Mosi oa Tunya Review Issue #3

Readers –
Should Novelists
Protect Them?
kay
powell
ENGLISH
NON-FICTION
Someone in the publishing trade said to me, “A good writer cannot protect their readers or
their characters.”
At the time, I was working on the outline for the story that became Then a Wind Blew –
published by Weaver Press (Zimbabwe) and told by three women caught up in the final
brutal years of the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe war in the late 1970s – and I was musing about the
sensitivities of the potential readership.
1. Readers-Should Novelists Protect Them? IKay Powell
At that stage, the concept of ‘protecting your characters’ was an alien one. I hadn’t written
fiction before and was unaware of the way the characters you create tend to want to let go of
your hand at some point and evolve in ways you hadn’t planned. And, for the novel to work,
you have to let them go.
But ‘protecting your readers’ was something I’d given thought to. I wanted to tell a story
about a time and place I knew well, a story that would be difficult to read in parts, but would
be as true to people and events, attitudes and actions, as my research and my memory
dictated.
The potential readership would be very divided. In one corner, those who’d been caught up
in the war, as fighters, supporters, victims, onlookers. In the other corner, those who knew
little, if anything, about the war or the country in which it played out. So, differences in
knowledge and understanding within the readership would be immense.
More than that, the knowledge held by the group who’d been in or close to the war would
have been coloured by propaganda. All wars come with propaganda, this one was no
different. I’m talking here not only of the powerful propaganda machines built by the white
government and its opposing black guerrilla forces, but also of the propaganda put out by
the foreign media, which often took sides and suppressed what showed its ‘side’ up in a
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