Thoughts on the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, Marechera and other writers
This year the Zimbabwe International Book Fair celebrates its 30-year anniversary (ZIBF@30). Given its impact on the life of writers in Zimbabwe, especially during its heyday in the 90s, I felt it is timely to share my random thoughts, which meander from Dambudzo Marechera to my discovery of reading and writing in Mototi, back to the book fair itself. This piece is presented like a memoir, so there will be moments of creative recollection. I hope that this activity will inspire a more serious tribute, but for now, let's have some fun remembering ZIBF: whose lives it touched, and whose touched it.
I never met Dambudzo Marechera in person, but I met The House of Hunger in 1987. I was still based in Mototi, attending a secondary school called Gwavachemai, where I had already installed myself as the local writer (in residence), always writing things, journalistic things, fictional things. In fact, by Form 3, I had managed to make myself the school's playwright, and I performed in the drama club too, doing plays on the health awareness of the 80s, acting plays adopted from Aaron Chiundura Moyo's novels, acting in Julius Caesar as Caesar, being stabbed by Brutus and gang, et cetra. Now, as for meeting Marechera; it didn't happen because I didn't go to Harare in 1986 or 87. These were the years I was likely to have discovered that there was such a thing called Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF). I would have gotten on the bus from Glen View and gone to the Harare Gardens; I would have met many writers, I would have heard about Dambudzo Marechera, and would have attended a workshop or two. If I had gone to Harare in 1986, particularly.
I had gone to Harare for the first time in 1982. That Mabvuku brother drove home in an old, but authentic Mercedes Benz one day in late July. He showed the village the car, we drove around, we parked at Vazhure shopping centre, we drank bottles of warm coke and Fanta and Tarino, and when we returned home, he said, "You're all going to Harare with me." Sudden screams of excitement from his children; I didn't react yet, because I thought, I was not part of the "you" he was talking about. Then he said, "Yes, all you, even you." So that's how I discovered Harare, and it fascinated me, it led to more writing; but the ZIBF hadn't been established then. Then when it was estabalished in 1983, I didn't go to Harare, and I didn't miss it, because the 1982 visit had made a lasting impressions in Mototi. I was setting all my written work in Harare, all the class essays, all the poems, all the short stories; in fact, all the novels. And when I was asked to read from the Shona textbook in class, I read in Zezuru; my peers grumbled, and the teacher said, "Leave him alone."
In 1985, I spent the August school holidays in Harare, mostly in Glen View (with occasional visits to Dzivaresekwa, Mabvuku, Glen Norah), reading and writing a lot. In Glen View 2, the home, then, of my main brother, my guardian, a next door family gave me books over the fence, saying, "You can keep these." They made it look like an illegal deal, covering the books in brown paper bags, first checking that no one was looking, and giving them to me. The books were a mixture of James Hardely Chase, Mills and Boon, and the occasional classic. I devoured all of them, I wrote exciting expressions in my notebooks, which would later appear in my compositions at school. That August I went through my Mills and Boon phase, discovering Janet Daly. It was all reading for pleasure, but I also had quite a collection of books when I went home. I didn't know about Marechera at all then, except the one day Mukoma found me writing and said, "Good, but don't become another Marechera." I didn't pursue the matter; I was too engrossed into a Mills and Boon book and quite honestly just overwhelmed by being in a city, the whole feel of it, the smells, he colorful chaos, the constant buzz of a high density life.
Had I read the newspapers Mukoma brought home everyday, I would have discovered Marechera before I returned to Mototi, and I would have known about Zimbabwe International Book Fair. Somehow to know about the book fair meant to know about writers too. Eventually, it meant meeting the writers, actually finding out that writers were human beings you could meet and sit with in a workshop, because meeting them at the book fair also meant discovering the other ways you would continue meeting them. That is, if you lived in Harare. No, when the school holidays ended, I was bused, happily, back to the rural areas to live through a year or two of celebrity. Having spent a holiday in Harare sometimes felt synonymous with being knowledgeable--intelligent even--as I would again set all my class essays in Harare, writing about accidents witnessed on Harare streets, writing about places called restaurants (and you don't want to know how we pronounced it then). And while at it, I started to get a better understanding of the settings of the books I read, and I would set my stories in the same places as the books': New York City was regular, so was London, Boston, Chicago, and so on. You could imagine how amazed my poor English teachers were, and particularly the one and only British teacher we briefly had at Gwavachemai, who would tell me that I captured New York very well, as if I had been there. And sometimes I felt, through the books I read, that I had been there...
