AUTHOR’S NOTE

Where the Story Began

The story of Muroro did not begin in an archive, nor did it begin with my decision to write a book. It began much earlier, when I was a child listening to my paternal grandfather, Sekuru Jairos Chikwaiwa, speak by the fire.

There were names that stayed with me long after those evenings had passed — Muroro, Mushawashe, Sena, Save and the generations who followed. At the time, I did not understand the full weight of what I was hearing. I simply knew that these were stories belonging to our family.

As the years passed, memory led to questions. Questions led to genealogy, maps and historical sources. I began to see how a story preserved within one family could also open a window onto journeys, encounters and communities that belonged to a much wider African past.

The people who carried these memories matter as much as the story itself. VaJairos preserved them in speech. Mbuya Lydia belonged to the family world in which those memories lived. My father’s eldest brother, VaFanuel Musekiwa, remained an important link to that generation. My father, Aaron Muroro, chose to carry the name Muroro himself.

This book is therefore not an attempt to replace oral history with written history. It is an attempt to preserve what was carried through memory, while placing it alongside what genealogy and historical research can tell us. Where certainty ends, the story should remain honest about what is remembered, what is reconstructed and what is known from the historical record.

Muroro is a family story, but I hope it also speaks to something larger: the importance of listening before voices disappear, of preserving names before they are forgotten, and of recognising that history often survives first in the memories of ordinary families.

I write it for those who came before us, for those of us carrying the story now, and for those who will inherit it after us.

Dr Tongai Chitsamatanga