AS MANY CRITICS LATER POINTED out, Marechera's life and writing intermingled constantly. It was as if in his life he was staging the scripts for his stories or, vice versa, he was acting out what he had written. Much of it was absurdist comedy or, as he would say in the splendid lecture he gave in 1986, it came close to ‘Menippean Satire’.

As I had the ‘privilege’ of travelling with the hero to some of such vantage points, looking back to them now they do indeed read ‘complex, unstable, comic and satirical’. Even those of us who were made part of these stories acted strangely at times.

In hindsight the preparations for Dambudzo's public reading in February 1984 read like a caricature of the interaction that was taking

place between the threesome that we were: Dambudzo, the ingenious writer and spoilt brat, Victor, his magnanimous sponsor and rival, and me, his lover and sponsor in one.

Much promotion had gone into this first public appearance by Dambudzo Marechera. It had been a long time since the heady days after his return from exile in 1982. We could not risk a fiasco. Eminent dignitaries had accepted our invitation: the German ambassador, representatives of the British Council and the Alliance Française, as well as the patron of the Zimbabwe German Society (ZGS), who was a well-known Zimbabwean businessman and who agreed to speak words of welcome. We were especially proud to have secured the Minister of Education and Culture, Dzingai Mutumbuka, to introduce the writer. He and Dambudzo had been contemporaries at the University of Rhodesia and were expelled together in the 1973 student unrest around the famous ‘pots-and-pans demonstration’. While Marechera went on to Oxford, Mutumbuka had joined the armed struggle. After independence he became a minister in the first Mugabe cabinet.

With about two weeks to go before the reading, Victor and I deliberated what the best strategy might be to ensure that everything proceeded smoothly.