Still, I didn't know about the ZIBF or about Marechera, yet I continued to write, sharing my work with my peers, being elected the chairman of the debating club, being elected the school's journalist, which allowed me to travel with the school teams when they went to compete in Zvishavane, our closet town. Being a writer was such a great thing! I knew about Aaron Chiundura Moyo, Shimmer Chinodya, who had written Farai's Girls, which we took too literally, Sharai Mukonoweshuro, Charles Mungoshi; in fact, nearly all the writers who wrote in Shona. Shona books traveled to the rural areas fast, and we also listened to some of them on radio, and we knew they were published by the Literature Bureau, which the radio readers pronounced Bheru (and it would take confusing an American listener later in life to get the correct pronunciation down). But I didn't know about Marechera and the ZIBF yet.
Then came 1987. Many things happened that year. I joined a dancing church. I was immediately nominated the leader of its local branch, which consisted mostly of young people (and ultimately was not taken seriously). People were comfortable with my writer self, but they didn't know what to do with my new deacon role. I wanted them to convert, I wanted the church to grow, and sometimes converting the young ones meant proving to them that even though I was a writer, a model student at Gwavachemai, a debate chairperson, a tenor in the school choir, I also found fulfillment in the church, that it was indeed my participation and faith that strengthened all the other roles (talents) they associated with me. So the youths (some encouraged by their families) followed my example and converted. Thus I wrote, I preached, I danced in that church, I wrote some more... But I didn't know about the ZIBF or Marechera, whose name was the rage in Harare and elsewhere.
Until one August, after the writer had died, that someone (an uncle figure) returned from Harare and paid me a visit at the secondary school. He had a gift for me. He wanted me to borrow his copy of The House of Hunger. "You say you are a writer. Read this," he said. " Keep it for as long as you want." Indeed, it was a book worth keeping. I was discovering what writing (in English) was all about. I read and reread the book, failed to understand a few parts, but enjoyed the ones I understood. I was fascinated by all the fighting scenes because my class compositions often featured betrayal and fights, colorful fights of people releasing rapid kicks and jabs, fighters floating in the air while exchanging blows, then entering their fast cars and racing down New York City Streets, only to turn around and fight some more. I also enjoyed the sections of the story "House of Hunger" featuring angry storms; they were relatable to the storms we sometimes received in the otherwise dry Mazvihwa, angry storms that sent us into sudden silence as we awaited flashes of lightning that could at any moment split a person into halves (which had never happened) or set our huts on fire (which we had actually witnessed). The sex scenes, well, they were just that, sex scenes. I had had my share of Chase and Mills and Boon. But then "House of Hunger" got really too serious for me, and suddenly I had no idea what was happening in it, so I wrote and wrote.
To me then, Dambudzo Marechera was just this book I was reading, not the news of his death (I didn't even know he had died), nor the fact that he used to appear at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (because I still didn't know that such a creature existed). But, later, upon discovering the ZIBF, I would make the connection between ZIBF and writers, and would discover all the talk there had been about Marechera, the talk that was still going on. I would later discover the ZIBF in 1988, when I was officially a Harare A-Level student, a city student. But I didn't attend the 1988 one; and I don't know why. I attended a day of the 1989 one, but missed all the writers' workshops. Then 1990 opened all the floodgates of book-fair going....
I had become a member of the Budding Writers Association of Zimbabwe (BWAZ), and you couldn't be a member of BWAZ without also being everywhere where the ZIBF was. Then I saw Chenjerai Hove in person, next to him...Mungoshi, and before long, Shimmer Chinodya, Musaemura Zimunya, and...Aaron Chindura Moyo! Then the stunning poet Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, who drove an expensive car (it felt comfortable; she gave us--Albert Nyathi and I and someone) a ride to Domboshava to read poems atop the rocks. This book fair thing was important; it made a budding writer connect with established writers, it made one feel accomplished for a moment... There were local and international established writers, all willing to listen to an aspiring writer.
