Imprisoned minds in colonised bodies Tsitsi Dangarembga and Julie Barnes were arrested on 31st July 2020 for walking down a street in Harare carrying placards that simply said “We want better. Reform our institutions.”. They were convicted on 29th September 2022 and given suspended sentences and fines for inciting violence. Dangarembga is a writer and filmmaker who has worked with […]
The kindness of creative people to each other
Autour du Livre Saturday 17th September It is crazy of me to go to this Book Fair because I write in English and it’s impossible to sell my books after all everyone else who visits and participates, reads, writes and buys French books. All the same, I’ve been going for a number of years now – since 2017 when I […]
Fly with me
We have a wonderful red Chinese kite that we bought in Shanghai in 2007. It’s a giant squid that flies with beautiful ease, but needs both space and wind. Here in our village we have space, but not much wind. That’s changing with the climate. The wind we get now is gusty, dusty and inconstant. In Zambia I would see […]
The Godfrey Setti Retrospective Exhibition at Lechwe Trust Art Gallery: Art Lives on III
Godfrey Setti In 1984 Godfrey Setti asked me if he could exhibit his paintings at Mpapa Gallery. I remember that occasion so well. Godfrey was a gentle and charming young 26-year-old and I had just begun work as manager and was finding out exactly what that entailed. We were both facing new experiences, though coincidentally we had each just completed […]
Reviews, more writing and the next books
Writing a series: What happens after Chipo and Chibwe save their green valley? I started writing a story about the importance of trees for my grandson, Stephen Kupakwesu, in 1993 and that book evolved into Dust and Rain, but it hasn’t ended there. I planned a series of children’s books and experimented with various formats from one huge book to […]