The Contact

Garikai Mutasa's The Contact tells the story of seven ZANLA guerrillas who have come to liberate the town of Shiku in the district of Shabani, ‘unofficially Zvishavane.’ The story of the war is narrated from the third person singular, a perspective that allows the omniscient narrator to supply the reader with detailed information about the potentially conflicting war narratives in the novel.^[1]

Review

The Contact is a product of intellectual reflection, an artifact written after the war. That creative distance from the actual physical war affects Garikai Mutasa’s way of representing the war but does not make his novel less credible as an account of war. - Maurice Vambe, African Literature Today

Author

Garikai Mutasa (born 1952) is a Zimbabwean novelist. He trained as a teacher at Gweru Teachers College.