“Dambudzo gave me HIV and why I chose to keep quiet”

In the final months of his life, she sat beside his hospital bed carrying a secret of her own.The Zimbabwean writer was gravely ill with AIDS-related pneumonia. Dambudzo Marechera was emaciated, bedridden and psychologically fragile. Flora Veit-Wild, the German scholar who had become his lover, carer and later the leading custodian of his literary work, had taken an HIV test after learning of his condition.