BOOKPATHS

Zimbabwe

Petina Gappah, winner of the Guardian First Book award, talks with Stephen Moss.

'It's very troubling to me because writing of a place is not the same as writing for a place,' she says. 'If I write about Zimbabwe, it's not the same as writing for Zimbabwe or for Zimbabweans. I have to remember that as much as there are many people unhappy with Robert Mugabe's regime, there are many who are not: about 49% [of the electorate] voted for him.' – from “Petina Gappah: ‘I don’t see myself as an African writer,’” by Stephen Moss, The Guardian

Zimbabwe

Richard Lea talks with Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah.

So much of the coverage of Africa in the western media is of disaster and corruption that she finds herself pushing against images of Africans as nothing more than victims. ‘This is what I'm desperate to show,' she says, 'that African people, Zimbabwean people are the same as people anywhere else. They just happen to be living in particularly nasty circumstances. They have the same ambitions ... fall in love, get married, get a little house somewhere, that everybody else has.’ – from “Interview: Petina Gappah,” by Richard Lea, The Guardian

South Africa; Zimbabwe

Amanda Craig interviews children’s author Lauren St. John, whose newest novel, The Last Leopard, is set in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The tragic country (Zimbabwe) is one St. John knows well, because it was her home until she was 20… ‘It was absolute paradise,’ she recalls.  ‘I was extremely quiet, shy, socially inept, obsessed with books and horses, and I felt as trapped as my father did in South African suburbia.  When a boy I sat next to in school at 11 was murdered, alongside half his family, we moved into their 1,000-acre game reserve.’ – from “Interview with Lauren St. John,” by Amanda Craig, The Times

Zimbabwe

Prize-winning author, Peter Godwin, tells Peter Stanford “about the Africa his family loved – and lost.”

“It is always, it is said, a mistake (except in the eyes of your publisher) to follow up a successful book with more of the same. But that is essentially what Godwin has done. A decade after Mukiwa, his account of growing up a white boy in what was then Rhodesia, won prizes and plaudits, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun takes up the story of his ongoing love affair with Africa. It chronicles Robert Mugabe's cruel retribution on his country for voting against him in a 2000 referendum, as Godwin frames the tale of the disintegration of his homeland with an account of his father's last years in poverty in Harare.” – from “Peter Godwin: Truth in Black and White,” by Peter Stanford, The Independent

Zimbabwe

Helon Habila writes about the life and times of African writer, Dambudzo Marechera in The Virginia Quarterly Review.

I got my things and left.

This, the opening line to Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, apart from being the coolest opening line in African fiction, is a fair summary of the writer’s life. He was always getting his things and leaving; not that he had many things to get—in his last years, homeless and reduced to sleeping on park benches in Harare, Zimbabwe, all he had were his typewriter and a few books. He died at thirty-five, an age when most writers are just publishing their first novels. It is a mark of his genius that, with only three novellas, some short stories, poems, and essays published during his lifetime, he is regarded today as one of the most influential postcolonial African writers.” – from “On Dambudzo Marechera : the Life and Times of an African Writer,” by Helon Habila, The Virginia Quarterly Review