The Curse of Historical Recurrence in Geoffrey Nyarota's Against the Grain : Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman.

Geoffrey Nyarota, a Zimbabwean journalist of note, is renowned for his investigative journalistic skills and numerous conflicts with political authorities. He is probably the most hired and fired newspaper editor in post independence Zimbabwe. In this paper, I put forward the argument that in his memoir, Nyarota uses historical recurrence as a motif and narrative strategy to recreate a personal life story that is fraught with events that keep repeating themselves in his life. By tracing his life story from the colonial period to post independence Zimbabwe, and the near tragic events that continually trouble his life, Nyarota reconstructs a life narrative that is haunted by the curse of historical recurrence in a way that makes a personal curse become the curse of the nation of Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]