Feso, originally published in Zezuru in 1957 when Zimbabwe was still the colony of Southern Rhodesia, is a narrative with subtle political implications set several hundreds years ago, before colonization.
Beyond the use of the Shona language itself, the novel incorporates a number of features of traditional Zezuru oral culture, including song and storytelling techniques.
[1] Despite Mutswairo's association with the small intellectual elite in the country, Feso was widely read, and even taught in schools, until it was banned by the Rhodesian government in the mid-1960s.
He ultimately received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1978, with a doctoral dissertation titled Oral Literature in Zimbabwe: An Analytico-Interpretive Approach.
Though his research in Zimbabwean oral culture has been useful for both African and Western scholars,[3] he has been considered something of a revisionist historian in his own country.