Shimmer Chinodya was born in a township (black ghetto) in Gweru, in the Midlands area of Zimbabwe (Gwelo, Rhodesia at the time). He spent the first eight years of his life there; then – in 1965, the year Rhodesia's Prime Minister Ian Smith declared unilaterally independence from Britain – his parents built a second home in a village in the north-west of the country. Chinodya's mother made her home there with his sisters, his father remained in town, and Chinodya and his brothers alternated between the two and boarding school. In 1976, at the height of guerrilla struggle for majority rule, Chinodya was a boarding student at Goromonzi, an elite government high school for Africans near the capital. (He edited and contributed to th

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First published 21 March 2002

Citation: Primorac, Ranka. "Shimmer Chinodya". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 March 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=863, accessed 9 February 2010.]