That is not to say that I had not met some writers before my discovery of the ZIBF. At A-Level, I had formed a friendship with Vitalis Nyawaranda, whom I had met at a writer's workshop designed for high school students, held at a small college located on the Harare kopje. Nyawaranda was one of the facilitators, and I was reading one of his novels as a set book, alongside Willie Chigidi's and others'. I sat with Nyawaranda during lunch, introduced myself as a writer from High Field High, and the fact that I was studying his novel. I asked if he could find it in his very busy to schedule to come to my school, talk to the brilliant young writers we had there. He agreed! And at my school, I would be famous as the writer who brought Vitalis Nyawaranda. That, and the fact that I was a prefect too! The prefect who brought his fellow writer to the school. Even the Shona teacher said, "Uri shangwiti, mupfana!"
I would continue to interact with Nyawaranda, sending him some really rough drafts of novels I wanted published by the Literature Bureau, Shona novels that I knew would change the Shona novel genre. (To this day those novels haven't been published by the Literature Bureau; in fact, there is no Literature Bureau to publish them anymore (although the keynote speaker at the 2013 book fair is reported to have said the ministry of education plans to resuscitate it). By the time I would attend a business college with one of the editors at the Literature Bureau, I would not have any strong Shona manuscripts to show him....but that's another story.
Surprisingly though, I didn't get to go to the book fair in 1989, the year that I could have, since I had begun sending (or walking) manuscripts to publishers like Longman, College Press, and the Literature Bureau! (Earlier I said I went, but I don't think I did). But I now knew much about Marechera, and I read in the news that the author of The River Between, Ngugi waThiongo, had been at the bookfair, ...and, I think, Wole Soyinka too. So when I finally went, as a member of BWAZ, in the 90s, I would be in a better shape to know what to do with a book fair, and I don't want to get into all the relaxing with fellow writers, the excursions to Harare outskirts or to places like Domboshava, and the wine, the finger foods, the wine, the crackers, the pamphlets, the readings, the white wines, the writers, the debates, the sudden appearance once of Mugabe to dismiss gays and lesbians, ("I was standing very close to him!") the staffing of the BWAZ and Tsotso stands, the readings in Chitungwiza, and, later, the organizing of some ZIBF functions, the meeting with the amazing Yvonne Vera, how to us she represented a writer from the Diaspora, like what Marechera had once symbolized to the early attendees of the ZIBF. I would dream to be like her one day, to be the writer who would return from somewhere, with a publication or two. And what was strange, we knew about Nehanda, but most of us had not yet read it. We knew about her Why Don't You Carve Other Animals, but it was too expensive for us budding writers to buy.
I never met Dambudzo Marechera in person, but I met The House of Hunger in 1987. I was still based in Mototi, attending a secondary school called Gwavachemai, where I had already installed myself as the local writer (in residence), always writing things, journalistic things, fictional things. In fact, by Form 3, I had managed to make myself the school's playwright, and I performed in the drama club too, doing plays on the health awareness of the 80s, acting plays adopted from Aaron Chiundura Moyo's novels, acting in Julius Caesar as Caesar, being stabbed by Brutus and gang, et cetra. Now, as for meeting Marechera; it didn't happen because I didn't go to Harare in 1986 or 87. These were the years I was likely to have discovered that there was such a thing called Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF). I would have gotten on the bus from Glen View and gone to the Harare Gardens; I would have met many writers, I would have heard about Dambudzo Marechera, and would have attended a workshop or two. If I had gone to Harare in 1986, particularly.
I had gone to Harare for the first time in 1982. That Mabvuku brother drove home in an old, but authentic Mercedes Benz one day in late July. He showed the village the car, we drove around, we parked at Vazhure shopping centre, we drank bottles of warm coke and Fanta and Tarino, and when we returned home, he said, "You're all going to Harare with me." Sudden screams of excitement from his children; I didn't react yet, because I thought, I was not part of the "you" he was talking about. Then he said, "Yes, all you, even you." So that's how I discovered Harare, and it fascinated me, it led to more writing; but the ZIBF hadn't been established then. Then when it was estabalished in 1983, I didn't go to Harare, and I didn't miss it, because the 1982 visit had made a lasting impressions in Mototi. I was setting all my written work in Harare, all the class essays, all the poems, all the short stories; in fact, all the novels. And when I was asked to read from the Shona textbook in class, I read in Zezuru; my peers grumbled, and the teacher said, "Leave him alone."
