House of Stone

House of Stone is a book by Novuyo Tshuma first published 2018 in Great Britain by Atlantic Books.

House Of Stone might be a work of fiction but it’s premise is based on real events from the history of Zimbabwe; the struggle for independence and the mostly untold, unwritten, unspoken and barely confessed about Gukurahundi Massacre……

The main character Zamani, is a young man, an orphan with a desperate need for a family of his own, a father and mother to call him son, and to chronicle the history of his surrogate parents in an attempt to recreate himself with a new past.

As he finds out the past from his surrogate family you get a glimpse of what might have been experienced during the Zimbabwean struggle for independence, the falling out of comrades in arms in the post independence era which led to the Gukurahundi massacre and the infamous farm invasions that dispossessed settler farmers………….

This is the first book I have read which touches on the Gukurahundi killings which were a near genocide decimation of the Ndebele people. For the longest time this dark period of our history has been buried and never outright referred to as if by some collective amnesia it would be like it never happened and even now 35 years later it’s still a triggering topic. When you reading this book you will be able to relate to why the people who experienced these atrocities never got closure nor outright talk about it………

Novuyo manges to capture the essence of the past without turning the book into a dark and heavy read with the story unfolding from Zamani’s perspective as it his related to him and of course you are on a dizzy ride trying to figure Zamani out, since the rest of the characters are spelt out for you but Zamani, Zamani, Zamani, what can I say read the book……

~B