Zitat des Tages von Petina Gappah:
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.
There are some people who are happy to be African writers. They are pan-Africanists. I'm not a pan-Africanist. I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different.
The first thing I remember when I moved to a school in the suburbs was, 'My gosh, all these books!' The classroom and school had a library; I'd never seen so many books in my life! It was something we didn't have in the township.
People always ask me how I manage to find humor in so much bleakness. I think this is almost a necessary skill to have.
I get irritated by the term 'African writer', because it doesn't mean anything to me.
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.
Zimbabwe is an unusual case study in African colonialism in that it was invaded by a private company under Royal Charter.
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.
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.
If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.
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.
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?
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.
I'm not even sure that I want to go back... The Zimbabwe that I really loved, the Zimbabwe that I grew up in, just isn't there anymore, and I'm not sure about the country that has replaced it.
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?'
