunger.