Books

When I first saw poet Philani Nyoni performing, I was torn between my patriotic duty to feed him to police dogs and my immediate admiration for his densely allusive craft. A season of protest had just passed – smoke clearing away from the streets, and hashtag activists retiring into the fashion police – but Nyoni paced about the LitFest stage that night clearly determined to have the last word. I had gone to the 2016 edition of the festival to write a harmless entertainment article, exchange numbers, and extort few review copies; but here I was, shaking my head as the angry young poet blasphemed President Robert Mugabe with a genre-straddling, high-octane, one-man soundtrack for the resistance. The performance, titled A Diary of Madness, switched between four-letter words that would have...

In the classic welcome note of a column, a journalist called Yours Truly chats up a pen friend called Dear Reader with the wise words of a great philosopher called Anonymous and a connection is made. I was all about keeping my thread unscripted and personal, but for the sake of tradition, Dear Reader, welcome to Storyboard, a column where Yours Truly reports, conspires, reviews and champions everything books. I follow books more curiously than my exes’ status updates, and stalk clever writers more dutifully than an insurance salesman. You can think of this column as a fire-in-the-bones thing not a career-minded nine-to-five. But if the only book you ever take home after work is the street-famous glue book for rats, my friend, you are probably reading the wrong column. Read more

In a good year for African heritage at the box office, Black Panther has flared up discussions for its daring, optimistic and controversial reinvention of the continent. While the top-grossing movie has made Afrofuturism pop worldwide, literary Africa has been also warming up to science fiction as a platform for floating big ideas about a century tangled in big problems. The Bulawayo Science Fiction Reading/Writing Workshop, incepted in November last year, is one such initiative. Between April and June this year, James Arnett, a visiting literature professor from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, conducts the second and final season of the workshop at the Nust-American Space. Arnett, who currently teaches in the Nust Journalism and Media Studies Department, registered his presenc...

‘Wananchi, the revolutionary cake has more yeast than flour. We cannot leave Uncle Sam’s bakery with an empty basket.’ ‘Who are you, cloth-cap nigger?’ ‘I am Tendai, the lawyer who briefed the U.S Senate on Zimbabwe’s coup lite. Since your goodwill dried up, the opposition has become a cigarette, bitten on one side, blazing on the other. ‘We are labelled sellouts for representing Zanu-PF goldfingers like Chombo, Gono and Chipanga in court and branded worse when we come here for a reset with our original paymasters.’ ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’ ‘Times have been hard since Uncle Sam weaned us out of his baby sling. Can you imagine that we started as a labour movement but recently my colleague had to hand the bourgeoisie a court ruling that sent 20 thousand workers home,...

Leonard Zhakata, for years, dominated Zimbabwe’s hit parade with the flamboyance of Michael Jackson, the radicalism of Bob Marley, the piety of Jimmy Swaggart and proverbial turns of verse evocative of a rich Shona past. Each time he entered the studio, Zhakata murdered competition, issued a new edition of Shona idioms, pleaded lawsuits for the economically deprived, navigated new dimensions of emotion and caused few headaches in the corridors of power. Zhakata’s compositions were a thing of marvel. He was widely credited, on good reason, as the country’s finest song-writer, effortlessly blending depth and immediacy. Early into his career, his claim was staked as one of Zimbabwe’s all-time greats. Those spirited years of “Mugove,” “Unochemeyi?” “Upenyu Mutoro” and “Handina Wangu.” But ...

Echoing Silences, the riveting, mystic and brutal reconstruction of the liberation struggle by Alexander Kanengoni, is not merely a work of hindsight. The Chimurenga classic is the burden of the past on the present, the bearing of the present on the future, the arrow that courses every direction. It is a multi-layered reminder of the cost of Independence, the sacrifices that won Zimbabwe, and the debt owed by the living, chiefly the leading, to the martyrs of freedom. There are no romantic abstractions, no revisionist templates in Kanengoni’s recollection of the war he fought in as a nationalist guerilla. It is all naked talk, live, human-centred and unexpurgated. Kanengoni, who died barely a week to Independence Day in 2016, inclines his antenna to capture the spiritual strivings of ...

  Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades Author: Peter Hudis Publisher: Pluto Press (2015) ISBN: 978 07453 3630 5 Frantz Fanon’s crusade against the shady tendencies of power crosses racial and ideological bounds. His foremost accomplishment is, perhaps, the precedence of humanity over ideology in his work ethic. For this, his intellectual strivings remain audible long after the curtain of history has fallen over transitory arenas and disbanded convenient alliances. Fanon deploys moral eloquence and revolutionary fervour against racism, alienation and imperialism with a precision ahead of his time. With inequality and racism once again emerging among the defining questions of our time, the spectre of Fanon seems bent to stalk the public square much longer. Peter Hudis d...