Then a Wind Blew

The question I have been asked most frequently by friends since they’ve learned about my debut novel, Then a Wind Blew, is: What made you want to write fiction?

I’ve been in book publishing for much of my working life, in all its many facets, and have loved it, particularly the editorial side. And, like many editors who’ve handled fiction at any point, I harboured a dream of writing fiction myself one day. Also, I grew up in Africa, and the African voice inside me has long said: Write something! But, until I retired from publishing a few years ago, I never had the time, the space. I never had that metaphorical ‘Room of My Own’.

The backdrop to Then a Wind Blew is the guerrilla war in Zimbabwe, called Rhodesia at the time of the war. The central theme of the story is a universal one, and something I’ve long been interested in: the pity of war for the women caught up in it. All too often, it’s the women in wars who bear the greatest burdens, carry the deepest wounds. I chose the guerrilla war in Zimbabwe as my vehicle to address this theme, because it was something I knew, first hand. I was brought up in the country, and later spent a few of the war years there.

There was another reason for choosing that war. My daughters were born during it and have grown up asking questions about it, but I’ve never felt that I explained it very well to them. Then a Wind Blew is an attempt to explain it to them, with all its nuances.

The book’s title is a reference to Harold Macmillan’s speech in 1961 about the wind of political change blowing across Africa, a speech that the leaders of the small white tribe in Rhodesia chose, sadly, not to hear. 

My story is seen through the eyes of three women. They can be seen as representing the political spectrum. I also wanted them – and the women in their lives, their mothers, daughters, sisters, friends – to represent the spectrum of what war does to women, what it means for women. Loss, displacement, torture, rape… 

In creating my characters, I tried hard to listen to voices that came to me from that time. Gradually, those voices took shape, became real people, jostled with each other for attention. The three central characters are: Susan Haig, wife of the manager of a chrome mine, who has lost one son in the war and seen her other son declared ‘unfit for duty’; Nyanye Maseka, who has fled with her sister to a guerrilla camp in Mozambique, her home village destroyed, her mother missing; and Beth Lytton, a nun in a church mission in an African Reserve, watching her adopted country tear itself apart. 

The most dominant of these characters is Susan. She came from the voices of the women who’d sit on our verandah when I was growing up, having tea and biscuits and a gossip with my mother – white women who found themselves in Africa after the Second World War and found that they didn’t like it as much as their husbands did, but would put up with it as long as they lost none of their privileges. They fought harder against the notion of majority rule than perhaps any other group. But, with the war, and its aftermath, they lost a great deal more than their privileges. Farms, livelihoods, homes, country… Many, like my character Susan, lost their sons. 

Apart from drawing on my own experience to write the novel, I also drew on work I had done in the 1980s on several publications related to the guerrilla war. The most important of these was called Serving Secretly. Over a period of about two years, I helped its author, the head of the country’s Intelligence service for 17 years, write his memoirs, and in 1987 I co-published the book with John Murray, London.

Working on that book took me deep behind closed doors, gave me great insight into many aspects of the war – military, geopolitical, intelligence gathering, the so-called ‘dirty tricks’, including the chemical warfare that the white leaders resorted to in the last years of the war when they saw power slipping away. 

But to write a credible story I still needed to do a lot of research, and so I hunkered down in the British Library for a year or two, and talked to – and corresponded with – a lot of people with first-hand experience of the war, both in the country and outside it, in the guerrilla camps. 

Although I have lived in the UK now for more than 30 years, I retain many links with Zimbabwe.  For all the tragedy of the war that forms the backdrop to Then a Wind Blew – a war that should never have happened – and for all the tragedy of the current suffering of so many Zimbabweans, it is still an extraordinarily beautiful country, with its rivers and lakes, its mountains and savanna, the glorious sunsets, the star-studded night skies. And, above all, its people – the kindest, funniest, most resilient and enterprising people you could ever meet. For too long in Zimbabwe, and in Rhodesia before that, the people have been poorly served by their leaders. Roll on the day when their dreams for the country they deserve to come true.

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Kay Powell was born in Zambia and grew up in Rhodesia. In 1968 she went to university in the UK and became a social worker. She returned to Rhodesia for a few years in the 1970s, and her two daughters were born there. After a stint at Faber & Faber in London, she returned to Zimbabwe in 1981, first working for Macmillan, then co-founding Quest, a publisher of non-fiction titles.

Emigrating to England in 1988, Kay set up an agency to provide publishing services to international development organisations. In 2008, her book on the use of English in the workplace, What Not To Write, was published by Talisman, Singapore, and became a bestseller. Then a Wind Blew is Kay’s first novel. She lives near Cambridge, UK, with her husband, who is also a novelist. 

 

For more, see: kay-powell.net  and Twitter @JIMandKAYPowell

Watch an interview with the author, Kay Powell, and readings of excerpts from the book by leading actors in Zimbabwe (Charmaine Mujeri and Michael Kudakwashe) and the UK (Robin Ellis and Christine Kavanagh). here: https://youtu.be/WclsQb6Ej8U

 

THEN A WIND BLEW

Then a Wind Blew is set in the final months of the war in Rhodesia, before it became Zimbabwe, and the story unfolds through the voices of three women. Susan Haig, a white settler, has lost one son in the war and seen her other son declared ‘unfit for duty’. Nyanye Maseka has fled with her sister to a guerrilla camp in Mozambique, her home village destroyed, her mother missing. Beth Lytton is a nun in a church mission in an African Reserve, watching her adopted country tear itself apart.

The three women have nothing in common. Yet the events of war conspire to draw them into each other’s lives in a way that none of them could have imagined. This absorbing and sensitive novel develops and intertwines their stories, showing us the ugliness of war for women caught up in it and reminding us that, in the end, we all depend on each other.

Buy HERE

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing