In 2004 Alexandra Fuller dedicated her second novel, Scribbling the Cat to Alexander Kanengoni. This was an intriguing gesture on many levels. Firstly, Fuller had never met Kanengoni but explains that he became the metaphorical ‘godfather’ to her novel after she came across his novel Echoing Silences in Johannesburg airport, shortly after it was published in 1997. Secondly, although both novels focus on the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, Fuller's is an autobiographical account of her travels with a white former Rhodesian soldier whilst Kanengoni's is a fictional exploration of the experiences of a black guerrilla soldier.

Such public declarations of cross-racial identification are relatively unusual in the context of post-independence Zimbabwean war literature, which remains scarred by legacies of racial division. This said, of course there has been much cross-pollination between writers from a wide range of backgrounds in Zimbabwe (as elsewhere), facilitated by forward thinking dynamic editors such as the courageous Irene Staunton. There have also been fictional explorations of cross-racial identification and indeed both Fuller and Kanengoni published short stories on this theme in a recent volume of new writing from Zimbabwe entitled Writing Still (Staunton 2003). But even with these precedents, Fuller's decision to dedicate her second novel to Kanengoni forms both a provocative political statement and an attempt to open up new dialogues. This article looks at both the motivations for Fuller's identification and its implications for her identity as an ‘African writer’.