Books

Mabasa's award-winning novelBook: Imbwa YemunhuAuthor: Ignatius MabasaPublisher: Bhabhu Books (2013)Ignatius T. Mabasa’s new novel “Imbwa Yemunhu” is an unsettling anatomy of the human condition. Mabasa fashions his protagonist into a laboratory dummy whom he dissects with a range of technical scalpels to demonstrate mankind’s struggle with the futility of life, diversion and the ultimate quest for spiritual fulfillment.“Imbwa Yemunhu” is Mabasa’s third novel following “Mapenzi” and “Ndafa Here?” and the first signature offering from his newly established publishing house Bhabhu Books. The stable, which is consecrated to promoting the Shona language, already boasts a gangly alliance featuring Memory Chirere, Tinashe Muchuri, Clever Kavenga and Jerry Zondo.The novel is a dumpsite of experim...

Maya Angelou (Photo Credit: Emerging Women)Black women’s poet laureate, author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou’s death last weekflared up homage and fresh interest in her work.  Angelou’s artistic inventory is varied, spanning across autobiography, poetry, film and essays, essentially set to a wave-tossed “voyage into self.”While her claimto fame is the childhood memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Angelou was also a forceful poet, with a voice uniquely her own.Liberal cross-fertilisation of genres explains the pictorial facility, sensory intensity, emotive potency and uninhibited self-portraiture which throbs through the tapestry of her major works.Her work distends from personal hindsight and orbits wider to capture issuesof universal significance, with identity, race, femi...

Chinua AchebeIdeas chart mankind’s thoroughfares in the making of history. Monumental feats are prefigured by an awareness window whereby ideas ferment and flare up public sympathies for a particular cause.Literature is among the principal framing chambers in which ideas are deliberated, debated and diffused towards the justification and procurement of anticipated ends. Ideas merit greater investment than stockpiles of arms, considering the pen’s potency over the sword.While people make history by responding to conditions in their immediate environs, books often come in as the interface by which people contextualise their experiences and as the mainstay which stiffens the spine of resistance.It is impossible to have a deflated estimation of books unless one does not consider how “The Repub...

Charles MungoshiThe Zimbabwe International Book Fair spread its turf to Bulawayo last weekend for the regional edition of the festival.The book fair ran under the theme “Indigenous Languages, Literature, Art and Knowledge Systems of Africa” at the City Hall. Writers, publishers, librarians, and booksellers at the workshop engaged the theme with a varied range of responses – cliché, activism, wit, humour, graphic facility and sleep-inducing lectures – as can be expected of middle-aged academics.Exhibitions, which ran concurrently with the workshop, were highly subscribed, marking a considerable improvement from previous fairs.The Literary Evening, which was first introduced during the main book fair in Harare, last year also revealed signs of life in the embattled book sector.Over the past ...

Shimmer Chinodya (Photo Credit: The Herald)Book: Chioniso and Other StoriesAuthor: Shimmer ChinodyaPublisher: Weaver Press (2012)Religion occupies a vast expanse in world literature. Antithetical perspectives on the questions of faith and fulfillment run the tapestry of the tradition across the lapse of dispensations.If literature is to discharge its normative function as a miniature of society, then this preoccupation with religion will be indulged as an inevitable feature on the writer’s task-pane. Mankind’s progress through history is informed by a quest for meaning in which religion plays a central role.Although the greater part of civil institutions have been secularised, the politics of survival still draw heavily on religion. Despite being tagged the opium of the people and ostracis...

Creatures at the TopBook: Creatures at the TopAuthor: Stephen MpofuPublisher: Spiderwize (2012)Stephen Mpofu belongs to that rare breed of Zimbabwe’s pioneer journalists for whom the newsroom was a vocation not a default option.Back in the day, journalism did not occur naturally on the inventory of professions available to blacks.By virtue of its location among the four estates of the realm, the colonial establishment hedged the newsroom out of the reach of blacks. Perchance a ‘native upstart’ ventured in, he or she would be consigned to the mundane, the trivial and the peripheral. Not so with Mpofu, if his riveting memoirs “Creatures at the Top” are anything to by.The elder scribe’s autobiography is not only jam-packed with personal recollections but also with Zimbabwe’s political history...

Writing RevoltBook: Writing RevoltAuthor: Terence RangerPublisher: Weaver Press (2013)Terence Ranger’s latest memoir “Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism, 1957-67” is a vastly riveting account which tags the historian in the mid-century revolutionary ferment.“Of the making of many books about Zimbabwe there seems to be no end,” Ranger observes in his 2011 instalment for “Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute,” assigning “inexplicably popular white Zimbabwe memoirs” to an ephemeral shelf life cluster.We have heard patronising dirges for Zimbabwe by former Rhodesians whose potency, for the most part, inheres in how much they qualify for carbon copies of the conventional characterisation of our country as a trouble spot shorn of its yesteryear allure.Wh...

The Dawkins DelusionBook: The Dawkins Delusion?Authors: Alister and Joanna McGrathPublisher: Intervarsity Press (2007)If Richard Dawkins is the contemporary pope of atheism then The God Delusion is the ultimate papal encyclical.The God Delusion borders on the polemical claim that one person’s delusion is called insanity while many people’s delusion is called religionDawkins steps up the podium complete a secularist trinity featuring, before him, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.The take-home message from the Kenya-born theophobe is that God is an irrational invention of mad and deluded people.The former assigns religion to an infantile prism where the longing for a father figure necessitates the existence of a deity while the latter regards religion as an emanation of social and economic depriv...

A.C Moyo (Photo Credit: The Herald)Prolific novelist, playwright and screenwriter Aaron Chiundura Moyo has indicated that he will cap his pen and pursue other interests if nothing is done to demobilise piracy.Piracy has emerged as the principal death-knell against the arts sector. Literature has been grounded to zero profitability, with no significant measure in force to protect authors.Major publishers have remained buoyant largely from textbook revenue but for creative writers, times have never been more austere.Moyo, far and away one of the more accomplished artists, revealed that his 14 books have collectively earned him less than US$400 from 2000 to date.Put differently, the author has earned in approximately 168 months the amount a disgruntled civil servant normally gets in one month...

Musaemura Zimunya (Photo Credit: The Herald)The Masvingo edition of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair which was slated for May 30 to 31 was cancelled on the last minute due to lack of funding.ZIBF chairperson Musaemura Zimunya told stakeholders on Wednesday that sponsors had withdrawn funding on short notice.He said the organisers unsuccessfully explored and exhausted other funding options and were left with no option but to defer the fair to 2015.Ironically, the organisation was banking almost entirely on foreign funding for the regional book fairs taglined “Indigenous Languages, Literature, Art and Knowledge Systems of Africa,” due to lukewarm Government and corporate support for the book sector.“We have been informed at a rather short notice that for the year 2014 our erstwhile devel...