There's a Shona saying: 'chakafukidza dzimba matenga' - 'What covers the home is the roof,' or 'Every home has its secrets.'
From Petina Gappah
'Authentic' is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.
I get irritated by the term 'African writer', because it doesn't mean anything to me.
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.
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