Abstract
Abstract This article offers an in-depth reading of Flora Veit-Wild’s They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir (2020) and its contentious racial politics of representation. Through the memoir, which I contend is an apologia pro vita sua , a justification for the author’s own life and work, Veit-Wild seeks to dispel long-standing accusations that she has benefitted from Dambudzo Marechera and his legacy. As she depicts herself as a magnanimous activist and scholar, Veit-Wild reverses the script by portraying Marechera as a “galling scoundrel” who “depended on others to sustain him.” In the process, far from offering an authoritative portrait of Marechera that we can trust, the memoir dehumanises the writer. Suggesting that Veit-Wild’s relationship with Marechera was motivated more by racialised objectification than love and respect, the text reproduces a white saviour narrative that reinscribes racist tropes of representation. While it also engages other works by Veit-Wild, this article delves into They Called You Dambudzo ’s (un)critical reception, its unsettling portrayal of Marechera as a spoilt, ungrateful, and mentally ill writer who “had a way of taking for granted whatever was done for him,” Veit-Wild’s self-representation as both Marechera’s victim and saviour, her misappropriation of Marechera’s thought to enforce colourblindness, and the vexed colonial politics of speaking for others that the memoir lays bare.