Yvonne Vera

Yvonne Vera was born on the nineteenth of September 1964 at Bulawayo, in the Matabeleland of Southern Rhodesia, the daughter of Jerry Vera — a Mhondoro schoolteacher of the Ndebele community of central Matabeleland — and Ericah Vera, a homemaker. She was raised in the Ndebele working-class township of Mzilikazi at the western edge of Bulawayo across the closing decade of the Smith Rhodesia régime and the opening years of Zimbabwean independence.

She was educated at the Mzilikazi Government School and the Njube Girls’ Secondary School at Bulawayo — completing the Ordinary Level certificate in 1981 — and at the Mzilikazi Government High School at the Advanced Level certificate in 1983.

She took employment from 1983 to 1987 as a primary-school teacher at the Bulawayo Henry Low Primary School, and at the same time took the certificate-in-education by correspondence at the University of Zimbabwe.

She enrolled in 1987 at the York University at Toronto, Canada — to which she had moved at twenty-three under the marriage to the Canadian doctoral student John Jose — and completed there the Bachelor of Arts in English in 1990, the Master of Arts in 1991, and the Doctor of Philosophy in 1995 with a dissertation on the late-colonial Rhodesian woman’s historical novel.

She published in 1992 the short-story collection Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals at the Toronto house Tsar Publications — the first book of fiction by a Zimbabwean woman published in Canada — and in 1993 the novel Nehanda at the Harare house Baobab Books — the chronicle of the Shona spirit medium Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, executed by the Rhodesian colonial administration in 1898 for her role in the First Chimurenga uprising.

She was named in 1997 director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe at Bulawayo and held the post for six years until 2003 — the period across which she published her three principal novels, Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1996), and Butterfly Burning (1998).

Butterfly Burning chronicled the township woman Phephelaphi Dube across the late-colonial Bulawayo of the early 1940s and was awarded the 1999 Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa.

She published in 2002 the novel The Stone Virgins — the principal Zimbabwean novel of the Gukurahundi massacres of Matabeleland under the Mugabe régime of the early 1980s.

She returned to Toronto in 2003 in failing health and died there on the seventh of April 2005 of complications of AIDS-related meningitis, at forty.

She is honored here as the author of Butterfly Burning.