Books

Mwapangidza's debut novelBook: Rebel SoldierAuthor: Solomon MwapangidzaPublisher: Author House (2013)Zimbabwean critics have been in troubleshooting mode for too long to acknowledge the potency of emerging voices. Our preoccupation with pessimism and hindsight has unduly diverted attention from young writers who are injecting fresh life into local literature.We need to move over to the sunny side of the sector where new writers are foiling the odds to season the domestic canon with a trendy flavour. Few newcomers, notably NoViolet Bulawayo and Brian Chikwava, have hogged international acclaim, while others are still to earn their efforts’ worth.On the home front, NAMA last month cherry-picked Solomon Mwapangidza, Tinotenda Mpofu and Tsungi Chiwara as some of the most exciting recent finds,...

ZIBF board members and delegates (Photo Credit: Zimbojam)The Bulawayo edition of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF) was almost cancelled after the foreign donor withdrew funding on short notice.ZIBF chairperson Musaemura revealed that the regional fair had run aground if not for publishers who jostled in with contributions in time to save the day.Speaking at the official opening of the fair, taglined “Indigenous Languages, Literature, Art and Knowledge Systems of Africa,” on Friday, Zimunya said a change of government in the donor country led to the withdrawal of funds.Lack of state and corporate support has seen regional editions of the country’s premier literary festival being bankrolled from outside the country – a clear indictment on government’s lukewarm support for the embat...

Pirated books (Photo Credit: Violet Crush)The Anti-Piracy Focus Group convened by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF) has announced a multi-sectoral plan to curtail book piracy.The focus group has roped in police, city council, border control officials, the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra), the judiciary, publishers, booksellers, authors, librarians and education ministries to stamp iron feet on piracy.Book piracy involves the replication, use and distribution of copyrighted literature through scanning, photocopying, printing and electronic duplication.Speaking at the Writers, Publishers, Librarians and Booksellers Workshop during the Bulawayo edition of ZIBF, the focus group chairperson Blazio Tafireyi said that a document detailing the piracy-busting plan of action will be circ...

Memory Chirere (Photo Credit: Jan Bibliothek)Book: TudikidikiAuthor: Memory ChirerePublisher: Priority Projects Publishing (2007)Memory Chirere’s dynamic toolkit reframes a familiar world with touches of humour and novelty in his second short story collection Tudikidiki.The stories, fit to a template which equates less with more, are at once tantalising, frustrating and amusing. Chirere carries his audience along the well-worn paths of love and hate, hope and frustration, resilience and triumpheach time overlaying his didactic import with deceptive simplicity.Brevity is a constant throughout his thread. From one angle, it seems to point to the transience of artificially contrived relationships which the author satirises in some of the stories. It also makes the anthology tight and jam-pack...

Ndiko Kupindana KwemazuvaThe digital revolt is in vogue. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are vastly effacing traditional life patterns. It is a virtual new world. The orbit of the hourglass prefigures a dynamic, new order of computer-generated possibilities.Tragically, though, the changes are taking shape out of the rubble of the traditional scheme of things.One embattled sector reeling from the effects of this dizzy transition is the book industry. Outside the classroom there is lukewarm interest in books even as preoccupation with the Internet is getting more precipitate.Yesteryear enthusiasts have disinvested interest from literature and tagged themselves along the trending applications. The world has been reconfigured around the social utility engines. The Internet ha...

Cuthbert Dube: (Photo Credit: Supersport)Book: The Quality of Citizenship Education in HarareAuthor: Oswell NamasasuPublisher: Scholars’ Press (2013)Zimbabwe’s educational panels need to touch base and perform again. Our schools need to correct their slanted emphasis on education which teaches citizens how to make a living not how to live.While education is inestimable, it is bound to falter off the mark when it exclusively majors with buildingstudentsinto able entrepreneurs and profitable workers not wiser and better citizens.Aristotle observes that educating the mind without educating the heart is not education at all.It is this comprehensive approach which must be streamlined into our schools.Education which does not nurture students into socially and morally responsible citizens is fun...

Women MusiciansBook: Women Musicians in ZimbabweAuthor: Joyce Jenje MakwendaPublisher: Joyce Jenje Makwenda (2013)Music, that moody food for those who trade in love as Shakespeare says, is cultural staple fare in Zimbabwe.  From the inception of township music in the 1930s to the present, the industry has not short supplied aesthetes who relish the savour of mellow jams.While most displines falter and flourish in response to the pulses of history, local musicians have kept us posted with emotive numbers, sustaining momentum in times of calm, upheaval, growth or downturn.From resilient and ever-green to one-hit and bubblegum acts, the crooners keep stepping up the podium to move their audience with an account for each situation and dispensation. Unlike written annals which are often sterile...

Ghetto Diary and Other PoemsBook: Ghetto Diary and Other PoemsEditor: Munyaradzi Z. MbirePublisher: ZPH Publishers (2011)Zimbabwean poetry is a cosmopolitan office. Few local poets seek to make a conventional impression, hence the counterpoint of angles which inheres in the tradition.The tradition is a melting pot where individual perceptions, native sensibilities, contra-conventional attitudes, universal experiences and aesthetic devices simmer to generate flavours adapted to varied tastes.Flora Veit-Wild observes that despite sharing a setting where experiences such as the search for identity, effects of urbanisation and colonial devastations often line the task-pane, they are notable differences in how Zimbabwean poets respond to common experiences. “Depending on their age, their indivi...

MaideiLanguage is the principal apparatus in the laboratories of culture. It is the interface by which a culture finds expression, transmission, diffusion, sustenance, development, perpetuity and regeneration. When language slouches towards obscurity, culture, as the corporate repository of knowledge, values, meanings, experience, customs, relations, roles, attitudes, beliefs and intellectual achievement, faces extinction. The patriarch of linguistics, Edward Sapir, observes that language does not exist apart from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives.Our peculiar identity, distinctive lore and understanding of the world are embodied in our languages. Indigenous languages, therefore, can only stagnate at the peril of our culture...

Ignatius Mabasa (Photo Credit: The Herald)Charles Mungoshi’s Branching Streams Flow in the Dark and Ignatius Mabasa’s Imbwa Yemunhu jointly landed the NAMA Best Fiction on Saturday.The category was tightly contested as all the nominees have drawn considerable acclaim. The other nominee Spiwe Mahachi-Harper recently won a Zimbabwe Music and Arts Awards gong in the United Kingdom for her third novel, Footprints in the Mists of Time which also has the distinction of being the longest local novel.In his acceptance speech, Mabasa thanked God and said: “I didn’t know that this dog will follow me to Bulawayo,” a pun on the title of his book. Farayi Mungoshi received on behalf of his father.Both Imbwa Yemunhu and Branching Streams are highly experimental offerings from two men regarded master and ...