In 1985, I spent the August school holidays in Harare, mostly in Glen View (with occasional visits to Dzivaresekwa, Mabvuku, Glen Norah), reading and writing a lot. In Glen View 2, the home, then, of my main brother, my guardian, a next door family gave me books over the fence, saying, "You can keep these." They made it look like an illegal deal, covering the books in brown paper bags, first checking that no one was looking, and giving them to me. The books were a mixture of James Hardely Chase, Mills and Boon, and the occasional classic. I devoured all of them, I wrote exciting expressions in my notebooks, which would later appear in my compositions at school. That August I went through my Mills and Boon phase, discovering Janet Daly. It was all reading for pleasure, but I also had quite a collection of books when I went home. I didn't know about Marechera at all then, except the one day Mukoma found me writing and said, "Good, but don't become another Marechera." I didn't pursue the matter; I was too engrossed into a Mills and Boon book and quite honestly just overwhelmed by being in a city, the whole feel of it, the smells, he colorful chaos, the constant buzz of a high density life.
Had I read the newspapers Mukoma brought home everyday, I would have discovered Marechera before I returned to Mototi, and I would have known about Zimbabwe International Book Fair. Somehow to know about the book fair meant to know about writers too. Eventually, it meant meeting the writers, actually finding out that writers were human beings you could meet and sit with in a workshop, because meeting them at the book fair also meant discovering the other ways you would continue meeting them. That is, if you lived in Harare. No, when the school holidays ended, I was bused, happily, back to the rural areas to live through a year or two of celebrity. Having spent a holiday in Harare sometimes felt synonymous with being knowledgeable--intelligent even--as I would again set all my class essays in Harare, writing about accidents witnessed on Harare streets, writing about places called restaurants (and you don't want to know how we pronounced it then). And while at it, I started to get a better understanding of the settings of the books I read, and I would set my stories in the same places as the books': New York City was regular, so was London, Boston, Chicago, and so on. You could imagine how amazed my poor English teachers were, and particularly the one and only British teacher we briefly had at Gwavachemai, who would tell me that I captured New York very well, as if I had been there. And sometimes I felt, through the books I read, that I had been there...
Still, I didn't know about the ZIBF or about Marechera, yet I continued to write, sharing my work with my peers, being elected the chairman of the debating club, being elected the school's journalist, which allowed me to travel with the school teams when they went to compete in Zvishavane, our closet town. Being a writer was such a great thing! I knew about Aaron Chiundura Moyo, Shimmer Chinodya, who had written Farai's Girls, which we took too literally, Sharai Mukonoweshuro, Charles Mungoshi; in fact, nearly all the writers who wrote in Shona. Shona books traveled to the rural areas fast, and we also listened to some of them on radio, and we knew they were published by the Literature Bureau, which the radio readers pronounced Bheru (and it would take confusing an American listener later in life to get the correct pronunciation down). But I didn't know about Marechera and the ZIBF yet.
Then came 1987. Many things happened that year. I joined a dancing church. I was immediately nominated the leader of its local branch, which consisted mostly of young people (and ultimately was not taken seriously). People were comfortable with my writer self, but they didn't know what to do with my new deacon role. I wanted them to convert, I wanted the church to grow, and sometimes converting the young ones meant proving to them that even though I was a writer, a model student at Gwavachemai, a debate chairperson, a tenor in the school choir, I also found fulfillment in the church, that it was indeed my participation and faith that strengthened all the other roles (talents) they associated with me. So the youths (some encouraged by their families) followed my example and converted. Thus I wrote, I preached, I danced in that church, I wrote some more... But I didn't know about the ZIBF or Marechera, whose name was the rage in Harare and elsewhere.
