21/11/2025
Itās wonderful to encounter Billy againāBilly from āThe Heistā, a short story in Joe Ruzvidzoās 2017 Behind Enemy Lines and Other Stories . You wonāt need to have read āThe Heistā (I did read it again after I finished this novel), although Welcome to Anywhere is an expansion. It tells us more about Billy: lots more about how chubby he is and how ordinary (at the beginning of the story, anyway), and more about what happened to his father and some about his mother:
āDuring wartime in the town, Mai Billyās daily routine as a teenage girl was a delicate dance between the shadows of conflict and the toughness that youth demanded. Living under her parentās roof, she navigated a world of uncertainty and sacrifice, where each day carried the weight of hope and fear. ⦠She carried the hopes of her family and community on her shoulders, a corpulent example of optimism in the face of adversity.ā
So you know where Billy gets that from.
We get a lot more background about how Comrade (the most important character, apart from Billy) came to be in Chemadhegudhegu. And we learn Comradeās thoughts aboutāor perhaps excuses forāhow he ended up on the wrong side of the war, committing atrocities against his own people:
āDo you think I wanted it? The voice came again, gruff and full of old bitterness. You think I wanted to be the man I became? A man with blood on his hands, whose friends were nothing but names on graves, whose enemies ⦠well, they disappeared into the earth, too. I didnāt ask for it, boy. But once youāre in, youāre in. It gets under your skin, the need to survive. It changes everything about you, down to the way you walk and the way you think. Thereās no going back to who you were before.ā
Thereās a link between Comrade and Billyās father which is explained in Welcome to Anywhere, a possible (hmmm) reason for what happens to Billy during the heist. And then, finally, we learn more about that ridiculous heist, and its effect on Billy.
We finally leave Billy when heās turned sixteen.
This is the story of Zimbabweās liberation...
Full review: https://hararereview.wordpress.com/2025/10/05/welcome-to-anywhere-x-joe-ruzvidzo/