Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Nomsa Ngwenya’s mastery of the short story form has now consolidated alongside her novel writing.
Ngwenya has naturally handled the short story and novel with an illuminating syncing of lively characters in different places, cultures and different times, and the reader is enamoured by the mystery of the ‘unsaid’ that runs through the stories.
Not only at home is the Matobo-born writer respected for her writing gift and cultural pride, but invitations to read her stories at various arts and culture festivals and seminars have also come from across Africa.
Towards the end of March this year she travelled to Mauritius where she attended the Culture Night in Port Louis, and then, recently on April 10, she read her published stories at an Exclusive Book Event in Kigali, Rwanda.
Ngwenya’s sharp wit at portraying the thoughtful rural woman character is noticeable in her recent stories such as ‘Let it Die’ and ‘I am Happy’ published in the latest anthology Strides of a Woman (Zimbabwe Women Writers, 2025).
The short story ‘Let it Die’ is not simply about the funeral of a female war veteran, but a quest for real freedom. Overall, an ancestral voice echoes through the mourning village, bringing back a people’s memories, and dreams unsatisfied.
The words ‘let it die’ are a refrain that encapsulates a variety of interpretations. Ngwenya artfully infuses metaphor just as in her other story ‘I am Happy’ in the same anthology Strides of a Woman. The words are presented to carry a meaning deeper than the literal.
It is important to celebrate brave women who sacrificed so much to liberate Zimbabwe, but equally important is to examine if their national wishes were satiated after the war was won. In the recent years, some war veterans, but hardly female, have been publishing their memoirs and biographies to educate future generations about what it took to defeat colonial rule.
However, Ngwenya, in her story ‘Let It Die’, goes further to ask how much respect do the women who fought the war get even in death. The war veteran Dorah dies and her body is put in a cheap coffin ‘made in Mbare whilst they waited’. It is double an unceremonious funeral for a woman of such high caliber.
Characters in ‘Let it Die’ embody unspoken agonies of different eras in Zimbabwe’s pre- and post-independence history.
The war veteran about to be laid to rest in her village once endured sexual abuse at the hands of a Mr. Harrison before she joined the liberation struggle.
Bondnote is a name of a child in the story, whose parents’ backstory is embedded in times of hyperinflation and of the rising contemporary ‘mineral’ colonisation of Africa by China.
The author brings up an issue commonly overlooked, of how deeply the women worried and cared for their voiceless husbands who at that time brought home “packets of mazhanje fruits, not Lobels bread and Buttercup margarine” because the money everyone thought was money was but “money which was not money, yet the men accepted it”.
The women in the story are deep thinkers, one hears their thoughts, their memories, their worries, and also their spiritual faith in the yet to be fulfilled words of the dead: ‘let it die’. The writer captures their actions and movements in a way that bonds them with their land, their inheritance which they could not give away at the flash of the dollar.
Mr. Wang’s character is representative of the little attention the Chinese investors pay to the African cultural values. Matters of indigenous culture versus the need for foreign investment clash when Mr. Wang, a stiff-necked employer, attempts to blast the sacred Njelele Shrine and Khami Ruins to profit his company. However, the resistance he encounters from the local community is in itself a call for Africans to resist the destruction of its heritage and save the little that’s now left after similar selfish foreign powers plundered huge part of it in the past.
The inherent power of Ngwenya’s short story 'Let It Die' is that it carries something which one may call an overdue pregnancy spanning over two historical eras of which the reader is reminded, particularly the suffering and hope of Zimbabweans and the continued struggles.
The dead war veteran (Dorah) is a witness in life as in death, of what happened before independence, the abuse at the hands of the colonial employers, and of what’s happening now to the new generation although it has systematically metamorphosed into a new form of slavery.
Ngwenya once admitted she fell in love at an early age with the late celebrated Ghanaian author and poet Professor Ama Ata Aidoo’s storytelling acumen in her advancing of anti-colonialism and women’s rights. It's clear now in her writing Ngwenya has found her own voice, own language and skill as she too writes against a backdrop of a victimized Africa with women in mind.
Ngwenya’s other published books are Izinyawo Zayizolo (2016), a short story collection The Fifty Rand Note and Other Stories which first appeared in 2017 and republished by Carnelian Heart, United Kingdom, in 2023, Zalabantu Ziyebatwini (2022), and Portrait of Emlanjeni (2023).
Born in Matobo, Matebeleland South province of Zimbabwe, Tsitsi Nomsa Ngwenya is a mother, a town planner by profession, real estate consultant in business.