Until one August, after the writer had died, that someone (an uncle figure) returned from Harare and paid me a visit at the secondary school. He had a gift for me. He wanted me to borrow his copy of The House of Hunger. "You say you are a writer. Read this," he said. " Keep it for as long as you want." Indeed, it was a book worth keeping. I was discovering what writing (in English) was all about. I read and reread the book, failed to understand a few parts, but enjoyed the ones I understood. I was fascinated by all the fighting scenes because my class compositions often featured betrayal and fights, colorful fights of people releasing rapid kicks and jabs, fighters floating in the air while exchanging blows, then entering their fast cars and racing down New York City Streets, only to turn around and fight some more. I also enjoyed the sections of the story "House of Hunger" featuring angry storms; they were relatable to the storms we sometimes received in the otherwise dry Mazvihwa, angry storms that sent us into sudden silence as we awaited flashes of lightning that could at any moment split a person into halves (which had never happened) or set our huts on fire (which we had actually witnessed). The sex scenes, well, they were just that, sex scenes. I had had my share of Chase and Mills and Boon. But then "House of Hunger" got really too serious for me, and suddenly I had no idea what was happening in it, so I wrote and wrote.
To me then, Dambudzo Marechera was just this book I was reading, not the news of his death (I didn't even know he had died), nor the fact that he used to appear at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (because I still didn't know that such a creature existed). But, later, upon discovering the ZIBF, I would make the connection between ZIBF and writers, and would discover all the talk there had been about Marechera, the talk that was still going on. I would later discover the ZIBF in 1988, when I was officially a Harare A-Level student, a city student. But I didn't attend the 1988 one; and I don't know why. I attended a day of the 1989 one, but missed all the writers' workshops. Then 1990 opened all the floodgates of book-fair going....
I had become a member of the Budding Writers Association of Zimbabwe (BWAZ), and you couldn't be a member of BWAZ without also being everywhere where the ZIBF was. Then I saw Chenjerai Hove in person, next to him...Mungoshi, and before long, Shimmer Chinodya, Musaemura Zimunya, and...Aaron Chindura Moyo! Then the stunning poet Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, who drove an expensive car (it felt comfortable; she gave us--Albert Nyathi and I and someone) a ride to Domboshava to read poems atop the rocks. This book fair thing was important; it made a budding writer connect with established writers, it made one feel accomplished for a moment... There were local and international established writers, all willing to listen to an aspiring writer.
That is not to say that I had not met some writers before my discovery of the ZIBF. At A-Level, I had formed a friendship with Vitalis Nyawaranda, whom I had met at a writer's workshop designed for high school students, held at a small college located on the Harare kopje. Nyawaranda was one of the facilitators, and I was reading one of his novels as a set book, alongside Willie Chigidi's and others'. I sat with Nyawaranda during lunch, introduced myself as a writer from High Field High, and the fact that I was studying his novel. I asked if he could find it in his very busy to schedule to come to my school, talk to the brilliant young writers we had there. He agreed! And at my school, I would be famous as the writer who brought Vitalis Nyawaranda. That, and the fact that I was a prefect too! The prefect who brought his fellow writer to the school. Even the Shona teacher said, "Uri shangwiti, mupfana!"
I would continue to interact with Nyawaranda, sending him some really rough drafts of novels I wanted published by the Literature Bureau, Shona novels that I knew would change the Shona novel genre. (To this day those novels haven't been published by the Literature Bureau; in fact, there is no Literature Bureau to publish them anymore (although the keynote speaker at the 2013 book fair is reported to have said the ministry of education plans to resuscitate it). By the time I would attend a business college with one of the editors at the Literature Bureau, I would not have any strong Shona manuscripts to show him....but that's another story.
Surprisingly though, I didn't get to go to the book fair in 1989, the year that I could have, since I had begun sending (or walking) manuscripts to publishers like Longman, College Press, and the Literature Bureau! (Earlier I said I went, but I don't think I did). But I now knew much about Marechera, and I read in the news that the author of The River Between, Ngugi waThiongo, had been at the bookfair, ...and, I think, Wole Soyinka too. So when I finally went, as a member of BWAZ, in the 90s, I would be in a better shape to know what to do with a book fair, and I don't want to get into all the relaxing with fellow writers, the excursions to Harare outskirts or to places like Domboshava, and the wine, the finger foods, the wine, the crackers, the pamphlets, the readings, the white wines, the writers, the debates, the sudden appearance once of Mugabe to dismiss gays and lesbians, ("I was standing very close to him!") the staffing of the BWAZ and Tsotso stands, the readings in Chitungwiza, and, later, the organizing of some ZIBF functions, the meeting with the amazing Yvonne Vera, how to us she represented a writer from the Diaspora, like what Marechera had once symbolized to the early attendees of the ZIBF. I would dream to be like her one day, to be the writer who would return from somewhere, with a publication or two. And what was strange, we knew about Nehanda, but most of us had not yet read it. We knew about her Why Don't You Carve Other Animals, but it was too expensive for us budding writers to buy.
