‘Short stories have long been the poor relations of Zimbabwean literature’, T.O. McLoughlin once observed. Critics and commenators in the Zimbabwean literary discourse have paid scant attention to the short story and have treated it as a footnote to the novel, some kind of practice ground for the more serious business of writing novels. And yet the short story engenders vital issues that have contemporary relevance.

The development of the short story in Zimbabwe as a separate, concentrated short form of literature reveals remarkable vitality, and it holds up in a natural manner as an effective mirror to the Zimbabwean society. The intensity of the form comes from its subjective points of view, pervasive imagery, controlled tone and ellipsis, and as a matter of fact, the Zimbabwean short story presents human experience in its most distilled essence.

In Zimbabwe the history of the short story can be traced back to three representative writers: Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera and Stanley Nyamfukudza respectively. As they published the first individual short story collections, these three writers automatically become ‘the fore-bearers’ of the short story genre in Zimbabwean fiction in English. Charles Mungoshi became the first black writer from Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) to publish a short story collection, Coming of the Dry Season, in 1972. With Mungoshi the Zimbabwean short story in English germinated in the form of homely anecdotes drawn from colonial experiences.