Books

Mungoshi Jr. (Photo Credit: Zimbabwe Mail)Charles Mungoshi Jr’s debut offering “Candlelight Thoughts,” a dumpsite of evangelically-themed motivational nuggets, is a work of notable promise. The twenty-seven year old joins several other showbiz heirs who have dabbled in their parents’ domains. The book is the second publication from the family stable Mungoshi Press which broke onto the scene with the patriarch’s 2014 NAMA Best Fiction-winning title “Branching Streams Flow in the Dark.” The title “Candlelight Thoughts” is derived from Mungoshi’s figurative appraisal of the impact of thinking on man. “The thoughts of a man are like a burning candle – the harder you think, the bright you glow or the sooner you burn out.”Mungoshi notes that the more a person exerts their mind, results in either...

Lumumba (Photo Credit: imurenge.com)When the imperial juggernaut rode roughshod over Africa following the Berlin Conference, no heed was paid to the boundaries and values which antedated colonisation.Africa, as it were, was convicted of backwardness and sentenced to arbitrary partition and subjugation at a trial to which she was not summoned. As at 1994, 110 years after Berlin, Africa had been acquitted. It is pertinent, though, to observe that the continent is not as free as certified history would have us believe.Imperialist tentacles are in vogue. The centre is still out of order.Colonialism encompassed three principal conditions: displacement, dispossession and disorientation. The validity of our independence does not premise merely on self-government but the extent to which these cond...

NOTES ON THIRTY-FOUR YEARS OF ZIMBABWE’S INDEPENDENCE 18 April  2014. Published by: Committee of the Zimbabwe Peoples Charter (CPC) Contributors: David Chidende, Blessing Vava,  Prince Tongogara, Takura Zhangazha Contact Details: committeeofpeoplescharter@gmail.com   Blog:  peoplescharter.blogspot.com Zimbabwe@34: Base, Superstructure and Democratic Posterity. By Takura Zhangazha Considerations on Zimbabwe’s independence rarely acknowledge the significant role the success of the liberation struggle owed to Socialism/Marxism. Both as an ideological premise as well as a pragmatic tool of linking ideals with the harsh realities of waging a protracted people’s war.   Its key contribution was the accentuation of a critical national consciousness. As the ...

Half of a Yellow SunBook: Half of a Yellow SunAuthor: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Publisher: Fourth Estate (2006) Half of a Yellow Sun sealed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s credentials in the canon of great African literature. The novel is not only a riveting stroke of hindsight but also a compendium of pertinent African questions. While most writers mellow with age earning belated recognition in their twilight years, often more for the prolificacy rather than the proficiency of their work, Adichie evaded mediocrity from the outset.Purple Hibiscus was a promising debut but the standing ovation was to be occasioned by her masterly chronicle of the Nigerian civil war Half of a Yellow Sun. The historically-themed novel earned Adichie induction into Africa’s literary best of the range, with rave revi...

Writing Africa Book: Writing Africa in the Short StoryEditor: Ernest N. Emenyonu    Publisher: James Currey (2013) A fresh stimulus is in the line for the reception of the short story as a wholesome and autonomous  genre. Writing Africa in the Short Story, comes across as a graphic compendium on African short fiction, invoking the beauty and potency of the genre for full scale appreciation. The short story has long been sidelined into a peripheral genre, assigned with second fiddle functions as a prelude, footnote or afterthought to the novel. Critics have often diminished the genre into foregrounding template for later exploitation the same way a transient news report is regarded as a first draft of history. However, multi-pronged efforts have been fermenting over the years to do away wi...

Marcus Garvey (Photo Credit: Africa is a Country)Marcus Garvey remains one of the keynote influences of the African renaissance. From the streets of Harlem, far and wide , the grand patriarch of Pan-Africanist thought commanded the arena with successive generations under his inspiration.The Provisional President of Africa, as Garvey was known to his adherents, is credited for flaring up Afrocentric sentiment from a fringe movement among subjugated former slaves to a cross-continental movement. His ideas, chiefly revolving around the “Back to Africa” movement as the ultimate hallmark of emancipation, outlived the reactionary backlash with which they were met and foiled by the establishment of his time. Repatriation, decolonisation, early aversion to neo-colonialism and the current upsurge o...

On Trial for My CountryWhen the Ides of March claimed of Zimbabwe's most accomplished man of letters, Prof Stanelake Samkange, in 1988, former Chief Justice Enoch Dumbutshena’s graveside eulogy attacked Zimbabwe for ignoring its best writers.Samkange was a first generation African novelist, public intellectual, journalist, nationalist, educationist, ethnographer, philosopher and historian. Ironically, the average Zimbabwean is preoccupied with stale jokes on the social networks to spare a thought for our literary legacy.His prolific inventory across varied genres includes On Trial for My Country (1966), Origins of Rhodesia (1968), The Mourned One (1968), African Saga (1970), Year of the Uprising (1978) Hunhuism or Ubuntuism (1980), Among Them Yanks (1985) and On Trial for That UDI (1986).“...

Mukoma WaNgugi (Photo Credit: thephoto.co.uk)A debate is current in literary circles, with authors and critics exchanging fire on multiple fronts. The object of controversy is what should constitute African literature.Is there a set template to which candidates must comply to qualify as African writers? If so, who defines it and what horizons does it encompass? Or, contrariwise, is African literature, like any other literature, the art of uninhibited creativity. Is it the language of emotion over which no external authority can preside?It is tempting to forestall discussion and separate everything to black and white but the complexities of the matter require more than retailing predetermined positions.Critics have provoked a backlash for peddling rule-books of what they presume to be Afric...

Chinua Achebe (Photo Credit: Africascountry.com)Chinua Achebe commands the presidium of African literature.  From varied domains, as an author, public intellectual and elder statesman, his work provoked a cultural revolt that became the framing point for later African voices.The Nigerian prodigy’s death on March 21 this year occasioned a flare of indignation over his failure to land the Nobel Prize, won by his compatriot, Wole Soyinka, in 1986, despite the trailblazing outlook and universal renown of his work."My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize,” Achebe told Quality Weekly in 1988.Two months after Achebe’s death, Soyinka told Sahara Reporters that he had received a series of letters asking him to put Achebe forward for th...

Ngugi WaThiongo (Photo Credit: BBC)Book: Indigenous Language CreationAuthor: Arthur TP MakandaPublisher: African Institute for Culture, Peace and Tolerance Studies (2013)The keynote medium of culture is language. Legacy, knowledge, beliefs, ideas, values, art, customs and tradition are assigned, packaged, encoded, fortified, updated, adapted, accessed transposed and fermented in the dynamic repositories of the tongue.Accordingly, the position of English and French as the foremost facilities of expression in literature and other major domains of African life has been an object of controversy for generations. Foreign languages run a cosmopolitan function as barrier-busting mechanisms for Africa’s heterogeneously branched linguistic map. Even in Zimbabwe, English is an amplified megaphone whe...