Award winning Zimbabwean novelist and poet Chenjerai Hove has died in Norway. Hove, who had lived in self-imposed exile since the early 2000s, was 59.
The cause of death is unconfirmed, but the writer had been suffering from a liver complaint and his health had begun to deteriorate in recent weeks.
Hove was born in Mazvihwa near Zvishavane in February 1956 and attended school at Kutama College and Marist Brothers in Dete, near Hwange.
He became a teacher and then took degrees at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and the University of Zimbabwe before he made a name writing newspaper columns and countless articles on the Zimbabwean situation.
Hove travelled throughout the world and is remembered for his fondness for African sayings and proverbs. He popularised a saying he first heard in Somalia that goes: “The higher the monkey climbs the more it exposes its bottom,” which he used in one of his articles criticising the then Constitutional Commission spokesperson Professor Jonathan Moyo.
Speaking to the BBC’s Focus on Africa radio programme last year, Hove said it was his responsibility as “a citizen, as an African, as a Zimbabwean… to look at our lives and at whether our leaders are enhancing our dignity or taking it away”.
He wrote four novels including Masimba Avanhu (Is This the People’s Power?), which looked at the situation of women in Zimbabwe. It was this, along with his outspoken criticism of Robert Mugabe’s administration that got him noticed by the authorities and ultimately saw him leave Zimbabwe permanently in 2001.
Despite his lengthy period in exile, Hove’s family hope to return his body to Zimbabwe for burial.
