3 ideas
When an unexplained technological hazard appears in a community, people first read it through the categories their tradition already supplies. The njuzu legend gives villagers a ready meaning for the river creatures, but that meaning points toward spirits rather than toward the lab that caused them. Inherited myth can therefore help people absorb a shock while also hiding who is responsible.
Unregulated bioengineering tends to happen where oversight is thinnest, so rural communities in poorly governed regions absorb the consequences of research they never consented to and cannot see. The harm reaches them through shared commons like rivers, which spread private experimental risk onto public life. Accountability breaks down because the affected people have no view into the source.
Writing a science fiction novel in Shona, and leaving it untranslated, asserts that African languages can express technological and speculative ideas without passing through English. The choice treats the genre as something Shona speakers can own, not just import. It also directs the story first to the community whose myths and landscape it uses.