Only al-Jazeera is allowed to report from Zimbabwe, but it is unwatchable. Their Zimbabwean reporter Supa Mandiwanzira was one of Zanu-PF's praise-singers at the reviled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.
The painful truth may be that Zimbabwe, the youngest of Africa's former colonies, has simply followed where the continent has led, treading the well-worn path beaten out of the lie that taking power from the colonialists and delivering democracy to the people are one and the same.
You could have names like Hatred; you could have names that mean something like Suffering or Poverty. So names are not just names: names have real meaning, and they tend to tell the world about the circumstances of your parents at the time that you were born.
It was one of those early mid-life crises, really. I started asking myself, 'What is it that I want from my life?' This question kept haunting me: 'Do I want to be a lawyer who always wanted to be a writer, or do I actually want to be a writer?
The prolific Chinodya has written a number of striking books, most notably 'Dew in the Morning', an exploration of an idyllic rural boyhood; the sophisticated 'Strife,' in which sins from the pre-colonial past cast shadows into the present; and the rich and varied short-story collection 'Can We Talk?'
The struggle for Zimbabwe lit up the imagination of people around the world. In London, New York, Accra and Lagos, bell-bottomed men and women with big hair and towering platform shoes sang the dream of Zimbabwe in the words of the eponymous song by Bob Marley: Every man has the right to decide his own destiny.