House of Stone

Zamani is a young man who rents a room in the Mlambo household in Bulawayo, and after the family's only son Bukhosi disappears at a protest, Zamani sets out to insert himself into the empty place. He does this by collecting and reconstructing the family history, which takes him backward through the Mlambos' 1980 wedding at Zimbabwean independence, the Gukurahundi massacres of the early 1980s where Robert Mugabe's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade killed an estimated 20,000 Ndebele civilians, and the slow national collapse that followed. Tshuma writes Zamani as an unreliable historian, asking who gets to tell a national story.