Solomon Mutswairo

Who was Solomon Mutswairo?

Solomon Mangwiro Mutswairo also spelt Mutsvairo, is a Zimbabwean novelist and poet. A member of the Zezuru people of central Zimbabwe, Mutswairo wrote the first novel in the Shona language, Feso.

Feso, originally published in Zezuru in 1957, is a narrative with subtle political implications set several hundreds years ago, just before British colonization. Beyond the use of the Shona language itself, the novel incorporates a number of features of traditional Zezuru oral culture, including song and storytelling techniques. Despite Mutswairo's association with the small intellectual elite in the country, Feso was widely read, and even taught in schools, until it was banned by the government of the new state of Rhodesia in the mid-1960s.

Mutswairo began studying in the United States in the early 1960s, originally through a Fulbright grant. He ultimately received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1978, with a doctoral dissertation titled Oral Literature in Zimbabwe: An Analytico-Interpretive Approach. Though his research in Zimbabwean oral culture has been useful for both African and Western scholars, he has been considered something of a revisionist historian in his own country. He provoked some controversy by arguing, in a series of televised debates, that the Shona people should be referred to instead as "Mbire."