However, it was important to know and to talk with the writer in person. Years later, when I was outside of the country, I would immediately look for those books. What would prompt the strivings were thoughts about the book fair, when I couldn't attend because I was away, and after a while because it had ceased to happen, when the political and economic climate of the country was not encouraging to the exhibitors that often make the whole experience matter. But in those great days, in the nineties, and especially when I was pursuing my belated University of Zimbabwe degree, and I was on the book fair committee, organizing things, charged with an area that needed my attention, working with other writers' organization as a secretary-general of BWAZ, and agreeing to go to readings in places like Norton, riding in the blue Mercedes Benz of the director of the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Associations, teaching school children to have a lion's share of books and reading, I would embrace everything the ZIBF had to offer.
At the end of the day you would go home invigorated, once in a while catching glimpses of yourself on television and your family members shouting, "That was your forehead!" And you would smile, because you knew something they didn't. You knew how it felt to be a writer in the company of other writers. You knew how to experience ZIBF, and you looked forward to the next one even before the current one was over. You knew ZIBF.
Update: After sharing this post on the ZIBF group, the administrator, Roger Stringer, shared these important details about the history of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair:
The first ZIBF held in Harare Gardens was the 7th in 1992. Before that they were held as follows:
1st: 1983 (National Gallery)
2nd: 1984 (Kingstons)
3rd: 1985 (National Gallery)
4th: 1987 (HICC, I think)
5th: 1989 (HICC)
6th: 1991 (HICC)
One feature I liked about the fair is that some of its events were spread throughout key venues in the city or the outskirts. So during a book fair, it was common to do a poetry reading at the university, or at a shopping center in Chitungwiza. I remember doing readings at libraries in places like Glen View, Tafara, Mufakose, etc. Then, as I stated earlier, there would be the quick trips to inspiring places. These were mostly writers' events. Another huge part of the book fair was the presences of local and international exhibitors. So if you were not involved with the writers' activities, you had a lot of stands you could visit, or performances you could view. It was just a week of fun, raising our spirits as book people.
So as the ZIBF looks back to its history and looks into a future driven by new web technology, I hope that the visitors, artists, and the exhibitors are shaping a future that puts the ZIBF back on the world map (that is, if it is not already back on it).
At the end of the day you would go home invigorated, once in a while catching glimpses of yourself on television and your family members shouting, "That was your forehead!" And you would smile, because you knew something they didn't. You knew how it felt to be a writer in the company of other writers. You knew how to experience ZIBF, and you looked forward to the next one even before the current one was over. You knew ZIBF.
Update: After sharing this post on the ZIBF group, the administrator, Roger Stringer, shared these important details about the history of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair:
The first ZIBF held in Harare Gardens was the 7th in 1992. Before that they were held as follows:
1st: 1983 (National Gallery)
2nd: 1984 (Kingstons)
3rd: 1985 (National Gallery)
4th: 1987 (HICC, I think)
5th: 1989 (HICC)
6th: 1991 (HICC)
One feature I liked about the fair is that some of its events were spread throughout key venues in the city or the outskirts. So during a book fair, it was common to do a poetry reading at the university, or at a shopping center in Chitungwiza. I remember doing readings at libraries in places like Glen View, Tafara, Mufakose, etc. Then, as I stated earlier, there would be the quick trips to inspiring places. These were mostly writers' events. Another huge part of the book fair was the presences of local and international exhibitors. So if you were not involved with the writers' activities, you had a lot of stands you could visit, or performances you could view. It was just a week of fun, raising our spirits as book people.
So as the ZIBF looks back to its history and looks into a future driven by new web technology, I hope that the visitors, artists, and the exhibitors are shaping a future that puts the ZIBF back on the world map (that is, if it is not already back on it).
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