Kundizeza has put his authorship on the record in his own words. 'For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote The Blue Fighter.

I did not use generative AI to write it. It is entirely my own work,' he stated on X, according to The Guardian.

He told the story has a 'concrete, documented history' — The Economic Times reports he traces its genesis to his LOATAD Black Atlantic Residency in Ghana, where he read Vangile Gantsho's poem 'my father's hands.'

He described the piece to the AP as 'a deeply personal story about economic collapse and familial relationships,' drawn from his family's life during Zimbabwe's years of economic turmoil, and said it went through standard editorial processes.

The dispute turns on evidence that many literary observers find shaky.

The Atlantic's Vauhini Vara ran the story through Pangram, an AI-detection tool that itself uses AI, and it flagged almost the entire story as machine-generated — yet The Guardian notes Vara herself acknowledged there is 'relatively little third-party research' on the accuracy of such software.

The Caine Prize's chair Ellah Wakatama pushed back directly, telling BBC Front Row she is against AI 'being used as a final arbiter in this case' and saying she is not happy for writers, 'especially black writers,' to form the testing ground for something 'at best still rough and ready.'

The wider debate has moved from one story to a suspected pattern.

Radical Books Collective, the international group behind online book clubs and literary podcasts, posted that 'the digital lynchings continue as Black authors are being targeted in AI/plagiarism scandals' — naming Jamir Nazir, Jerry Falade, Thélyson Orélien and now Kundizeza, as the AP reports.

The Guardian's account lists parallel cases: Nazir won the Commonwealth Foundation short story prize in July despite social-media claims of AI 'markers,' and Orélien's novel was removed from the Goncourt longlist after an anonymous account alleged it was almost entirely AI-written.

For the Caine Prize — one of the most prestigious awards for African writing, worth $10,000 this year — the review sets a precedent for how prizes handle machine-authorship claims.

The organizers say they are taking 'a human-centered approach, ensuring that writers are supported and cared for during the process,' while still holding that looking into such claims is their responsibility.

Kundizeza, meanwhile, rejected the suggestion that the winning story's stylistic distance from his 2021 work casts doubt on him: 'to suggest that a writer cannot write in different styles or genres, or improve his writing substantially after five or more years, fundamentally misunderstands the craft of writing.'

Supporters are reading the story as authentically Zimbabwean rather than machine-made. Nhlandla Duba, a Zimbabwean linguist researching English literature at the University of Pretoria, proclaimed on X that 'that story sounds human.

Zimbabwean literature is alive!'

The Guardian's report of Vara's critique — that the story leans on 'not x, but y' constructions, a glut of metaphors and platitudinous aphorisms — shows how subjective the stylistic case is, and The Guardian also notes Pangram's own research claims false positives are rare, even for non-native English speakers.

Kundizeza has vowed to continue working with the Caine team and to keep writing.

The immediate question is the Caine Prize's own review, which organizers say has been initiated in this case and which promises support for the writer while it proceeds.

Kundizeza, who said he is 'not too well versed with these technologies,' is nevertheless making the bias argument the case's central issue, predicting that 'this kind of treatment I got is not going to stop' unless it is addressed.