cultural meeting-place in London's Covent Garden for African and Afrocentric scholars and students. Some accounts suggest that Marechera married a British woman but not much is known about the union. Return to Zimbabwe and final years Marechera returned to the newly independent Zimbabwe in 1982 to assist in shooting the film of House of Hunger. However, he fell out with the director and remained behind in Zimbabwe when the crew left, leading a homeless existence in Harare before his death there five years later, from an AIDS-related pulmonary disorder, age 35. Mindblast; or, The Definitive Buddy (1984) was written the year after his return home and comprises three plays, a prose narrative, a collection of poems, and a park-bench diary. The book criticizes the materialism, intolerance, opportunism, and corruption of post-independence Zimbabwe, extending the political debate beyond the question of nationalism to embrace genuine social regeneration. The combination of intense self-scrutiny, cogent social criticism, and open, experimental form appealed to a young generation of Zimbabweans, the so-called mindblast generation, who were seeking new ways of perceiving their roles within the emergent nation. Marechera's poetry was published posthumously under the title Cemetery of Mind (1992). Like his stories, his poems show the influence of modernist writers from Arthur Rimbaud and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Christopher Okigbo, and confirm his proclivity for perceptive social critique, intense self-exploration, and verbal daring. In an interview, Marechera said of himself: "I think I am the doppelganger whom, until I appeared, African literature had not yet met." This is an accurate assessment of Marechera's role in shocking the reader into looking at himself anew through the eyes of the other. His individualism, literary experimentation, and iconoclasm ensure that his work resists narrow definitions; it is constantly shifting and crossing boundaries. Awards 1979: Guardian Fiction Prize Legacy Marechera remains Zimbabwe's most important cultural product on the creative writing front. Since his death, dozens of younger writers and many of his colleagues have written numerous accounts and biographies detailing his troubled life and works. In the 1990s, the most prominent were foreigners, especially the German scholar Flora Veit-Wild, who has written both a biography and a sourcebook of Marechera's life and works. What Wild misses dismally is the fact that Marechera edited his own life as he went along. Wild seems to take many of the things she got from Marechera as facts. In an