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Title: Harvest of Thorns Author: Shimmer Chinodya Genre: Fiction/Colonialist/Race Publishers: AWS Classics Pages: 248 Year: 1989 Country: Zimbabwe Shimmer Chinodya is one of the few Zimbabwean authors I have read whose works explore the struggle for independence from the stand point of the fighters and the general pulse of the nation at the time and is able to provide cogent argument for it without questioning, unnecessarily, the human cost. Not that he assumes that all the black Zimbabweans at the time were in support of the war; he accepts the human loss but Chinodya presents his work in such a way that make the struggle more significant, for the coloniser will not grant freedom to the colonised without a struggle and there is no struggle without its human loss and if you expect otherwise then you really don't know what you want. Most Zimbabwean literature, especially those published a decade or two after the war, makes it look as if the war was irrelevant and...

Title: Dew in the Morning Author: Shimmer Chinodya Genre: Fiction/Pastoral Publishers: Heinemann (African Writers Series) Pages: 218 Year of First Publication: 1982 (this edition, 2001) Country: Zimbabwe* For the Africa Reading Challenge Shimmer Chinodya's first novel,  Dew in the Morning,  deals with the gradual changes that engulf individuals, villages and the environment as population increases and the carrying-capacity is exceeded. Set in a small rural community in northern Zimbabwe, Dew in the Morning  tells this story from the point of view of Godi, a young boy whose father lives and works in the city but also keeps a farm and family in the village. As crops failed and life and the general agrarian economy began to suffer after seven years of adverse weather conditions, the government moved people into the northern parts of the country where the land is fertile and the forest virgin. This massive exodus of the derukas  - newcomers - i...