Words matter. These are the best Petina Gappah Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Zimbabweans, I’ve come to believe, we are very passive-aggressive people. We don’t like conflict; we don’t like confrontation, so we find all sorts of ways of avoiding that conflict and confrontation. We are not allowed to talk about bad things that go on in families.
I always say to people that Zimbabweans are the funniest people in Africa; we even laugh at funerals. And it’s true. I mean, there are so many jokes about funerals. There are so many jokes about AIDS. We find ways of coping with pain by laughing at it and by laughing at ourselves.
The struggle for Zimbabwe lit up the imagination of people around the world. In London, New York, Accra and Lagos, bell-bottomed men and women with big hair and towering platform shoes sang the dream of Zimbabwe in the words of the eponymous song by Bob Marley: Every man has the right to decide his own destiny.
The prolific Chinodya has written a number of striking books, most notably ‘Dew in the Morning’, an exploration of an idyllic rural boyhood; the sophisticated ‘Strife,’ in which sins from the pre-colonial past cast shadows into the present; and the rich and varied short-story collection ‘Can We Talk?’
I was eight when independence happened. I remember my mum and dad getting dressed up to go to the independence concert to go listen to Bob Marley. Independence was such a wonderful time; we had so many expectations of the kind of country we would become. The vision of the government then was a wonderful vision.
The painful truth may be that Zimbabwe, the youngest of Africa’s former colonies, has simply followed where the continent has led, treading the well-worn path beaten out of the lie that taking power from the colonialists and delivering democracy to the people are one and the same.
These are the kinds of names that Zimbabweans like: names that have positive qualities. Like, Praise is a very popular name; Loveness is a very popular name.
I guess you could say I’m lucky because I’ve known a Zimbabwe that didn’t have Robert Mugabe leading it. One of the saddest things about Zimbabwe is there are so many hidden casualties of the Mugabe government’s misrule. They’re not just casualties that you immediately see.
My grandfather was a polygamous man, and he had two wives, and between him and his two wives, we are about 200 or so in our family.
‘Authentic’ is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?
For the first years of my life, I went to school in Rhodesia. My memory of living in the townships is that they were actually really happy places.
I don’t want to write because I have to; I want to write because I want to. Sometimes, when writers write because they have to, the results are disastrous.
It was one of those early mid-life crises, really. I started asking myself, ‘What is it that I want from my life?’ This question kept haunting me: ‘Do I want to be a lawyer who always wanted to be a writer, or do I actually want to be a writer?
I get irritated by the term ‘African writer’, because it doesn’t mean anything to me.
A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe’s finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.
You could have names like Hatred; you could have names that mean something like Suffering or Poverty. So names are not just names: names have real meaning, and they tend to tell the world about the circumstances of your parents at the time that you were born.
What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.
Only al-Jazeera is allowed to report from Zimbabwe, but it is unwatchable. Their Zimbabwean reporter Supa Mandiwanzira was one of Zanu-PF’s praise-singers at the reviled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.
There’s a Shona saying: ‘chakafukidza dzimba matenga’ – ‘What covers the home is the roof,’ or ‘Every home has its secrets.’
People always ask me how I manage to find humor in so much bleakness. I think this is almost a necessary skill to have.
