Weaver Press

Stories capture life home and abroad
White Gods, Black Demons: David Mandishona
Published: Weaver Press
Reviewed: Charles Mungoshi
In The Standard 14.02.10


These ten short stories, at times pithy and acerbic, ironic and humorous cut right across the troubled human landscape of Zimbabwe today. They reveal Zimbabwean life, at home and in the diaspora, through the unblinking eye of a formidable new talent on the literary scene. The scintillating polish to the stories could easily persuade the uninformed reader to believe that he is in the presence of a more-than-one-title published past master of the genre.

The stories depict the ordinary – or as is now extraordinary – everyday life of a people caught in the deep miasma of a political nightmare and reeling under an economy nose-diving to rock bottom. White Gods, Black Demons was the subject of a discussion at the Book Café in Harare on Thursday, 21st January.

The stories, almost all of them read well and deceptively smoothly with the pungent urgency of a fresh news item in a daily newspaper, but you can sense the strength of their staying power in the silent under tour of the deeply lived human experience both spelt out or implied in between the lines.

A kind of almost tangible melancholic aura hovers over most of them like the distantly just audible hum of a dirge. they should offer satisfying reading for the thoughtful reader and those interested in what is happening in literature in Zimbabwe.